"Faceless" (1987) d/ Jesus Franco

As we enter the second month of 2016 our thoughts quickly turn to love and romance, and the great lengths we go to prove it to our significant other, usually spending vulgar amounts of cash around the middle of the month, just to save face. In the world of cult cinema, saving face can take on entirely different connotations, and in the case of tonight's review, a late eighties gore-packed variation on his initial effort, director Jess Franco does an awful lot of it. In fact, he also ruins some faces, removes a few, and throws in a chainsaw and a power drill just for kicks. You've got to appreciate the man's unwavering dedication to capturing intimacy between the sexes on celluloid. The Richard Marx-esque late eighties synth pop soundtrack that (constantly)accompanies this one? Not so much. Not so fucking much at all. Still...


It's not often that we see Brigitte doing the poking. Just sayin'.
Dr. Flamand (Helmut Berger) witnesses his sister, Ingrid (Christiane Jean), block a vial of acid that was meant for him, chucked by a disgruntled, partially scarified former patient, with her own beautiful face, leaving her with a permanent Manwich grill, and leaving her brother to spend every resource available to him to restore her former beauty. Nathalie (Brigitte Lahaie) helps out by kidnapping unsuspecting donors from the Paris nightclub scene of the late eighties, locking them naked in cells in a private wing of their clinic, and subjecting them to the advances of Gordon, an especially creepy subordinate with a perm-ullet and no fucking eyebrows. When they abduct Barbara (Caroline Munro), a coked-out model, right from her photo shoot, her father (Telly Savalas) enlists a cat named Morgan (Chris Mitchum) who comes off as a skinny, less imposing Dirty Harry,  to fly to Paris and find his daughter. When Flamand and Nathalie consult Dr. Orloff (Howard Vernon) for helpful face transplant hints, he suggests they bring Dr. Moser (Anton Diffring), an escaped Nazi surgeon who specialized in such operations at Dachau, on board.


Also just sayin': I'd wrap those legs around my head like a turban.
Luckily for Flamand, Moser is seemingly available for work almost immediately, but he shows up and fumbles the first attempt, destroying a young whore's face, and forcing Gordon, chainsaw in hand, into action, as he beheads her with it. Meanwhile, Morgan is bullying Barbara's last employer (sort of a French Charles Nelson Reilly) for answers, leading to a ham-fisted comedic scrap with a muscle-bound gay named Doudou, and copping cheap feels from the headless corpses piling up at the morgue, to the dismay of the French authorities. In need of new face, Flamand and Nathalie come upon none other than Florence Guerin (as herself) in the dance club, talk her into some menage a trois action, and kidnap her for impending facepiece surgery. Don't sweat it, Flo. Can't be any worse than appearing in Bruno Mattei's Caligula et Messaline (1981). As Morgan traces Barbara's credit card to the clinic, where he also notices Nathalie sporting the jewel-encrusted watch that Babs was wearing when she went missing in the first place. Will he rescue her before Ingrid can adopt her good looks? Will Dr. Moser fumble the dermal mask again while staring at Nat's ample pornographic charms? Will Gordon get a decent haircut and grow his eyebrows out? Did Telly Savalas just speak French? The answers to these questions and more await you, once you've bagged yourselves a copy and screen it personally.


"I've eaten all the strawberry preserves, but that Florence Guerin face roll up looks appetizing."
Besides playing more than his fair share of archetypal Nazi villains over a film career that spanned nearly fifty years, Anton Diffring turned up in a few horror movies along the way, usually as an unhinged plastic surgeon, like this Jesus Franco update of his own pioneer genre effort, The Awful Dr. Orloff aka/ Gritos en la noche (1962), where he plays a nazi and an unhinged plastic surgeon. Faceless, which marked the second last role for Diffring before his death in 1989, would also be the last big screen appearance of Telly "Kojak" Savalas, but they're not the only recognizable names in the credits, as British scream queen Caroline Munro, Visconti regular Helmut Berger, Robert Mitchum's son Chris, Lina Romay, and even French porn goddess Brigitte Lahaie all make the scene. If you can manage to ignore the awful soundtrack, and some of the horrible eighties fashions on display, as hard as that is,  you'll probably enjoy Faceless, though it isn't nearly the best of it's kind, or even the best Franco approach on the subject matter. On the scale, a modest two Wops sounds fitting here. Give it a look.


