Memorable, crazy movie

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

After all the hype surrounding this film, I am kind of disappointed. This is not a bad film, but it feels like more effort could have been put into little details that would have elevated the film. The prosthetics, which should be the selling point of the film, were never entirely convincing except in the photograph sequence, which was a highlight. Spoilers: (They show the ruined face out of focus because you know they could not pull it off well. When the first girl's face is removed it just looked like they smeared blood on her actual face. When she's wearing the bandages, you can see skin where it showed they had removed it. Things like that really bothered me, and most would be easy to fix or film in a more convincing way.) The characters could have been fleshed out more, mainly the father and secretary. I liked how the girl was left to be more mysterious. I enjoyed the film, but it has major flaws.

Eyes Without a Face is a pleasant surprise of a horror that manages to be both disturbing in its imagery and thoughtful in its story. The director Georges Franju succeeds in crafting a great scary story with thought-out characters and great plot development that never feels fresh and interesting throughout the runtime. The film's story feels reminiscent of old-school classic horror like Dracula and Frankenstein in that it has something more to say about people than other gory horror films out to merely shock and are content with that task alone. This french masterpiece isn't content with that. True the imagery is shocking and envelope-pushing for it's day (it's even shocking now), but there is so much more to this picture than it's haunting imagery and shocking moments. Eyes Without a Face tackles themes like the body and soul relationship, identity, and reaching to the extremes when trying to "fix" something or someone. These themes create interesting character arcs and dynamics to which the characters feel real and believable. Even in many cases, we feel substantial sympathy for even the most macabre of characters. In summary, Eyes Without a Face isn't the most original premise to a good horror but its execution feels fresh and it's narrative is undeniably unconventional. It's a highly recommended film and definitely worth watching not only the first time but repeated viewings to soak up the layered themes we won't get the first time. Definitely don't let this one slip through the fingers because it really is great.

In "Eyes Without a Face," mad scientist Docteur Génessier, whose specialty is transplanting tissue from one person to another, is working to overcome the tendency of the recipient to reject the foreign tissue. He also has a practical purpose, which is grafting a new face on his daughter, Christiane, who was disfigured in an automobile accident that was his fault. His Igor is Louise, whose disfigured face was restored by Génessier, for which reason she is extremely loyal to him and willing to aid him in his evil doings. In particular, Louise picks up young women who look the way Christiane did before her disfigurement, takes them to Génessier's house so he can remove their faces and transplant them onto Christiane. Unfortunately, he has thus far been unsuccessful, the result of which is that a bunch of dead women's bodies without faces keep turning up, all of whom seem to be of the same physical type. In fact, we see Louise dump one such woman into a river at the beginning of the movie. One way in which all the women are similar is that they all have blue eyes. Now, this makes no sense, because Christiane's eyes are fine, hence the title: she has the eyes; what she needs is a face. So why the women whose faces are being removed have to have blue eyes is a mystery.Génessier identifies the woman found in the river as his daughter so that people, including her boyfriend Jacques, a doctor who works in Génessier's clinic, will think she is dead and not wonder where she is, for only Génessier, Louise, and Christiane know of her horribly burned face. In the meantime, Christiane wears a mask around the house so as not to gross everyone out including herself. The mask is an immobile version of what she used to look like. One of the amazing things about this mask, which allows us a clear view of her eyes, is how expressive her "face" is. We have all heard the expression, "The eyes are a window to the soul." This movie really demonstrates it. We get a good sense of what Christiane is feeling and thinking as she walks around the house owing only to the expressiveness of her eyes.Louise's next victim is Edna. She tricks her into getting into the car with her, and the next thing you know, Edna is strapped to the operating table having her face lifted, so to speak. We actually get a glimpse of her face after the skin has been removed, squarely placing this film into the category of Grand Guignol. At first the transplant seems to be a success, but eventually it becomes necrotic and has to be removed again. Back on goes the mask. For some reason, Génessier keeps Edna alive, as if he is doing her a favor, but she leaps to her death. Adding to the creepiness of this movie are all the big, howling dogs Génessier has locked up in small cages to be used for his transplant experiments.One of Edna's friends reports her missing. She tells the police about the woman that Edna said she was going somewhere with, but all she can say by way of identification is that Edna said the woman wore a pearl choker (Louise wears a choker to hide the scar on her neck). Later, Jacques receives a strange phone call from Christiane, who misses him terribly. She only utters his name, but he recognizes her voice. He goes to the police, and when Inspector Parot mentions the pearl choker in passing, Jacques thinks of Louise. As a result, she and Dr. Génessier become suspects.A woman named Paulette, who fits the profile of missing girls, blue eyes and all, is picked up by the police for shoplifting. Parot and another inspector threaten her with prosecution unless she acts as a decoy. She agrees to go to Génessier's clinic and fake an illness. And here is the point in the movie where police incompetence becomes so absurd that it is laughable. Do they have a plainsclothes officer watching the clinic to see what happens to her when she is discharged? No. And so, when Paulette is released late at night and walks down the street to get a bus, she is offered a ride by Louise and accepts. Too bad nobody is around to see her get in the car.Jacques calls Inspector Parot to let him know Paulette has left the clinic. Parot concludes that this puts Génessier and Louise in the clear, since they obviously did not kidnap Paulette, but let her leave the clinic instead. However, Parot decides to make sure she got home all right. Gosh! She never got home. So the two inspectors drive out to Génessier's clinic just to be sure. They ask Génessier if Paulette was released from clinic. Yes she was, he tells them. The inspectors shrug and go home, concluding it was just a false trail and the choker was just one big coincidence.Before Paulette's face can be peeled off, Christiane releases her from the table, stabs Louise in the neck right through the choker, and releases the dogs, who then go after Génessier, ripping half his face off. Christiane wanders off into the woods with one of the doves she also released perched on her hand, just to give the movie a little symbolism. You see, this is a French film, so you can't expect it to make sense the way a Hollywood production would.

