Edward L. Cahn's monster movie Curse of the Faceless Man (imdb.com) was pretty bad, even by low-rent late '50s movie standards. I enjoyed Cahn's Invisible Invaders (imdb.com) (1959) more, even though it's not actually much better.
Faceless Man is a dumb mummy story set in Italy (apparently, the Griffith Park Observatory is in Naples, or was for a time in '58), and follows a victim of Pompei's fall to Vesuvius as his body is unearthed, and he comes alive because his hot lady friend has (maybe) been reincarnated as a boring '50s low-budget blonde.
(The "Italian" -- actually hispanic (en.wikipedia.org) -- lady is hot as hell, even made up to look more middle-aged than she really was, and the actress was married to Roy Huggins (en.wikipedia.org), which was interesting. Writers really can score the hotties, sometimes. The fact that '50s low budget rules required the hero to prefer the boring blonde over the hot brunette with smoldering eyes only shows how stupid rules can be.)
Richard Anderson, who played Oscar Goldman in Six Million Dollar Man, is the lead, and while he credited the film with teaching him how to act for TV, it doesn't really show. He's boring here.
The use of omniscient narrator is one of the laziest examples of the form, and why the "never use VO" rule is part of screenwriting lore, I think. The only rhyme or reason to the intrusion of the narrator, as near as I could tell, was "we want the audience to know this, but don't have the time or the budget actually to shoot it.
And the plot... I think almost every "logical connection" made is so absurd that no audience would make it without either the characters or the narrator telling us that this is how it "must" be. The fact that the guy who wrote the script also wrote the utterly classic short story "It's a Good Life (en.wikipedia.org)", immortalized by The Twilight Zone, only goes to show that even good writers have to put food on the table, too.
On the plus side, the cinematography was crisp and pretty well done (considering the budget and seven-day shooting schedule); the Southern California locations mostly worked as "Italy", apart from the Griffith Park Observatory; like all of Eddie Cahn's late period movies it clocks in at just around 70 minutes, so it moves right along; and the monster design is pretty nifty, even though clearly done on a budget and would have benefited from more shadowy lighting.
(Here is the trailer (invidio.us).)
This movie review by D. Jason Fleming is released under a CC BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org) International License, some rights reserved.
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