Flesh to Play

In order to protect his facially disfigured daughter Roberta (Roxy Spider) from cruelty and ridicule (her face looks like a cow has dumped on it), crazy plastic surgeon Mr. Belmont (Gerardo Rodríguez Michel) keeps her hidden away from the outside world; he also hires two men to abduct young, heavily tattooed ladies, using his surgical skills to create a false reality for Roberta where all women are deformed.

Flesh to Play is demented stuff, with plenty of pain and suffering on display - but it suffers from weak acting, the Mexican cast mangling the English language (my copy had some scenes in Spanish, with no subs, but it was mostly in English). Director Gamaliel de Santiago manages a few genuinely shocking moments, the nastiest being Belmont attacking one of his victims with a Stanley knife, but much of the film feels like it is struggling to disturb, held back by the lacklustre performances and lack of graphic splatter.

What gore we do get is reasonable given the budget, the messy highlight being when the mad doctor hacks off the leg of Alex (Luis Velazquez), the man he has had shipped in to keep his daughter happy - but there isn't enough of it. I'm always a sucker for a dwarf (in this case, the little fellow has a mis-shapen head and a stabiliser wheel to help him walk), so there's that, but on the whole, this one would have benefitted from more graphic brutality and a cast for whom English is their first language (or just film the whole thing in Spanish with subtitles).