Faceless (1987)

Georges Franju's Les Yeux Sans Visage (1960) must be one of the most influential films in the history of continental horror movies.  It has inspired numerous films about the restoration of disfigured female beauty via radical skin grafts and face transplants.  Sometimes the treatments involved vary, with blood transfusions, hormone infusions and the like substituting for surgery, but they all involve the murder and dismemberment of young women and it never ends well.  Perhaps Jesus Franco was the director most influenced by Franju's film, turning out a number of films based around the same basic plot, starting with Gitos en la Noche (1962), The Awful Dr Orloff in English, which itself spawned a number of sequels featuring the title character.  Franco's main contribution to this sub-genre was the injection of plenty of sexual kinkiness and lots more gore.  He was, of course, constrained by the censorship of the era but, in the late eighties, he returned to the subject with Faceless (1987).  The film is, pretty much, a remake of Orloff, but with a contemporary setting that eschews the Gothic decadence of its progenitor in favour of a much slicker and glossy looking production.  It also ups the kink and violence quotient quite considerably, with modern special effects and make up techniques allowing him to incorporate a number of startling and, for their time, effective gore sequences.  

This version of the story incorporates incest, rape, necrophilia and chainsaw mutilations, as Franco attempts to update the story for more modern times.  This time around it is plastic surgeon Dr Flamand who is trying to restore the acid-scarred face of his sister (with whom he has an incestuous relationship), after she takes the acid intended for her brother, thrown by a disgruntled ex-patient.  Using his private clinic as a front and assisted by Nathalie, another lover who is also involved with the sister, he kidnaps young women and surgically removes their faces in order to try and transplant them onto his sister.  There's also a handyman, Gordon, who not only rapes some of the women but also disposes of their bodies by cutting them up with a chainsaw and indulging in a bit of necrophilia with the pieces.  Unfortunately for them, one of their victims is the wayward daughter of a wealthy US businessman, who sends a private eye to track her down.  Flamand eventually enlists the help of a an SS surgeon and war criminal who had achieved some success in face transpants while working in a concentration camp.  

Obviously enjoying a larger than usual budget, Franco delivers a surprisingly slick looking film with decent production values and lots of nicely shot Paris locations.  The film relentlessly emphasises its modernity - in stark contrast to Franco's sixties and seventies Gothic historicals - from gleaming operating theatres to neon lit streets and the gleaning interior decor of bars and nightclubs.  It also boasts an uncommonly (for a Franco film) good cast, with Helmut Berger as Dr Flamand, Brigette Lahie as his assistant, Caroline Munro as the kidnapped girl, Anto Diffring as the Nazi surgeon, Chris Mitchum as the private eye and Telly Savalas in a cameo as Munro's father.  Best of , the doctor who recommends the Nazi surgeon to Flamand is none other than Dr Orloff, played, as he was in 1962, by Howard Vernon.  Where the film falters, however, is in its poor juggling of its proliferating sub-plots some of which, such as the business of the suspicious patient threatening blackmail (played by Stephan Audran), are truncated very abruptly.  Even the main sub-plot, that of the detective's investigation, vanishes for long stretches of the film as it is made to play second fiddle to the horrible and sensational, (and therefore more easily marketable) goings on at the clinic.  While not exactly ground breaking, Faceless is, nonetheless, an entertaining enough film to watch, it moves along at a good pace, with the story developing reasonably smoothly.  Which won't necessarily please hardcore Franco fans as it lacks the characteristic sense of chaos and borderline lunacy of most of his output, (not to mention a lack of his apparently random use of the zoom lens), having a far more 'generic' eighties horror flick look and feel.  But it does have some pretty good effects, including faces being cut off, axe and chainsaw choppings and even a syringe to the eye, which will probably please fans of more convention slasher and body horror films.