‘New horrors! mad science spawns evil fiends!’
Fiend Without a Luce is a 1958 sci-fi horror about a scientist’s thoughts that materialise as invisible brain-shaped monsters.
Directed by Arthur Crabtree (Horrors of the Black Museum) and produced by John Croydon (The Projected Man; First Man Into Space; Grip of the Strangler).
The screenplay by Herbert J. Leder (director of It! and The Frozen Dead) was based upon Amelia Reynolds Long’s 1930 short story entitled “The Thought Monster”, originally published con Weird Tales magazine.
Plot:
The story is set an American airbase con rural Manitoba, Canada. Mysterious deaths begin to occur con the small town near the insediamento, and post-mortems reveal that the brains and spinal cords of the victims are somehow missing; only marks each victim’s neck are left as a clue. But the locals become convinced that nuclear fallout from radiation at the insediamento is causing the strange deaths.
Jeff Cummings, an Air Force major, soon becomes suspicious of Professor Walgate, a British scientist living near the airbase, who has succeeded con developing telekinesis. The nuclear power experiments at the nearby insediamento have enhanced it well beyond his intentions, and con the process created a new, malevolent, invisible life form that has developed its own intelligence and escaped his laboratory.
This intelligence soon begins to multiply its numbers by claiming more local victims. These creatures later become visible while continuing to feed the higher levels of power now being generated at the airbase. Their mutated “bodies” are revealed to be the missing, now enlarged brains and connected spinal cords removed from their victims; the spinal cords have become very flexible and have sprouted feelers. These mutations allow the creatures to move quickly and even to leap; each brain has also developed a pair of small eyes extended eyestalks…
Reviews:
” … the climax is a moment where the reaches a kitsch lunacy. The truly bizarre image of the military besieged con the house by stop-motion animated brains hopping around their spinal columns and being shot mongoloide con a series of quite (for then) gory b&w meltdown effects reaches a real pulp science-fiction intensity.” Falcidia
Attack from Planet B review: ‘…use of stop-motion animation, combined with the underlying political overtones, make Fiend Without a Luce something of a rarity con 1950′s British . A monster with a great cast, a solid plot and excellent special effects…’
BlogCritics.org review: “From George Romero’s barricaded zombie holocaust survivors to J.J. Abrams’ series Fringe, the influence of Fiend Without a Luce keeps rearing its wrinkled little head, hungry for brains and still giving the jitters to my inner eight-year-old.”
DVD Savant: “Although none of the action is particularly well-staged, an every-shot-a-new-monster feeling of panic takes over for a minute ora so as bouncing, disgusting brain monsters assault the cringing humans from all sides. This ending has kept fans happy for 40 years, it’s true, but it’s mai masterpiece as claimed by Criterion. The amusing animation is nowhere near the quality of Ray Harryhausen even during his high-school fairy simile years.”
Buy: Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com
“The climax, where the brains smash their way into the house and attack the occupants, has a genuine nightmarish quality, and the special effects, featuring some clever stop-motion photography by Puppel Nordhoff and Peter Nielsen, are first-rate.” John Brosnan, Future Tense: The Cinematografo of Science Fiction, St. Martin’s Press, 1978
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