Ten Days of Terror!: Horrors of the Black Museum

Film: Horrors of the Black Museum
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on rockin’ flatscreen.

Sometimes, I genuinely don’t know what to make of the movies that are put on the lists that I am following. Horrors of the Black Museum is a case in point. This film holds a respectable place in the mid-500s on the They Shoot Zombies list, and I can’t understand why. According to the list’s website (and the fact that I’m going to the write-up for information indicates my desperation here) is that this is the first of a trilogy of movies that are based on ideas of the Marquis de Sade, the so-called Sadeian Trilogy that includes Circus of Horrors and Peeping Tom. The write-up suggests that this is the least of the three movies, and yet Circus of Horrors is not in the list of 1000 greatest horror movies and this one is. Go figure.

We’re going to open with the brutal and shocking murder of a young woman. She receives a pair of binoculars as a gift, but when she uses them, Needles shoot out of the eyepieces into her brain. It's grisly and a true highpoint of the film. The police are naturally baffled, and they are further harassed by crime writer Edmond Bancroft (Michael Gough, best known as Batman’s butler on the Batman television show), whose books and newspaper columns frequently mock the police.

Ten Days of Terror!: Fiend Without a Face

Film: Fiend Without a Face
Format: Internet video on the new internet machine.

The Criterion Collection is odd sometimes. There are plenty of movies that are a part of the collection because they are weird, obscure art films that tend to be fawned over by the beret and clove cigarette crowd. And then you get Fiend Without a Face, a strange little science fiction movie that could have easily been an MST3K film in different directorial hands. This film is loaded with dumb science and magic technology words about radiation, and also features free-range brains with attached spinal cords and eyestalks, so there’s that, too. I mean, I get why this is generally looked at positively, but it’s still weird as all hell.

We’re spending our time in this film in Manitoba around an American air force base put in place more or less to protect Canada and the U.S. from Russian attacks from over the pole. Quite suddenly, there is a rash of deaths in the surrounding countryside. The people in the area naturally blame the radiation coming from the nuclear power plant at the military base. Autopsies on the victims, though, indicate something very different is afoot. The victims all have a pair of holes at the base of their necks. More disturbing, their brains are missing, as are their spinal cords.