EDITOR’S NOTE: Pyro…The Thing Without a Face was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, March 4, 1967 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, October 28, 1967 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, November 9, 1968 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, January 3, 1970 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, October 17, 1970 at 11:30 p.m. and Saturday, September 11, 1971 at 11:30 p.m.
When a film carries a title like Pyro… The Thing Without a Face (courtesy of American-International Pictures; it was released as Phantom of the Ferris Wheel in other countries), your mind immediately jumps to rubberized monster suits and mad-scientist labs. Toss in the fact that producer/co-writer Sidney W. Pink was the mastermind behind sci-fi drive-in staples like The Angry Red Planet, Reptilicus and Journey to the Seventh Planet —plus rumor has it the lead role was originally intended for Vincent Price—and you think you know exactly what you’re getting into.
Except Pyro isn’t quite that movie. At least, not for the first half.
Instead, Julio Coll’s Spanish-American co-production opens as a tight, surprisingly slick and suspenseful romantic drama that slowly curdles into a dark crime thriller.
Vance Pierson (Barry Sullivan) is a successful American architect living in Spain with his wife Verna (Sherry Moreland) and their young daughter. Sick of working-class housing projects, Vance wants bigger and better assignments. While house-hunting, he meets Laura Blanco (Martha Hyer)—an icy, dangerous widow who is literally in the middle of setting her own house on fire to collect the insurance payout. Despite stern warnings from his young Spanish colleague, Julio (Fernando Hilbeck)—who drops unsettling hints about Laura’s dark past and her tangled family history—Vance dives headfirst into a torrid affair with her.
Eventually, Vance’s wife realizes what’s going on, prompting Vance to do the sensible thing: end things with Laura. But Laura’s mind doesn’t work like a normal mind. She operates under the twisted logic that if Vance’s family simply ceased to exist, he would have no choice but to come back to her. After asking him a hauntingly specific hypothetical question—“If you didn’t have a wife and child, would you marry me?”—she puts a meticulously engineered arson plan into motion.
The plan succeeds with catastrophic results: Vance’s family perishes in the blaze. But Laura didn’t account for Vance returning home early. Trying in vain to rescue his wife and daughter, Vance is horribly burned and disfigured. Left a scarred wreck in a hospital bed, he utters a chilling vow of revenge against Laura before vanishing into the night.
The first half plays like an intense, Hitchcock-influenced melodrama filled with clever, odd details—like Vance’s peculiar obsession with Ferris wheels and his quirky observations about his apartment-building neighbors. Once the fire takes place and Vance sets out for vengeance, the film shifts gears entirely, morphing into a revenge thriller complete with a scarred, mysterious carnival operator, a remote island off the coast of Galicia, nd a young local girl named Liz—played by none other than Soledad Miranda in an early role.
While the second half strays into melodrama and narrative improbability, director Julio Coll keeps the pacing moving and the atmosphere thick. The film relies heavily on strong lead performances: Barry Sullivan brings grounded weight to his descent from upwardly mobile architect to vengeful ghost, while Martha Hyer plays calculating, sociopathic obsession to perfection.
The makeup effects for Vance’s burns and reconstruction are impressively grim for 1964, lending real bite to the film’s climax.
You can watch this on Tubi.
