Sure, Jess Franco is just making a new version of The Awful Dr. Orloff with this film, but with bigger stars and plenty of gore. And when you're looking for a movie to watch at 4 AM - and I often am - it certainly does the trick.Dr. Frank Flamand (Helmut Berger, The Damned) is a plastic surgeon surrounded by gorgeous women who walk arm in arm to his fancy car. But a former patient wants revenge, so she tosses acid at him. Instead, she catches his sister, Ingrid, directly in the face, ruining her gorgeous looks.Fast forward to a modeling shoot in Paris, where Flamand's assistant Nathalie (Brigitte Lahaie, The Grapes of Death) drugs and abducts Barbara Hallen (Caroline Munro, Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter, Dr. Phibes Rises Again). As she locks her into the basement of the doctor's clinic, Nathalie gets into an argument with Gordon, a maniac who lives down in the basement and chops off women's arms for a hobby.Still with us? Then let's go to New York, where Barbara's dad Terry (Telly Savalas, Lisa and the Devil) is searching for his daughter, turning to Sam Morgan (Chris Mitchum, Alejandro Jodorowsky's Tusk, Bigfoot, Chisum) to help find her. He first travels to a Paris morgue, where her body supposedly is, but the headless victim is not her as its missing a mole.Flamand and his sister meet Dr. Orloff (Howard Vernon, who played Orloff in six of his seven films) and learn how they can cut off Barbara's face to replace Ingrid's thanks to a Nazi scientist named Dr. Karl Heinz Moser (Anton Diffring, who played numerous Nazis in his career, including in Jerry Lewis' long lost The Day the Clown Cried). Plus, Franco's longtime muse, Lina Romay, appears here as Orloff's wife. When the doctor returns to his office, he learns Gordon has cut up Barbara's face.Morgan beats up Barabra's photo director before a bouncer makes him leave. He has to call Terry with some bad news - his daughter had been working as a prostitute.The doctor finds another face donor for the surgery, but Moser destroys it. That means they need to find yet another victim, during which Barbara's credit card is traced to Flamand's clinic. Morgan starts surveillance and notices that Nathalie is wearing Barbara's clothes.He arrives at the clinic and takes out Gordon, but is overcome and locked into the cell with all of the girls. The villains leave them bricked up and with their air running out. But Sam has sent Barbara's dad a message, who gets ready to rescue everyone. And then...the movie ends.Yep.The original ending of the film had Sam saving the day, but Franco wanting to make it different and leave it open as to whether Sam and Barabara survived. Why? Why ask.Oh yeah - I almost forgot. This film is replete with surgical horror, like faces being sliced and lifted off, needles into eyeballs, scissors into throats and much, much more. If only it lived up to the promise of its poster, but that said, it's grimy and seedy fun if you can't find anything else.

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.

I had watched a good part of this on late-night Italian TV: I caught it from the scene where the Stephane Audran character is dispatched – as it turned out, this occurred around the 36-minute mark so, obviously, I have to consider this as a first viewing! Back then, I didn't like it at all; even if the rating doesn't suggest it, I found it hard to hate a film like this: Franco revisits familiar territory with a bigger budget than usual and a surprisingly starry cast: apart from the afore-mentioned Audran, we also have here Helmut Berger, Brigitte Lahaie (a regular of the contemporaneous horror work of Jean Rollin), Anton Diffring (in his final appearance and whose best-known role also saw him play a demented surgeon – CIRCUS OF HORRORS [1960]), Telly Savalas (who had previously collaborated with another horror/Euro-Cult great – Mario Bava), Chris Mitchum, Caroline Munro (once a Hammer starlet), Gerald Zalcberg (Mr. Hyde from Walerian Borowczyk's DOCTEUR JEKYLL ET LES FEMMES [1981]), as well as two Franco stalwarts in Howard Vernon (his last stint playing "The Awful Dr. Orloff") and Lina Romay! However, much of the director's effort goes for naught alongside the dated 1980s chic look and cheesy disco soundtrack.That said, the contribution of the cast is variable to say the least – as a matter of fact, the film has even been ridiculed by the claim that the best performance comes from ex-porn actress Lahaie! Sure, her participation is just about the most successful element in it – infusing her character with a good balance of cold-bloodedness and sensuality (involved with Berger in the casual seduction of prospective victims) – but the latter isn't bad either (just a bit stiff), Diffring quietly imposing (his statement that he had been a collaborator of Josef Mengele at Auschwitz is hilarious, whereas Dr. Orloff learned his craft under Diffring himself at Dachau!) and the odd-looking Zalcberg undeniably effective as Berger's burly mute henchman (continuing Franco's obsession with such secondary characters). On the other hand, both Mitchum and Munro are out of their depth here, Audran clearly looks embarrassed, while a visibly-tired Savalas is saddled with a thankless role (at times, literally phoning in his performance)! The film is perhaps best appreciated by non-Franco fans, since there's curiously little of his trademark 'style' on this occasion: with FACELESS, the director may have demonstrated that he could work within the mainstream, but he was obviously more comfortable doing his own thing in a semi-improvised manner and with the barest of resources! Besides, an audience of gore-hounds not used to Franco's earlier work wouldn't have scoffed at his outrageous touches of violence here: amputated hands, hypodermic in an eyeball, scissors in the throat, driller to the forehead – not forgetting the grisly face-grafting scenes (the first operation, which goes horribly wrong, generates some real tension with Lahaie and Berger looking on bewildered as Diffring fumes at the impracticality of the material he has to work with)! All in all, however, the film feels too different to the quintessential Franco product – while offering nothing remotely new thematically – to emerge as anything but a curio. As I said, the incongruously glossy look and irritating minor characters (some of Berger's eccentric elderly patients and, especially, a pair of gay stereotypes intended to provide comic relief but which is actually both lame and offensive) ultimately unbalance its points of interest. I had considered purchasing Media Blasters' SE DVD, which includes a couple of Audio Commentaries (one of them by the director himself) – but, frankly, the film isn't deserving of such extensive discussion/reminiscing; besides, the disc reportedly suffers from the company's usual sloppy production (the soundtrack reverting to French for the closing line and the audio of the main feature drowning out the latter section of Chris Mitchum's Commentary track).