Scott LeBrun The classic French horror film "Eyes Without a Face" is reworked, Jess Franco style, in this enjoyably lurid exploitation drama. An incredible international cast of stars is gathered for a story in which there are many horrific highlights, including a hypodermic needle jabbed into an eyeball, a decapitation by chainsaw, a person being drilled while hiding inside a locker, and the disturbing sight of a face being surgically removed while the patient is alive and conscious. Franco guides the various trashy goings-on with a steady hand, always keeping things interesting and amusing. An American fashion model, Barbara Hallen (Caroline Munro) is kidnapped and a supposedly tough as nails private eye, Sam Morgan (the miscast Chris Mitchum) is hired by her father (Telly Savalas) to find her. The perpetrators did it in the attempt to find a donor face for Ingrid Flamand (Christiane Jean), the sister of renowned plastic surgeon Frank Flamand (Helmut Berger), Ingrid having been scarred by a vindictive former patient of Frank's, victim of an unsuccessful surgery. The eclectic group of actors also includes the stunning Brigitte Lahaie as Nathalie, Frank's nurse and lover and partner in crime, Anton Diffring as the distinguished Dr. Moser, Stephane Audran as the snoopy Mme. Sherman, Franco regular Howard Vernon as Dr. Orloff (a role he'd played for the director a number of times previous), and Franco's longtime partner Lina Romay as Orloff's wife. In addition to the trashier moments, there are also more humorous ones, as Sam threatens an effeminate photographer. On location shooting in Paris is a real asset. The soundtrack, however, gets a little repetitive with its use of that one pop song. Makeup effects are mostly quite impressive and exploitation fans will be pleased with the level of depravity on display. They'll also get a kick out of the mentally slow, hulking henchman Gordon (Gerard Zalcberg) employed by Frank and Nathalie. A number of the women present are real lookers, and it could only have made this film even better had they shown off more of their bodies. Still, this is fun stuff overall for trash fans, although the ending falls short of real satisfaction what with the way it leaves us hanging. Eight out of 10.

Leonard Smalls: The Lone Biker of the Apocalypse I'd recommend a big steak, a bottle of red wine, some candles, a special lady, and this film for a perfect romantic evening.I was surprised by how gross this film was! Impressed, too... I think films like "Hostel" and "The Devil's Rejects" owe a lot to the 1988 sleaze-fest "Faceless." I've read a lot about how Franco's other films suck and I have to say, from what I've seen, I agree. I have "The Castle of Fu Manchu" and "A Virgin Among the Living Dead" and both of them were painful to get through. "Faceless" remained entertaining throughout and I never got bored for a second. And it's a pretty long movie.Sleazy, wet, sick, and awesome. Euro-trash cinema at it's finest here. If you like this one, I'd suggest "Beyond the Darkness." 6 out of 10, kids.

chrisbridges71 I recently finished watching the first season of Kojak which Universal released. With Telly Savalis fresh on my mind, I decided to buy this movie since he had a role in it.Immediately, it is evident that Franco had a bigger budget to work with. Combined with a better-than-usual script for one his movies and some acting talent (look for John Vernon from Zombie Lake is a brief role), and this movie was not bad.By this time, this genre of movie had started to fade away in terms of quality releases. Lucio Fulci had run out of steam by this point as had Umberto Lenzi. Even the great Ruggero Deodato was struggling having just released Body Count the year before. (Unlike Franco's "Faceless," Body County had some known actors but the script was terrible and they had nothing to work with.)It was interesting to see Savalis in this, even though he was not a main character. His bald head, distinct voice and flashy suit, just like from his days as Kojak, added to the movie. His small role could not have saved this movie if it was terrible. However, in this case he added to it and made it a decent effort from a director who is routinely criticized for his work.I would recommend giving this a look.

