With Faceless, director Jess Franco updated — unofficially, of course — 1960’s Eyes Without a Face, George Franju’s groundbreaking French classic about a mad surgeon who’ll do anything to give his facially wrecked daughter a new visage, even murder. The main changes in Franco’s work is that he made the victim the doc’s sister, and he threw in the sex and gore not permissible two decades prior. While messy onscreen, the results are tight by Franco’s standards.
In Paris, Ingrid (Christiane Jean, 1982’s Les Misérables) wears a mask to hide her acid-ravaged mug from an attack meant for her brother, Dr. Flammand (Helmut Berger, Salon Kitty). Her face looks like Wheaties left in a cereal bowl, but not forever, provided her brother can find the perfect “donor.” To that end, the physician has been kidnapping and imprisoning the most beautiful women across Gay Paree, and hired a Nazi doctor (Anton Diffring, Fahrenheit 451) — a former colleague of Josef Mengele, no less! — to aid in the surgery room with the “total face transplants.”
Unfortunately for Team Flammand, one of its recent acquisitions is a coke-snorting model (Caroline Munro, The Last Horror Film) whose pappy (Telly Savalas, Lisa and the Devil) has hired a P.I. (Christopher Mitchum, Ricco the Mean Machine) to locate her.
That he will is a given — how many murders will occur between now and then is the unknown variable, but with Franco at the helm, viewers can be assured the numeral won’t be low. Even without all the botched face-transplant procedures, Faceless is full of realistic-looking ick, from a syringe plunged in the eye to a power drill bored through the forehead. (More offensive is the film’s smooth-jazz theme song, played nearly as many times as Franco has movies, and definitely more times than Mitchum has expressions.)
With a concept that worked wonders for Franju, Franco virtually was assured a notch in the win column. That the X can be bolded is a sign of him giving this one some tender love. As graphic horror, as a sex-charged thriller, as a time capsule of big hair, as proof of Munro at her most drop-dead gorgeous, Faceless succeeds with a smile on your part and a scream on theirs. —Rod Lott