Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

inspired by the movie masterpiece Eyes Without a Face - Georges Franju (1960) , Uncle Jess signed his most successful film in my humble opinion ... mad doctor of topics dealt with in the old movies of Jess Franco is then at its ease in telling a story over and over again but giving it a personal touch that ' rivers of blood and lots of sex main elements in his vast career ... the film is set in the cosmetic surgery clinic of Dr. Flamand .... He kidnaps young women for a long time in order to give the appearance a time to the beautiful mistress disfigured .... the movie is not a masterpiece but for lovers of sleazy European cinema is really not to be missed ....if you can recover from other films by the same director to see how they make a great movie with a small budget ...

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.

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