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39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An artistic mad doctor splatter flick from France, November 1, 2002
"Eyes Without a Face" ("Les Yeux sans visage") is a horror film in which there is certain sympathy with the mad doctor, in this case Doctor Genessier (Pierre Brasseur) who is trying to repair the horrible damage to his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob) in a car accident that was his fault. The doctor, helped by his assistant Louise (Alida Valli), has been kidnapping young girls so that he can remove their skin and graft it onto Christiane's ruined face. Not only do the victims die, but the grafts fail, forcing Genessier to try again and again and again. What makes Georges Franju's film work is the inherent sympathy we feel towards the father trying to make his daughter beautiful again, just as we are repulsed by the surgical procedures he uses. Meanwhile, Genessier remains oblivious to what his efforts are doing to Christiane's own tenuous hold on reality. "Eyes Without a Face" moves back and forth from the sacred and the profane, between the love of a parent for a child and meaningless destruction of human life. Franju conveys this contrast visually through the use of poetic images and realistic scenes. I have read arguments that "Eyes Without a Face" should be considered with "Psycho" as creating the splatter flick, and while it is hard to imagine anything having the impact of Hitchcock's film, Franju's movie is more artistic overall (of course, the shower scene is the master trump when we talk about horror films as "art"). This black & white French film with English subtitles is well worth seeing and could end up on your personal top 10 horror film list. The "Eyes Without a Face" translation is actually the British title for this 1959 release, which was called "The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus" when released in the United States in 1962, in what must be one of the stupidest titles grafted onto a foreign film in cinema history. Here you have a film that walks a fine line between beautiful visual images, such as when Christiane walks through the house in her mask, and viseral horror, represented by not just the operation scenes but the film's climax. The title is simple and elegant, not to mention appropriate to the story being told, and some suit who heard about Christopher Marlowe while reading an E.C. comic comes up with "The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus." Mon dieu, mon ami!
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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Something dark for Halloween., June 17, 2005
I guess I'm a horror film snob, but I like my "creature features" and ghost stories with a little class. Give me Julie Harris in "The Haunting," or Deborah Kerr "The Innocents," or Jean Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast," or Mia Farrow in "Rosemary's Baby." One of my all-time favorite horror films is this macabre tale of a girl with a tragically disfigured face and her mad-surgeon of a father, obsessed with restoring her beauty - no matter the cost.
Directed by Georges Franju and scripted by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (who wrote "Diabolique" and "Vertigo"), "Eyes Without a Face" is one of the most stylish, suspensful and gruesome films I've ever seen. My sister leaves the room during the surgical sequences - really, truly horrific. The performances are excellent throughout. The physician's assistant is played by the wonderful Alida Valli (of "The Third Man" fame). Pierre Brasseur plays the surgeon and Edith Scob is simply haunting in the titular role. The great Maurice Jarre composed the score. Don't miss this one. Play this on Halloween for all your friends who've never heard of it - and then sit back and watch them squirm. Great movie.
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Horror Poetry, December 27, 2000
When I first saw this film as a young man, those releasing it in the States were obviously trying to cash in on the hard-core horror market so they released it under the unconcionable title "Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus." This is probably why I laid my $.25 down and walked in to see it. I had a pentient for trashy horror flicks that I don't seem to have entirely outgrown. Anyway...it was obvious even to me that this was a cut above what I was used to seeing. Yes, there were some graphic scenes that would make most peoples' skin crawl, but it was more than that. As I was able to see it again some 40 or so years later I realized why. This movie gets under your skin with haunting imagery and sadness. The story, about a doctor who uses his assistant to kidnap young woumen so he can remove the skin from their faces in order to restore the face of his own daughter, actually started a small sub-genre in horror films. This is by far the best I've seen. The black and white cinematography is beautiful. Few films use light and shadow to the effect they are seen here. And when the daughter is first seen with her featureless, white mask it is one of the creepiest and saddest moments in film. These aren't shallow, evil people we're witnessing here. These are people driven by guilt and dedication, carrying out acts that make sense to them in their circumstances. The mechanics of the plot, particularly those involving the police, are somewhat pedestrian, but there is more than enough here to overcome the minor shortcomings. When the viewer reaches the end of the film, to see the shot of the daughter outside her house on a windswept night, few moments in cinema ever reach the same degree of power, horror and poetry as those caught here.
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