"Don't be silly, darling...you're still very reverse-beautiful."

"Calvaire" (2004) d/ Fabrice Du Welz

Thanks to Belgian filmmaker Fabrice Du Welz, you can pretty much cross the High Fens natural reserve in Liege off your bucket list of places to visit. When I think about tonight's review ...also known as The Ordeal (2004), and rightfully so, as Du Welz has concocted a bizarre mix of beautiful cinematography and gripping psychological terror, the madness of  love, and dreary, ominous isolation that makes for a pretty wild ride, while tapping into earlier films like Psycho (1960), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Deliverance (1972), and Misery (1990). If those titles don't paint a vivid enough picture of what kind of lunacy you're in for here, it's outta my hands, folks. I've done all I can...


"Dominique, nique, nique, s'en allait tout simplement...c'mon, ev'rybuddy!"
After cabaret singer Marc Stevens (Laurent Lucas) speeds away in his personalized van from his last successful gig belting out mundane love songs (in a personalized cape, mind you) to horny Belgian grannies (and smitten nurses who Polaroid him their boobs) in a backwater convalescent home, he breaks down during a sleet storm in the dark and desolate wilderness of Liege, bumping into a disheveled-looking chap named Boris (Jean-Luc Couchard) who's been searching for his dog, Bella, in the elements, and who points him towards the empty local inn, where an quirky little fellow named Paul Bartel (Ha! ...as played by Jackie Berroyer) sets him up with a bed and breakfast, on the odd promise that he does not go near the village. While out on a nature walk, he does just that, spying a horrific gaggle of crummy-looking mutant locals as they take turns making love to a pig in a nearby barn. Bartel promises that his van will be repaired by morning, and the men trade a joke for a song after dinner, amid melancholy vibes over Bartel's wife, Gloria, who apparently broke camp ages ago.


"Check your pay envelope, I put Polaroids of my boobs in there.", notes Mademoiselle Vicky (Brigitte Lahaie). 
The next morning, things have gone from disadvantageous to deplorable. Marc's van looks to have been broken into and rummaged through, the only phone has been disconnected, Bartel is nowhere to be found, and the small closet in his room is now filled with women's dresses. He then notices an angry Bartel outside smashing the fuck out of his vehicle with a sledgehammer, and runs down to try and reason with him, only to get brained with the detached battery. Bartel sets the van on fire and drags the unconscious lounge singer off. When he finally comes to, he's wearing a dress, tied to a chair, and getting his injured, bleeding head shaved by the innkeeper, who seems to have convinced himself that the man is his wife, returned to him. When Marc tries to escape, Boris returns him to Bartel's tractor (which is spotted by some of the locals on a trapping run), and later crucifies him (!) to some support beams in the barn. From here, the situation only turns more distressing by the sickening minute.


"If you don't pay attention to my footwork, you'll never be able to do the 'Tor Johnson' ...You've got it all wrong. Sway left, then right, then left, then right, then..."
Du Welz followed this effort up with Vinyan (2008), Alleluia (2014), and Colt 45 (2014), all of which are on my "to watch" list, for sure. Phillipe Nahon you'll probably remember from things like Haute Tension (2003), and Gaspar Noe's Irreversible (2002), as well as Seul contre tous/ I Stand Alone (1998). Brigitte Lahaie, as most of you should well know by now, was one of France's premier pornographic exports in the late seventies. I found this one as deliriously demented and rotten as any grindhouse flick from the seventies, though beautifully framed with a decidedly arthouse lens, lending a surreal feel to the unpleasant proceedings which might be a cultural curveball to mainstream genre fans. On the scale, Calvaire shuffles about to the tune of three Wops, a must-taste for discerning Euro-horror palates out there.


"Okay, well, since you put it that way...", shrugs Shotgun-face (Laurent Lucas).