Expected more

Absolutely Brilliant!

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

This beautifully filmed and uniquely scored gem will haunt you. The combination of plausible story line and shocking (for the time period) imagery makes for a disturbing experience. The 1995 digital remaster of the original black and white print brings the quality up to modern standards. Unlike many French works from this era, the pacing is relatively brisk, though not at all like today's jump cut mania.

This is the provenance of Edith Scob's iconic image as the girl-with-a-white-mask, to whom Leos Carax pays the homage 52 years later in HOLY MOTORS, by asking Scob to put on the expressionless prop once again in his recondite omnibus. And Ms. Scob has a most otherworldly countenance, which firstly absorbs us through Christiane's glinting eyes, a young girl whose face is savagely disfigured during a car accident caused by her father, a renowned surgeon Doctor Génessier (Brasseur), thus, his road to redemption will course through a grisly and amoral route to a bitter end. A forefather of Gothic and body horror, EYES WITHOUT A FACE is French filmmaker Georges Franju's pièce de résistence, but in the eyes of a less squeamish viewer, its scary quotient isn't that high, the hyped face skin-removing surgery set piece is a greatly concocted legerdemain, but the helping hand of its make-up team is unmissable to notice, also the gore is roundly sanitized and the only really startling moment is when Christiane reveals her skeletal visage in a jiffy during an oneiric sequence precipitating the scream of one of the hapless victims Edna Grüber (Mayniel), elsewhere, the film holds together a taut yet uncanny overtone in solemn company with its formulaic plot-device, which incorporates sundry narrative hiccups, such as Edna's demise, is it a slip of foot or a suicidal boldness? Or, the seemingly odd situation where Christiane is left sober when her father begins the operation near the climax, since in the last round, she is also put into sleep during the process. After all, it is an ensorcelling Grand Guignol festooned with copious visual niceties and emotional restraint (from Brasseur's impassive but authorial culprit to Alida Valli's visibly disturbed but nonetheless stalwart accomplice), plus a mesmeric score from Maurice Jarre, also it is a rewarding coup de maître that poetic justice arrives in the hand of Christiane's ethical awakening instead of the inept police investigation, a masked angel descends with a dove in her hand, indeed poeticism can germinate from something heinously reprehensible.

Here I go. I am about to write one of those reviews that gets me endless "Not Helpful" votes because I am about to dare to trash a film that so many hold in such high regard. If there was a "Film Snob Scale" I think I would be about a 7. In my imaginary scale, a 10 is the total snob. This is the guy who talks to you about Jodorowsky and Malick and would never deign to watch something common. A 1 on this scale likes the Adam Sandler movies on Netflix. Why am I making up imaginary scales and rambling on in this review? It's to give you some sense of where I am coming from here. I am not one with common tastes. I enjoy film. I enjoy movies that make me think. With all of that said, I think only the 10s on my snob scale will truly like this film. I think it benefits from "foreign film disease" (yes, I'm making stuff up again). This is a syndrome where a movie that would be considered "good" in English is escalated to the status of greatness because it is in a foreign language. This idea that somehow foreign film makers, and especially French film makers, inherently make better films.To begin with, the plot of this movie has existed since the dawn of the Poverty Row b-horror film. Whether the villain is interested in obtaining "parts" for his own self, his lover, his family member or anyone else, horror history is littered with the discarded body parts of some mad scientists plan to make someone whole again. So, in the void of anything creative in the plot, one has to ask if the plot we are given is done with anything the audience hasn't seen before. Has the director given us something new and profound. My answer to that is resoundingly "no".The majority of this movie is so understated as to border on boring. Critics and film snobs alike will want to regale you with diatribes about how this director was seeking a new kind of horror, an intellectual horror, blah blah blah. There is no emotion on anyone's face (except the victims and half the time they can't be bothered). Nothing really happens ever in this movie. Half the run time is slow, lingering shots of some characters' face, endlessly hanging there as if this creates tension or atmosphere. There is nothing to entertain, at all. That is the crux of my problem with the film. I am all for art. I want creativity. I want thought. BUT I WANT ENTERTAINMENT. I have to end the movie thinking "yeah, that was good". If it is good and it, also, gives me something artistic, that's what creates a great movie. If it ends and I have to go looking for things to praise like cinematography, camera angles, or directive style. If I need to have completed a four year degree in film studies from UCLA to "appreciate" the movie, then it's not a good movie. It fails at its' primary purpose, which is to entertain.In the end this is all sound and fury signifying nothing. It's a film snob's dream and a movie that the average joe will fall asleep on within 30 minutes. Unless you would consider yourself a "10" on the film snob scale, skip it.

This picture has the look and feel of an American made Forties or Fifties horror flick but it's actually a French film made in 1960 and directed by Georges Franju. I don't know what single word might best describe it, but the one that immediately comes to mind is creepy. Everything about the picture tends to horrify the viewer, established with the opening scene as we see the images of passing skeletal trees against a sky of night time darkness. We learn that a middle aged woman (Alida Valli) is on her way to dispose of a body in a nearby river, another failed experiment at the hands of a gifted surgeon named Genessier (Pierre Brasseur). From there, things take an even more frightening turn, as the story explores Genessier's obsession to restore the face of his daughter, horribly disfigured in a car crash for which he was responsible.The story uses some of that pseudo-scientific babble I love to come across in these types of films, that stuff about a 'heterograft', whereby radiation is a requirement to biologically modify a host body to receive a donor transplant. Because radiation is too intense in the required dosage, exsanguination is deemed the next best available strategy for the type of procedure explained by Professor Genessier to his attentive audience. Funny, but none of that was going on when the good professor got down to the real nitty gritty of his work on daughter Christiane (Edith Scob).You know, it's hard to describe, but there was something of an ethereal beauty in both the masked and newly engineered face of Christiane following the operation. Didn't you think for a moment that the new face of Christiane would be that of victim Edna Gruber (Juliette Mayniel)? Instead, you had this beautiful face appear, rather astonishingly to convey success for the questionable transplant operation. It's best described by the professor - "There's something angelic about you now" in a cautious appraisal of his daughter's beauty. However things take a disastrous turn as the operation proves fruitless; the girl's body rejects the new face and the mask is required once again.But you know what I found to be truly outrageous? What was with that police scheme to insert Paulette Merodon (Beatrice Altariba) into the professor's den of horror? There didn't seem to be any control in place to monitor the girl's movements, and she could have been another goner in the doctor's twisted scheme of things.Well I don't know if modern day viewers of a young age would be affected by the story as much as I was. I think the real terror for them would be watching Christiane use that ancient contraption known as a dial telephone. And then, as if to totally confuse the present day techie, boyfriend Jacques has to answer the phone without benefit of caller ID. Oh, the horror! Well in any event, I thought this film was a genuine creepfest, heartily recommended to genre fans, particularly as I mentioned earlier, to fans of classic horror films of the Forties and Fifties where the mad scientist reigns. In iconic fashion, the evil doctor gets his in the end here, as we learn the answer to that age old question - who let the dogs out?