This picture has the look and feel of an American made Forties or Fifties horror flick but it's actually a French film made in 1960 and directed by Georges Franju. I don't know what single word might best describe it, but the one that immediately comes to mind is creepy. Everything about the picture tends to horrify the viewer, established with the opening scene as we see the images of passing skeletal trees against a sky of night time darkness. We learn that a middle aged woman (Alida Valli) is on her way to dispose of a body in a nearby river, another failed experiment at the hands of a gifted surgeon named Genessier (Pierre Brasseur). From there, things take an even more frightening turn, as the story explores Genessier's obsession to restore the face of his daughter, horribly disfigured in a car crash for which he was responsible.The story uses some of that pseudo-scientific babble I love to come across in these types of films, that stuff about a 'heterograft', whereby radiation is a requirement to biologically modify a host body to receive a donor transplant. Because radiation is too intense in the required dosage, exsanguination is deemed the next best available strategy for the type of procedure explained by Professor Genessier to his attentive audience. Funny, but none of that was going on when the good professor got down to the real nitty gritty of his work on daughter Christiane (Edith Scob).You know, it's hard to describe, but there was something of an ethereal beauty in both the masked and newly engineered face of Christiane following the operation. Didn't you think for a moment that the new face of Christiane would be that of victim Edna Gruber (Juliette Mayniel)? Instead, you had this beautiful face appear, rather astonishingly to convey success for the questionable transplant operation. It's best described by the professor - "There's something angelic about you now" in a cautious appraisal of his daughter's beauty. However things take a disastrous turn as the operation proves fruitless; the girl's body rejects the new face and the mask is required once again.But you know what I found to be truly outrageous? What was with that police scheme to insert Paulette Merodon (Beatrice Altariba) into the professor's den of horror? There didn't seem to be any control in place to monitor the girl's movements, and she could have been another goner in the doctor's twisted scheme of things.Well I don't know if modern day viewers of a young age would be affected by the story as much as I was. I think the real terror for them would be watching Christiane use that ancient contraption known as a dial telephone. And then, as if to totally confuse the present day techie, boyfriend Jacques has to answer the phone without benefit of caller ID. Oh, the horror! Well in any event, I thought this film was a genuine creepfest, heartily recommended to genre fans, particularly as I mentioned earlier, to fans of classic horror films of the Forties and Fifties where the mad scientist reigns. In iconic fashion, the evil doctor gets his in the end here, as we learn the answer to that age old question - who let the dogs out?