Faceless (1988)

just watch it!

Brilliant and touching

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

As the 1980s sparkled on, Director Jess Franco pursued ever more personal and lower financed projects. 'Faceless' proved to be the exception. A collaboration with French video magnate René Château ensured this was a multi-million pound venture and Franco's biggest ever budget.Always willing to surprise, his venture opened with the strains of a George Michael-style vocal song (performed by Vincenzo Thoma) that is repeated sporadically throughout – you may well know each verse word-for-word before the end credits roll. The subsequent sight of Jean Rollin leading lady Brigitte Lahaie (playing Nurse Nathalie) sitting in a car watching Barbara (former Hammer star Caroline Munro) snorting cocaine is delightfully surreal – two genre icons from widely differing backgrounds together! Perhaps surprisingly for a Spanish/French collaboration, the dialogue is spoken in English.The impressive cast is bolstered further by Anton Diffring, and a cameo from Howard Vernon as Dr. Orloff. Terry Savalas, in his last performance, stars as Terry Hallan, Barbara's concerned father – she has gone missing and is a prisoner of Berger's clinic.'Faceless' could be seen as a partial remake of Franco's first hit, 'The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962)', which could be seen as a partial remake of French classic 'Eyes Without a Face (1960)'. There are some good effects – the slightly fey Docteur Flamand's (Helmut Berger) unfortunate daughter Ingrid (Christine Jean) looks convincingly scarred after an acid attack, and a later injection into an eyeball is achieved very realistically. There is a retarded servant, the eyebrow-less Gordon (Gérard Zalcberg) who also gets to commit a number of gory attacks.The story meanders somewhat from its fairly straightforward premise, but is a lot more enjoyable than it might have been, especially given the creative stagnancy in the horror genre in the late 80s. There is no real pathos for the scarred Ingrid as she is played without any suggestion of sympathy, and the open ending (changed from an upbeat finale by Franco) has irritated some – but I really enjoyed this film.

"Faceless" had everything to be a film I'd hate: it's another one of those Eurotrash sleazefests from the 80's, and plus, it's a remake of what I consider among the finest movies ever made - Georges Franju's "Eyes Without A Face". Basically, what Franco does is remove all the poetry and twisted beauty of Franju's work, and replace with sex and gore galore. Yet the final result is a fun, kitsch and throughly bizarre work that may be among the finest of Franco's career. It has obviously a much higher budget than his other works, which gives it a sense of class (mostly due to the stylish camera-work) amidst the tasteless violence. It also has a great cast which includes Telly Savalas, Chris Mitchum, Caroline Munro, Jean Rollin's muse Brigitte Lahaie and Stephane Audran (it's very strange to see her in this one, specially after watching the magnificent "Babette's Feast" from the same year). Another bonus is the interesting and compelling script, something that usually lacks in his other genre flicks, and though Franco's usual surrealistic flair doesn't show it's full power here, the 'substance', for the lack of a better word, more than makes up to it. Last but not least, the disco soundtrack by Vincenzo Toma help giving it that unforgettable 1987 feel, with it's catchy main theme "Destination nowhere", will more than likely haunt you for life once you've heard it. In the end, it's obviously no cinematic artistry as "Eyes Without A Face", but it is extremely entertaining, and in this case, it's all that matters really.

This is one of Jess Franco's most entertaining and best achieved films, a remake or rather rif-off of Franju's Les Yeux sans Visage, featuring a swank French plastic surgeon whose sister is hideously disfigured (in an acid attack intended for him) and who resorts to kidnapping and cutting the faces off of beautiful girls in order to facilitate a phiz transplant. One of the girls he kidnaps is the cocaine-snorting daughter of a rich American businessman, who sends a private eye to find out what's happened to his girl. The story of the face surgeries and the private investigation operate as a two-strand culminating narrative.The film is an absolute scream, full of John Waters-style campy dialogue and confrontations, gratuitously nasty sexual violence, explicit surgery scenes involving the cutting off of faces and as bizarre a cast of international curiosities as you could hope to find. Helmut Berger, a long way from Visconti, is suitably sexy, louche and sleazy as the plastic surgeon whose kinky relationship with his blonde wife proves him a total swinger; Telly Savalas is a picture of cheque-book worry as the businessman in search of his daughter; Christopher Mitchum is a very cut-price version of his dad as the private eye; and Stéphane Audran has a delightful supporting role as a suspicious patient at the clinic, whose keeping an eye on the sinister events lead to her being poked in the peeper with a syringe. Best of all is Anton Diffring as a Nazi death-camp surgeon, shipped in to help with the operation.Diffring's character gives a speech half-way through which almost elevates the film from campy fun into the realms of true provocation. He pours scorn on modern France which sees itself as so humanitarian but which earns millions in dosh from its arms industry. There's a sense in which he is striding from a nightmare past to judge the film's core obsession with our society's beautiful veneer, the violence which creates it and the ugly blood-and-bone truth behind it - the most gobsmacking scenes involve the gorgeous women stripped of their faces, swivelling their eyeballs and chattering their teeth as they lay there, a bloody mess.Faceless gets high marks by having not a single boring moment in it, and by offering an almost Verhoeven-like journey into a pulp world of swank nightclubs, wealthy swinging, violence and gore. This is a portrait of a glossy, faceless modern world of night, where predators roam and prey and there's little hope in sight.

FACELESS (Jesus Franco - France/Spain 1988).As usual with a Jess Franco film, the background stories from cast and crew are much more interesting than the film itself, which is pretty crappy. But, relatively speaking, it's one of his better films, with an interesting cast consisting of Helmut Berger, Telly Savalas, Chris Mitchum and legendary French porn queen Brigitte Lahaie. Franco had a relatively large budget to spend for this film, around one and a half million francs ($250,000). It all looks very glossy, very eighties, including the soundtrack with the strangely hypnotic song 'Destination nowhere.' The film itself is good for quite a few laughs; Chris Mitchum's encounter with the muscled bodyguard "Dudu" or "Doodoo". The inexplicable presence of a drag queen in Helmut Berger's clinic, a joke Franco spontaneously made up on the set, even Helmut Berger looked a little disturbed after entering the room (Franco probably didn't tell him who or what was in the room). An electric doll (the stand-in for a body) that runs wild due to some electric failure, with its teeth clappering up and down like wild. Why fix it? Just keep it in the movie. No one will notice. Sure...The extras are always the most interesting part of Franco-DVD's. Chris Mitchum is a likable and intelligent guy, who tells some amusing anecdotes about the start of his movie career. He also reveals that - due to some misunderstanding - he was in an outrageously expensive hotel suite in Paris, that cost more than $30,000 in total during the whole shoot, more than one-tenth of the total budget. The interview with Jess Franco is strange and he stays clear of saying anything specific about his work, which is a smart thing. He does manage to discuss the work of Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Frederico Fellini and Helmut Berger, all within five minutes! The teaming of these names in one interview in such a short time must be a first. A somewhat atypical entry in Franco's oeuvre with a (relatively speaking) coherent plot, less hanky-panky than usual, but some shocks and gore, and plenty of (unintended) laughs.Camera Obscura --- 5/10