I never thought I would see the day when I would award a high rating to a Jess Franco movie, but Faceless proved to be far better than any of the director's other output that it has been my misfortune to see.
Helmut Berger plays Dr. Frank Flamand, a renowned plastic surgeon desperately searching for a way to restore his sister's beauty after she is terribly scarred in an acid attack. Since this is a Franco flick, this means removing the faces of unwilling donors, who have been abducted by Frank's sexy assistant Nathalie, and transplanting them onto his disfigured sister.
When top model Barbara Hallen (Caroline Munro) is selected by the nutty physician as a possible donor, and snatched mid-assignment, her father (Telly Savalas) hires a tough private eye to find her.
Franco delivers a quality piece of sleaze, laden with nudity, lesbianism, rape, torture, gratuitous gore and bizarre characters (which include an extremely camp photographer, the doctor's hulking sidekick and a Nazi surgeon). Working with a higher budget than usual and a quality cast, the director avoids his usual pitfallsdull, meandering story lines with dreadful editing and camera-workand gives the audience a gleefully OTT gore-fest with some occasional unintentionally-hilarious moments for good measure (the 'private eye versus muscle-man' fight scene, for example).
The effects are particularly gruesome and pretty realistic and include such delights as a syringe in the eye (in glorious close-up), a botched face transplant, a drill in the head, and a nice scissors-through-the-throat scene.
Franco also proves once again that he has an eye for beautiful women; loads of great looking ladies populate the movie, and although they don't get completely naked, they do wear some rather fetching skimpy underwear.
I'm still finding it hard to believe, but I have no hesitation in recommending this movie to all fans of horror and sleaze.
