Touches You

Awesome Movie

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Excavated from an expedition at Pompeii, a professor and his assistant find that the recovered mummy of an ancient guardian believes that she is the princess he loved reincarnated and sets out to reclaim her forcing them to protect her while trying to find a way to stop him.This here wasn't all that bad of a drive-in feature. One of the films' better features is the fact that there's quite a lot of work here on the build-up to the reveal of the mummy and its condition. The connection to ancient Roman history, setting the whole affair around the eruption of Vesuvius which is carried out rather nicely through the discovery of the mummy, and it's contents from the dig site which leads rather well into the dreams she has about the mummy coming for her which comes off as the vast majority of the first half here. When it gets to the point about him being alive and coming after the medallion, this one gets even more fun as these are where the film really offers its best scenes as the first resurrection in the museum in front of her is quite the impressive offering, while the main attack in her apartment after it chases them out after it's chamber and goes on stalking her throughout the building which is a really fun and exciting sequence which remains a nice highlight. Even the finale is rather nice, from the final abduction out of the museum and the trip through the countryside where they arrive at the beach when the police arrive and engage in the final confrontation with the creature which is a rather nice and unexpected finish that ends this on a rather fun note. Along with the great look and imposing features of the mummy, these here are what make this one fun enough to hold over the flaws. The issue here is the fact that a vast majority of the film has an annoying and utterly irritating voice-over narration that is completely unnecessary as a whole. The voice-over tells us absolutely nothing important about what's going on since it merely describes the action playing out on-screen or shoots off a quick blurb following up on what was just learned which renders the exercise quite comical as well as irritating. Since it's carried on throughout the whole film, oftentimes just for a line or two, it's pointless needling on the story really gets old, and becomes a hindrance due to its continuation while it stayed only for the beginning this wouldn't be an issue. Likewise, the only other problematic issue is the overall cheap and quickie feeling to it as there's just not a whole lot here that denotes too much went into this, from the cheap look and cramped sets to the flimsy look of everything which makes this look incredibly cheap. That does tend to lower this one, although there's still plenty to like overall here.Today's Rating/PG: Violence.

CURSE OF THE FACELESS MAN is another of those No Budget, Poverty Row quickies that's surprisingly well done and ,even more surprisingly, very Entertaining. It's THE MUMMY by way of THE GOLEM, of course, but without all the overwrought Production Values. Hey, who needs Production Value(s) when you've got The Faceless Man, right...? Not that The Faceless One isn't an impressive Monster: he IS; many bigger-budgeted movies would've done well to have done as well as these guys did. CURSE OF THE FACELESS MAN doesn't DRAG, that's for sure, and The Monster gets plenty of that all-important Screen Time. Can't ask for more.

(There are Spoilers) Found in the ruins of ancient Pompeii is this mummified man with a box of jewelry buried next to him. It's soon discovered by the eminent historian Dr. Emenuel,Felix Locher, of ancient Roman Greek and Egyptian times that the body is that of a Roman slave and gladiator named Quintillus Aurellus, Bob Bryant. Aurellus was killed, along with thousands of fellow Romans, when Mt. Vesuvious blew its top in 79 AD and destroyed the city of Pompeii!After spending some 2,000 years in limbo the ancient Roman slave/warrior Aurellus came to life, with the help of a modern x-ray machine, looking for his long lost love a daughter of a Roman aristocrat Lucila Lucia. As we'll later find out Lucila has been reincarnated and is now American artist Tina Enright, Elaine Edwards, who's fiancée Dr. Paul Mellon, Richard Anderson, is involved in the archaeological expedition that dug up the long dead and buried Quintillus Aurellus!The faceless man, Quintillus Aurellus, suddenly comes to life and cause havoc all over the Italian city of Naples, the sister city to ancient Pompeii, in looking for his lost love the now pretty American artist Tina Enright. Tina does have an inkling to just who this stone man, or mummy, is in a number of dreams she has of him. This causes her to paint a portrait of the stone man without actually knowing who he is and what she has to do with him!The stone, or faceless, man himself is so slow and uncoordinated that it's miracle that he could catch up with, as well as kill, anyone in the movie. Yet he's responsible for at least a dozen attacks that results in some two, a truck driver and museum security guard, deaths!Finally getting what he wanted, his his long love Tina/Lucla, the stone man ends going up the river, or Mediterranean Sea. This has to do with the stone man miscalculating the time that he's living in: 1958 AD not 79 AD. That cause him to self -destruct by not realizing that his escape plan, with Tina, was the wrong path for him to take! Since the long inactive Mt. Vesuvious is no longer a danger to him and the woman, together with the population of Naples, he's so insanely in love with!Nothing that out of the ordinary for a 1950's horror movie if that's what "The Curse of the Faceless Man" is supposed to be. What's really good about the movie "the Curse of the Faceless Man" is its opening and closing soundtrack together with the stock footage of exploding volcanoes that are supposed to show Mt. Vesuvious' 79 AD eruption! There's also actor Filex Locher as ancient historian Dr. Emenuel who that same year-1958-will achieve motion picture immortality in him staring as the daffy and overzealous Dr. Carter Morton in that all time bad movie classic "Frankenstein's Daughter".

Watching CURSE OF THE FACELESS MAN transports me back to the days of "Chiller Theatre" on Saturday nights. The premise of a man saturated with Egyptian embalming fluid and then sealed in volcanic ash and preserved by the radiation from deep within the earth is certainly an unusual one. (Notice how they sneaked "radiation" into the plot once again?) It is also a movie you have to think about. Quintillus "sees" through a sort of ESP and recognises the reincarnation of the woman he loved. Alas Richard Anderson is a little too hard headed as the hero. Even after he sees Quintillus alive he refuses to believe his fiancee could have had a past life as the stone man's beloved. Gar Moore, who had worked with Roberto Rossellini in the late 1940's, does not have much to do apart from spount some scientific jargon and looked concerned. Bravo to Felix Locher as Dr. Emmanuel. Mr. Locher, real life father of actor Jon Hall (Charles Locher) did not begin acting until he was 76. Look for him also in HELL SHIP MUTINY and in his most famous film, FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER. The Faceless Man is played by Bob Bryant who usually did westerns. The narrator sounds a lot like Morris Ankrum, could someone tell me if it is really him? The "Museo di Napoli" is actually Griffith Observatory and a stretch of beach in Venice, California not Europe, stands in for the Cove of the Blind Fisherman. Okay so it is not full of CGI and the plot is predictable. We watch B-movies to have fun, right? So let's watch it have fun like we did when we were kids.