FANTASIA OBSCURA: A Cult Horror That Couldn’t Have a More Stony-Faced Villain
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, we come back to try again, hoping that this time we will be successful…
Curse of the Faceless Man (1958)
Distributed by: United Artists
Directed by: Edward L. Cahn
Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
[I hate and love; you ask me why I do this?
I don’t know, but what I feel is torturous.]
– Catullus
It may not have been the worst disaster to befall a community, but the sudden destruction of Pompeii in CE 79 certainly captured the imagination of the Western world.
The calamity took place at a Roman resort town, their equivalent of the Hamptons or Palm Springs, which meant a lot of people with education and free time would process their thoughts in writings that survived to the present. The destruction was unexpected and total in the communities affected, with Pompeii a lost city until 1738, after which continuous efforts to reclaim the art and artifacts buried under ash continued into the present.
The rediscovery of intact Roman decorations, alongside their graffiti and advertisements, surrounded by common everyday items, made the ruins feel more like a living city that just sent people away for a spell. The saga of its doom and the suggested stories of its residents found in a time frozen prompted many inspired works of art, visual as well as literal.
And, also, this…
Thanks to the odious continual narration provided by Morris Ankrum, we watch and have described to us in real time (badly) the events of the film. Which opens with a worker at the Pompeii site discovering both a box of gems and jewelry and a stone figure (Bob Bryant under the ‘suit’) that draws the attention of the head of the Pompeii Museum in Naples, Dr. Fiorillo (Luis Van Rooten).
The finding of such a specimen, a body mummified in rock, prompts him to call in a fellow scientist, Dr. Paul Mallon (Richard Anderson), who once had a thing with Fiorillo’s daughter Maria (Adele Mara), who is also in the sciences. Which means that when our stony subject comes to life and kills the driver of the truck taking him to the museum, there’s a lot of brain power on site, for all the good it does anyone…
We are soon introduced to Paul’s fiancé, Tina Enright (Elaine Edwards), who seems to have seen our titular terror in her dreams before she causes Paul a nightmare, the one where the current love and the ex get in the same room…
We get some important (if improbable) information from Dr. Emanuel (Felix Locher) who translates a Etruscan inscription on one of the pieces of jewelry in the box: We find that our stooge in the statue suit had a name, Quintillus Aurelius, who was a gladiator in Pompeii with a bad case of ardenti caritate for his master’s daughter. Who, we discover easily enough through assumption and bad narration, was reincarnated as Tina.
Despite the museum being closed until the driver’s killer is found, and all common sense as well, Tina sneaks into the museum to get some more sketches of Quintillus, who despite being stone does not stay still all that long like decent artist’s models are supposed to…
While Quintillus may have been willing to spend over a thousand years buried and waiting, the producer of this film was certainly in a hurry. Robert E. Kent, who started his career as a screenwriter doing B films at Columbia Pictures, got into producing in 1957 to cash in on the need for drive-in and TV fare. Ed Cahn, who had directed 97 films before he got this script, was an old pro at doing okay work on a quick turnaround. The fact that the film was shot in just six days and still managed to show considerable (if uninspired) craft shows how well-oiled the gears of the machine were.
They were certainly efficient enough to keep things going despite the lack of engagement with the material any of the actors had. There could not have been a worse pairing as leads than we got in Edwards and Anderson, and they got no help from anyone else in the cast. Most of the blame if pressed would have to go to Anderson, who doesn’t demonstrate a lot of comfort as a leading man; this might explain why later in his career, as Oscar Goldman on The Six Million Dollar Man, he spent most of his time at a desk while letting his bionic co-stars do all the heavy lifting (no pun intended)…
One big fault is something of a surprise, though, as the screenplay was written by Jerome Bixby. It’s not a great script, frankly; there’s the fact that the main motivation of a man returning from the dead to reunite with his reincarnated love is lifted from The Mummy, which is a horrid case of bad recycling, for use of a kinder term. And the word stew spewed by the characters evoking alchemy and radiation as needed to give the crew something to talk about (please, anyone other than that damn narrator) do the film no favors.
That said, there are circumstances to consider: This was one of Bixby’s first screenplays, likely written at the same time he wrote It! The Terror from Beyond Space. In fact, both films were directed by Cahn (both with six-day shooting schedules) and were paired together by the distributor and released simultaneously, which suggests that at the time his Roman horror-play was not getting the bulk of his attention compared to the other film.
Further, the fact that the envisaged creature shows signs of being inspired by the real life casts made of buried bodies found and produced in the 1800s shows that at least some thought went into the initial plotting. And the fact that after this script, Bixby would go on to write the much better script for “Mirror, Mirror” for Star Trek as well as the stories adapted by other writers for “It’s a Good Life” for The Twilight Zone and the film Fantastic Voyage, supports the idea that what they had to work with when they shot Curse of the Faceless Man was a rushed rookie effort from a writer trying his hand at a screenplay for the first time.
Which means what we’re treated to in this case is watching a screenwriter’s first steps in the industry It may not be great, and by Jove that’s a certainty here, but with every return to the set the hope is that the next time, the result will be better.
Much like being reincarnated, in fact…
NEXT TIME: Let’s sing along, shall we?
There goes the bride
Yes, it’s homicide
Watch this screen legend
On his downward slide…
