It’s a quiet night and a fisherman works alone on his small boat. A coffin emerges from the water and the fisherman goes to investigate. He leads the waterlogged coffin to the shore and unsurprisingly discovers a skeleton contained within. Spooky noises follow him as he gets back to work on his boat and he’s discovered by the police soon after strangled to death with the skeleton lying right next to him. Eerily, the skeleton has its hand around the man’s neck. The coroner raises a couple disturbing questions when he finds that the bones are still sturdily held together after having been rotting for more than a hundred years and the signs of strangulation seem to point to the skeleton being the perpetrator. The police captain is having a hard time accepting this but the science is pointing to these very strange answers. An atomic scientist is called in when the coroner’s deeper probing show the bones to be irradiated and regenerating. Smug American Dr. Redding is intrigued by the idea of a regenerating specimen so he and his superior Dr. Agustin decide they should check it out. As exciting as the strange properties of the bones are, the scientists agree that there is no supernatural killer causing problems and that it’s probably just some lunatic hanging around. That night, the coroner’s assistant is murdered by something unknown with powers of the windy variety. The theremin on the soundtrack lets us know it’s something spooky. The coroner is the next to die when he comes face to face with the being causing all the chaos. Much to my surprise, it appears to be an alien that wouldn’t look out of place in a budget-strained episode of The Outer Limits. In fact, this whole movie is starting to feel like an extended episode. An attack (well, kind of a misunderstanding that escalates into fire and heavy winds) on a costume party is cheapjack magic. The police force and Redding track the trail of terror being caused by the fiend and attempt to figure out what pattern the unknown is following. Long believed to be an alternate title for the same director’s Blood Thirst, this is definitely an interesting bit of formerly lost horror and I will tip my hat to Vinegar Syndrome for unearthing and restoring it, especially considering how inhospitable the area’s climate is for film. A Filipino creature feature from the sixties that overstays its welcome is still a Filipino creature feature from the sixties so there’s no way I don’t give it plenty of leeway thanks to my monster kid mentality. The interesting first act is let down by a lack of action and dulling of originality but I’m still gonna give this one a passing grade.
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