Plot Synopsis
The film is set on an American airbase in rural Manitoba, Canada. Mysterious deaths begin to occur in the small town near the base, and postmortems reveal that the brains and spinal cords of the victims are somehow missing; only marks on each victim's neck are left as a clue. But the locals become convinced that nuclear fallout from radiation at the base is causing the strange deaths.
Jeff Cummings, an Air Force major, soon becomes suspicious of Professor Walgate, a British scientist living near the airbase, who has been experimenting with telekinetics; Walgate, it is soon revealed, has succeeded in developing telekinesis. The nuclear power experiments at the nearby base have enhanced it well beyond his intentions, and in the process created a new, malevolent, invisible life form that has developed its own intelligence and escaped his laboratory.
This intelligence soon begins to multiply its numbers by claiming more local victims. These creatures later become visible while continuing to feed on the higher levels of power now being generated at the airbase. Their mutated "bodies" are revealed to be the missing, now enlarged brains and connected spinal cords removed from their victims; the spinal cords have become very flexible and have sprouted feelers. These mutations allow the creatures to move quickly and even to leap; each brain has also developed a pair of small eyes on extended eye stalks.
The film climaxes with the visible creatures attacking an isolated house, where most of the film's main characters have gathered to discuss the growing crisis. Having come armed, the defenders soon discover the creatures can be easily dispatched with well-aimed gun shots to the exposed brains, but it is Major Cummings who saves the day by blowing up the airbase's nuclear power plant machinery, robbing the creatures of their high-energy power source, causing them to die quickly and then dissolve away.
Read more about this topic: Fiend Without A Face
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