Review of Faceless (2014) by Chris S — 06 May 2009

When a Parisian cosmetic surgeon gets violently confronted by a disgruntled patient, his sister gets caught in the crossfire and takes a bottle of acid in the face. The surgeon and his nurse embark on a quest to restore the sister's face, which mostly involves abducting beautiful women and hiring an infamous Nazi doctor to perform a face transplant.

Meanwhile, a wealthy American businessman's daughter has gone missing in Paris, and a private eye is dispatched to find her. After quite a few years of making zero-budget erotica, cult auteur Jess Franco was finally given some real money to make this movie -- and it's a goldmine for connoisseurs of Euro sleaze.

It's a remake of sorts of Franco's own The Diabolical Dr. Z (1965), which was itself a remake of sorts of Georges Franju's The Eyes Without a Face (1959); and when you combine Franco's delirious sensibility with some seriously tacky 80s sheen, Faceless is even more preposterous than the plot synopsis suggests.

And let's not forget the once-in-a-lifetime cast: Helmut Berger, Austrian bad boy; Brigitte Lahaie, French porn star; Caroline Munro, Bond girl; Christopher Mitchum, wimpish son of Robert; Anton Diffring, everyone's favorite Nazi actor; and the one, the only, Telly Savalas.

There's nothing else quite like it.