Film review: Fiend Without a Face (1958)

It being Halloween, we decided to watch a horror film.  But nothing too horrific now we're old and pathetic, so let's see what the Criterion Channel has to offer.  Not much, as it happens, at least that we haven't seen.  So we selected this little offering.  Let's just say that I've seen higher quality films.  It's not that it's an Ed Wood level turkey - the acting is fine and when you finally see the monsters, there're some fun stop motion effects:

...but the plot is just silly on a level that is hard to get past.  Basically, the action is set on an American air base in the middle of nowhere, Canada.  They've got a kind of experimental super-radar that involves communicating between jets flying overhead and the control room, and that is powered by their own personal atomic reactor.  But something seems to be draining the energy from it just as they extend the scanning range to spy on the Russkies.  And at the same time, innocent townspeople keep getting killed by an invisible attacker that chokes them and (autopsies reveal) suck out not just their brains, but their entire spinal columns, somehow through little vampire bites on their neck.  Where do these invisible monsters come from, you ask?  Well you'll wish you hadn't. You'd think, this being an air base, and this being the UFO-obsessed 50s, it would be aliens.  But NOOO.  Instead, the answer is that an eccentric genius professor (that's him, above) has discovered how to do telepathy with a LOT of electricity, and the result was that the power of his mind turned into the kind of things that hold thoughts - you know: brains.  Why are they invisible?  Don't ask me.  Why can we eventually see them?  Because they get more power from the reactor.  Are they made of the brains and spinal columns of the dead people?  Unclear.  That would make sense, wouldn't it.  So it's probably wrong, especially as this is a film where they shut down a nuclear reactor that has had all its rods destroyed by BLOWING IT UP WITH DYNAMITE.  It's very, very silly.  Just look at the gifs above and you've seen all you need to see, really.  Well, except for this (as promised in the poster):