Bogey Man Spanish exploitation/sleaze/horror king Jess Franco's "Faceless" (Spanish, French, 1988) is one of his more interesting works and has a remarkably bigger budget, too, when compared to some of his older and duller films, like "El Sádico de Notre-Dame" (1974) with its numerous aka titles to name just one. Faceless has a very typical story that is like in his 1962 classic horror film "Gritos en la noche" aka "The Awful dr. Orloff" and like in that film, Howard Vernon plays "Orloff" in Faceless, too. The plot however is very thin but still the film never feels boring or too long thanks to some interesting elements in the film.A beautiful French female gets her face ruined by some crazy woman who throws acid on her face. Her determined brother is a doctor and promises to restore her beauty and make her look an attractive girl again. This he will achieve by kidnapping young females to his clinic with the help of his nurses and a Morpho-like monster (referring to the Orloff classic from 1962), and it is not too long before they kidnap a model girl whose father starts to worry about his daughter's disappearance and so he sends a one-faced cop to France to search for her. So there's nothing too special or never-seen in the plot but still Franco manages to maintain our interest with pretty good actors, pacing and (of course) graphic gore all of which are not always present in his other, worse, movies.This is not a typical Franco flick at all as it hasn't got gratuitous nudity and plenty of it. Of course, since this is directed by him, there are lusty characters who crave for sexual pleasure almost all the time and this animality side of human nature is a real theme in some of his classics, most notably his 1981 women-in-prison film "Sadomania - Hölle der Lust" and the 1977 classic "Liebesbriefe einer portugiesischen Nonne" aka "Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun", both of which depict humans as pretty much animals living only to satisfy their instincts for violence and especially sex, the latter film also having some commentary about church and hypocrisy that can be related to it. But these things are not so "deep" in Faceless anymore and the brief scenes of sexual intercourse and playings feel a little forced and unnecessary but fortunately they are as mentioned very brief.There's one very interesting character here, and that is the nazi doctor who has done some horrifying experiments on living humans back in the war camps, and he is sent to complete the face transplantation for the girl. There are also some interesting issues about superficiality inside modern society in which external beauty is the most important thing for some/most, and this accompanied with the presence of the most wicked of them all, the nazi doctor, gives the film a fair amount of thoughts about rotten and disturbed society and how far its inhabitants may be ready to go in order to reach the selfish goal and save their own skin (not pun) at the expense of others. As the real life atrocity nazi character is there it all becomes more harrowing and haunting, especially when he indeed looks quite scary physically, too. The ending leaves some things open but still it is pretty effective and crystallizes the theme of the film described above. It is obvious this film is so easy to sit through as it really has something more than just graphic gore and face mutilation, things that would have been the only things in this film if some less ambitious director had made it. And Franco always (well, almost) seems to be very interested to add something deeper in his (exploitation) films which is nice.The gore and exploitation elements are pretty strong and present throughout the film. A needle gets plunged into the victim's eye in a zooming Franco close-up, a character gets drilled to the head in a pretty outrageous scene, but the most outrageous scenes involve the facial experiments and how good the special effects are here. It is "a little" more graphic than in John Woo's "Face Off" (1997), and Franco this time really is able to concentrate on the details and close-ups as there are nothing to be shamed of in the effects work this time. The gore and amount of it is pretty extreme so no matter what themes they had in mind, exploitation was still the main thing and those scenes pretty much the reason this film was made for in the first place. Faceless is easily among the easiest to watch and more noteworthy films of film maker Jess Franco. It has not laughable over-acting, it has some professional actors in it, too (like Telly Savalas in a role of the father of the missing girl), it has some genuinely interesting issues which all are presented in a form of a traditional almost plot-free but well paced gore film. One major negative side for me is the awful 80's disco/pop soundtrack that plays throughout the movie and its various night club scenes and sounds like Wham or George Michael and so it is not a great delight to my ears. The plot is also full of holes and things that don't get explained (like what is in fact the status of a murder clinic of that kind?!) but still it could be much worse and ridiculous and Faceless is a respectable 5/10 achievement by the legendary Spaniard.