... which usually highlights the best films from around the world. So you'd expect and you would find "Seven Samurai", "The Third Man", and "Bicycle Thieves" among those films that are or have been in print by this group. But why this film?
I really don't know. Maybe just because it is a good representative of late 50s sci fi horror. In the 30s and 40s people were afraid of Dracula, Dr. Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man. In the nuclear age people are just not that afraid of a giant bat. And that's where this little film comes in.
It's got lots of angles covered. There is the American military installation in Canada. The military and the nearby farming community do not like or trust one another. There is nuclear power at the installation...to power the radars? I looked this up and this actually was a thing. The natives think that the nuclear power plant is effecting the milk production of their cows. One nearby villager is killed one night when he is nearby the military installation taking notes. Then three more locals are murdered. And in a most unusual way. Their brain and spinal column has been sucked out of their body through a tiny hole in their head. And whatever killed them is invisible. So now the Canadians think there is a crazy American soldier killing people on top of everything else.
So enter Major Cummings (Allan Thompson) to solve the mystery. And this film is so very 50s. Cummings openly takes speed so he can work late hours. His idea of romancing a gal is to walk into her house just because the door is unlocked to find her clad only in a bath towel. In fact, Cummings is so bad at romance a special sax score plays whenever it is supposed to be a romantic moment, because you'd never figure it out without that cue. And we are just waiting to see what this invisible killer looks like because it makes the weirdest "swishing" noises as it approaches.
To obviously be a B film with a low budget, it does what it does well, and manages to include as a clue a word that does not exist - "sibonetics". Did they mean cybernetics? I'd recommend this quirky little film that is home in both the Criterion Collection and MST3K.
