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sossy65
Reviews
Fiend Without a Face (1958)
Scary when first made but hilariously dated now
I'm rating this based on its appeal as a classic example of a 50s sci-fi flick. The film is low-budget to the point that the special effects are quite transparent. Even so, as a little kid during the height of 'so bad they're good' sci-fi films, it scared me quite a bit. The brain and spinal cord 'fiends,' initially invisible, are obviously plastic models when they can finally be seen by the audience, but kids don't bother to notice those details and I believed they were real. I become a bit wary of eating shrimp for a few years after seeing the movie.
If you're a fan of classic (old-genre) sci-fi flicks, I would definitely recommend seeing the movie. Just curl up and enjoy it - you'll laugh, but you'll also appreciate even more the era in which writers, producers, directors and special-effects technicians could dream up gimmicks like the one that keeps this film going.
Horrors of the Black Museum (1959)
Dated but so bad it's almost good
As another reviewer mentioned, this film was horrifying to those of us who saw it as kids when it first came out. Horrors of the Black Museum was produced before technical effects became morph-driven and so fake they're not believable (even though they might be scary). Unlike Fiend Without a Face (also mentioned in these reviews) or The Blob, this movie doesn't rely on mechanically produced monsters. which means an imaginative child or paranoid adult could perhaps picture its horrors actually happening. A stretch, surely, but still . . .
Pre-movie sequence demonstrating colors and hypnosis was funny and hokey even when the film was first released. The horrors, however, had many children (me included) suffering from nightmares for years. The binocular scene was particularly frightening, but not as frightening as the beheading scene. I cautiously checked the tall bedroom ceiling in the old farmhouse where I grew up for a long while after seeing this flick.
Overall, after getting over the heebie-jeebies that lingered for years afterward, I have fond memories of this film. Anyone who is a fan of the 1950s chiller genre might enjoy the dated look and feel of it as well as the scare-factor it can generate in a viewer.