d. Edward L. Cahn (1958)
'Where's the dividing line between yesterday and today, between the past and the present, even between life and death?'
Essentially a Mummy film, The
Curse of the Faceless Man is, as you might expect, obsessed with death and
forbidden love, reincarnation and revenge. Set in Italy, the monster here isn’t
a long dead Egyptian swathed in bandages but rather an Etruscan gladiator contained in a
carapace of volcanic ash, having been engulfed by the eruption of Vesuvius at
Pompeii some two thousand years previously.
Discovered in a hole by an incredulous workman and taken to a museum in Naples, his scabby white body mostly lies around on its back with its arms and legs in the air, like a stunned beetle. At key moments, however, the ‘fantastic dead man’ drags himself to his feet and starts stomping stiffly around: ruthless, relentless, chopping people to death with the rock hard side of his horny hand.
Discovered in a hole by an incredulous workman and taken to a museum in Naples, his scabby white body mostly lies around on its back with its arms and legs in the air, like a stunned beetle. At key moments, however, the ‘fantastic dead man’ drags himself to his feet and starts stomping stiffly around: ruthless, relentless, chopping people to death with the rock hard side of his horny hand.
Like most angry monsters, he’s
all Id, operating purely on pre-set instructions. His mission is two-fold: to
murder nominal authority figures like Policemen and Museum staff, and to be
reunited with his lost love, who just so happens to have been reincarnated as a
visiting American artist: an astonishingly fortuitous break for him, extremely
bad luck for her.
It’s a shame that he is so preoccupied,
really. Think of what he could have added to our knowledge of the ancient world
if he hadn’t been a psychotic killing machine.
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