Fiend Without a Face is a 1958 British Horror Film directed by Arthur Crabtree.  It tells the story of mysterious deaths at the hands of an invisible life-form that steals human brains.

The film is set on a US airbase in rural Canada.  Mysterious deaths begin to occur in the small town near the base, and postmortems reveal that the brains and spinal cords of the victims are somehow missing; only marks on each victim’s neck are left as a clue.  Locals feel this has a lot to do with a nearby nuclear facility.

Marshall Thompson plays an army Major who  suspects also that this is the case and he  becomes suspicious of a Professor Walgate, a British scientist living near the airbase, who has been experimenting with telekinetics.  Walgate, it is soon revealed, has succeeded in developing the science.

Marshall Thompson came over to England to make this picture which had  a budget would you believe of £50,000. He had already appeared in a number of  films from 1944 and continued to work continuously until his death in 1992. Just before this he had been in another Horror Film – Cult of the Cobra – which seems to have a plot similar to the later British film The Reptile.  He is best remembered here more for Clarence the Cross Eyed Lion which sparked off a long running TV series Daktari.

Professor Walgate was played by none other than Kynaston Reeves, a name well remembered from the early days of TV as Quelch the headmaster in the Billy Bunter series. I do recall him very well from this although on checking he did not play the part for very long.  Also I think he has a name that sticks with you somehow.

He was also in the classic The Forsyte Saga playing one of the older Forsyte family – Nicholas Forsyte and also in two of The Avengers episodes and in one he played a character by the name of Major General Ponsonby-Goddard.

The female lead was played by Kim Parker who actually only made ten films of which this was the ninth.

The film climaxes with the visible creatures attacking an isolated house, where most of the film’s main characters are gathered. They have come well armed, and soon discover the creatures can be finished off with well-aimed gun shots to the exposed brains.

In the end Major Cummings succeeds in blowing up the airbase’s nuclear power plant , which deprives the creatures of their power source and they die very quickly and then dissolve away.

For some strange reason this is a film I remember very well from first seeing it although it was some years before I saw it again on TV and I have not seen it for ages now although it is available on DVD.

It has an unusual theme and is quite compelling and very watchable. It will be dated now but it is well worth viewing.