Curse of the Faceless Man Blu-ray review.
Release Date: February 16
Order your copy of Curse of the Faceless Man here!
“I’m sorry it takes something like this for me to be able to see you again, Paul.”
That’s right, Maria, we really shouldn’t wait until the next stone figure from Pompeii starts murdering people before we hang out again.
Kino’s new Blu-ray release of 1958’s CURSE OF THE FACELESS MAN is a satisfying 67-minute diversion into B-movie nostalgia. While the film itself might seem so brief it would fit better on one of those 4-or-5-in-one packs with other monstersploitation cheapies, a fun commentary track and stellar presentation make this an okay single-title buy, especially for any Mummy (or, in this case, pseudo-Mummy) completists.
Yes, CURSE is a Mummy movie in all-but-name, taking many of its cues from the original 1932 Boris Karloff/Karl Freund joint, as it tracks the discovery of gladiator Quintillus, petrified when all the residents of Pompeii got flash-fried by Mount Vesuvius in 79AD. Once the body is dug up in present-day ’58 it begins springing (ever-so-glacially) to life and crushing folks’ skulls. Italian archeologist Maria Fiorillo (Adele Mara) spends the bulk of the picture trying to convince her former beau Dr. Paul Mallon (Richard Anderson) that the seemingly indestructible Quintillus is alive and after his fiancé Tina (Elaine Edwards), whose paintings show a strange psychic connection to the creature.
The talky script by Jerome Bixby of “Star Trek” and “Twilight Zone” fame is bound together by superfluous expository narration, something that could be chalked up to director Edward L. Cahn’s slashing of the much larger script to correspond with the miniscule budget. That said, Anderson is great as the lead, with a scene in which he takes on the title creature with an axe being an obvious standout moment. He would bring that charisma into later genre roles, including the villain in Dan Curtis’s Kolchak sequel THE NIGHT STRANGLER and, most famously, as Oscar Goldman in TV’s “The Six Million Dollar Man.”
While the nearly spotless HD presentation doesn’t do wonders to hide the rubber-y-ness of the costume, it does present the movie in pristine shape the likes of which no one has probably ever seen, even those who caught it “day one” at the drive-in six decades ago.
Special Features
Besides a couple vintage trailers for other Kino B-movie releases, the disc includes a colorful, decidedly non-academic commentary from this site’s own editor Chris Alexander, who takes the opportunity to not only wax nostalgic about his childhood memories of watching CURSE on TV in Canada but to defend its earnestness and unintentional poetry. He makes a good case for this as well as the rest of director Edward L. Cahn’s filmography, which also includes such 1950’s B staples as IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE , INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN and INVISIBLE INVADERS, the latter of which Kino is bringing out on Blu-ray this coming July.
Cahn has something of a legacy not only among horror aficionados but major filmmakers as well. IT! was famously one of the major inspirations for Ridley Scott’s ALIEN, and in the mid-nineties a whole slew of his American International Pictures exploitation films were remade for the Showtime TV movie series “Rebel Highway,” including MOTORCYCLE GANGS (John Milius), DRAGSTRIP GIRL (Mary Lambert), SHAKE, RATTLE AND ROCK! (Allan Arkush) and RUNAWAY DAUGHTERS (Joe Dante).
While keenly aware of the movie’s shortcomings as compared to a more cash-rich production, Alexander goes to the mat for the film’s bombastic jazz score by Gerald Fried, which is about as far away from minimalist synths as you can get yet still has an era-appropriate quality that brings out the scares. He also rails against the lameness of trying to make fun of the film “Mystery Science Theater 3000”-style, or really any movie from this era for that matter. Though it may have been shot in a week, Curse of the Faceless Man approaches its material from a place of earnestness as opposed to cynicism, and so should you.
