THE CURSE OF THE FACELESS MAN

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.

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.

THE RETURN OF DRACULA

d. Paul Landres (1958)

Count Dracula is a colossal failure when you think about it. He’s wealthy, charming, attractive; he can transform himself into a bat, a wolf, a rat, a fog and has the capacity to live forever. But he’s incompetent and arrogant, a fatal combination that means he is vulnerable to mortal men who have none of his advantages, but are simply sharper, smarter and more organised.

The Return of Dracula illustrates this perfectly. In an attempt to reboot the Dracula franchise for the drive in generation, Dracula comes to atom age California under the assumed identity of a man he murdered back in Transylvania. America was built on immigration, of course, and, under normal circumstances, would have provided Dracula with everything he needed to continue his career as a supernatural serial killer: lots of people, bags of space and plenty of opportunity. With a bit of planning he could spend eternity flitting from state to state, free from suspicion, safe from harm. Instead, he moves in with a suburban family, smashes all the mirrors and starts acting really suspiciously. Within a few hours he has bitten the family cat to death and, a couple of days later, he kills a woman who lives a few doors down. It’s just bad management. Why couldn’t he charm the community he is living in, establish a really good alibi and then fly over to another town to slake his inhuman thirst?

In a small town, of course, the arrival of a dark, surly foreigner followed by a sudden, unexplained death leads to some immediate dot joining so, within a few days he’s being pursued by the crucifix and stake wielding forces of good. Even then, he eschews the chance to put on his cape and move on, instead carrying on as indiscreetly as before. This hubris quickly turns him into a mouldering skeleton with a piece of sharp wood in his chest - again. 

He never learns, does he?

SHE DEMONS

d. Richard E. Cuhna (1958)

She Demons is a pulp magazine brought to life, you know, the sort with a cover that has a statuesque blonde in her scanties being tortured by a Nazi with a lascivious expression on his face.  Chuck in a hurricane, some horribly scarred women, a live volcano, some mild bondage, lots of flagellation and a bongo number and you have any number of reasons to enjoy this fun little feature that was clearly made on a shoestring and in someone’s back garden but, nevertheless, is stupidly entertaining.

Irish McKenna plays the statuesque blonde, a spoiled little rich kid who finds herself stranded on an uncharted desert island after her Daddy’s yacht sinks in a hurricane (she admonishes her rescuer for not salvaging the essentials: ‘you might at least have picked me up a pair of toreador pants’). The island, as you might expect, is populated by a savage she cult of mutated women and a gang of nasty Nazis, led by a scientist who is trying to restore his wife’s lost beauty (some lava fell on her face) by experimenting on the natives. It’s a bad scene, especially when the head German takes a shine to Irish and decides that SHE will be his Queen from now on.

Totally preposterous, extremely enjoyable, She Demons is some sort of classic, and comes highly recommended for anyone with an interest in sensation, shock science and interpretive dance - which has got to be everybody, surely? 

I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE

d. Gene Fowler, Jr (1958)

Despite the sensational title, this is quite sombre, serious stuff. In it, an advance party of aliens arrive on earth and take over the minds and bodies of some of the male inhabitants of a small town. What do they want? Well, their own females have all died in the wake of a nuclear war, so they are after wives and girlfriends, which somehow seems much worse and far more presumptuous than simply zapping everybody to death and taking over the planet.

The aliens here are a fantastic conception, with hideous tentacled faces that are reminiscent of Lovecraft's cephalopod-like Cthulu. Their space suits seemingly provide them with an artificial atmosphere, and glow and vibrate so that they are hard to see, like a hallucination - or a nightmare. The aliens have the husks of their kidnap victims back in the mother ship, hanging mindlessly in the air, hooked up to some sort of transmitting device that allows the aliens to inhabit a facsimile of their bodies and access their memories and thought patterns - and their wives, especially their wives*. 

Even so, the aliens make unconvincing humans, at least as far as their wives are concerned: they can't have kids for a start (their scientists are working on this), dogs and cats hate them and, incredibly for 1950s America, they don't touch alcohol, not even cocktails. Naturally, they don't last long and are ultimately hunted down by a good old fashioned angry mob and killed, collapsing and coalescing into a pool of dirty bubbles as they die.

The final shot is of hundreds of saucers leaving the earth's atmosphere and moving on to the next galaxy: defeated, ugly men, still desperately looking for love.

* In the outwardly prim and proper 1950s, 'marriage' is synonymous with sex. The inference is quite clear: these fucking aliens are fucking our fucking women.

THE BRAIN EATERS

d. Bruno VeSota (1958)

'A few weeks ago, Riverdale, Illinois was just another small, quiet town. But on that Saturday just after midnight, a living nightmare began'.

A 200 million year old race of hungry neon leeches land on on Earth with the idea that they are going to plug themselves in to the necks of human beings, operate them like mad puppets until they finish eating their brains, and then move on until the supply is extinguished. You can see what's in it for the leeches, but the Midwest natives are unconvinced, so eventually use science, a harpoon gun and several lives to zap the little bleeders into oblivion.

Not much happens, to be honest, but it's relatively well made and the alien's ship, a gleaming metallic cone of unknown material filled with a myriad of concentric tunnels, is interesting, as is the late appearance of the human manifestation of the malevolent hirundea, happily played by our old friend Leonard Nemoy (that's how it's spelled on the credits), wearing a silly Father Christmas beard to make him look older and wiser, his familiar features further obscured by odd lighting and a vaseline smeared lens. It's good to sort of see him.