Eyes Without a Face (1960)

Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (Les yeux sans visage) tells the story of a girl whose face has been badly disfigured in an automobile accident. Her father, a famous surgeon, attempts to restore her face through a face transplant. In order to get donor tissues, his wife abducts attractive young women who are then murdered in order to take their face. Despite the surgeon's best efforts, his transplants end up being rejected and he must get more faces to work with. Overall, I didn't really care for this film.

While mostly a horror film, the film did address some science. In 1960 the idea of a face transplant was rather imaginative as any sort of organ transplant was rather difficult to perform in 1960. Today, face transplants have taken place, but they are quite rare. The film proposed some ideas for how to overcome transplant rejection which are now quite wrong. Still, you can't really fault the film for this.

The only thing praiseworthy about this film would have to be the makeup and effects. Considering the age of the film, I thought that the effects of removing faces from people and the faceless people looked pretty decent. Modern day CGI could no doubt create more realistic images, but this was still pretty good. Still, some fancy effects won't make up for this film. The doctor attempts to come off as sympathetic as he loves his daughter and wants to save her, but it was hard to sympathize with him because his daughter wasn't the least bit interesting. As the film progressed I found myself not caring about the daughter at all and being more attached to the victims who were at least somewhat interesting. This film received mediocre reviews upon its release and is now regarded as a decent film. I'm not sure why exactly I decided to watch this, but I wouldn't suggest anyone else sees it.

50.5/100
F