calvinnme Well, not exactly. Peter Cushing plays Sir John Rowan, a respected surgeon, in love with beautiful mod model, Lynn. He's mad about the girl, but when they go to a party with "her crowd" you can tell he feels about as comfortable as Dr. Victor Frankenstein would have felt on Laugh-In. When Lynn's photographer wants to take pictures of her right there with the crowd watching while she pulls down the straps of her dress and then he asks her to remove some more clothing, Rowan's blood gets up, there is a fight between himself and the photographer, and in the fist to cuffs one of the hot photographer lamps falls on Lynn's face.The surgeons save Lynn's eyesight, but she has almost complete scarring of the right side of her face that will take years of painful skin grafts to repair. Sir John holds up in his laboratory and determines a way to shortcut the grafting process and quickly heal Lynn's face. This is actually more important to Lynn than it is to John, as illustrated when she begs her sister to help her commit suicide.John is OK with breaking the rules in the hospital morgue, lying to the attendant and extracting the pituitary gland of a dead woman to restore Lynn's face, but when that treatment does not last, and he realizes that only very recently dead women will do, and then only for a little while, he refuses to go on killing. For a change it is not the doctor who goes mad - he initially says no - but the former model/girlfriend who is more thirsty for beauty than she cares about the lives that must be sacrificed. She figures John will go on decapitating women and keeping her beautiful forever. Then a real monkey wrench - a home invasion occurs with a bunch of people who are part Chelsea London Hillbillies and part super villains that got stuck with the bargain basement Hslloween costumes. To further complicate things, Lynn's sister and fiancé who have figured out what is going on burst in on the doctor's house too.Then just when you think you have figured out what is going on, the final scene throws you completely.I can say this is not your usual tale of a doctor gradually turning murderer in a case of trying to restore a passive loved one to their original beauty. Here the beauty goes mad, and the doctor just works reluctantly and guiltily out of obligation and love. Plus there are plenty of plot twists and turns I have not told you about. A very good entry in the Hammer horror canon, but oddly frozen in time with all of the 60s cultural references.

Prichards12345 And without Mr. Cushing this would be a sorry little film indeed. Inspite of some nice Cornish backgrounds and the aforementioned star this is a film which gets more demented the longer it goes on, has a very dated 60s party scene (with a spontaneous fashion-shoot happening which kick-starts the plot) and a gang of thugs that have to be seen to be believed.The film does have its moments, notably Cushing's murder of a prostitute - all sweaty wrestling and stabbing, with female toplessness in the ahem, continental version - and a superbly acted train murder with Valerie Van Ost getting more and more creeped-out over our eminent surgeon's behaviour. But this goes for nothing when the thugs raid Cushing's holiday home. They are the most pathetic gang ever put on screen. They even have David Lodge as a gimpy fiend - a performance so unintentionally funny it should really have made it into a comedy.Cush and his rather young-for-him fiancée (Sue Lloyd), turn up at a swinging sixties party which is almost as hilarious as Mr. Lodge. "If you want to get struck off you've come to the right place." Our hero, as mentioned, is a gifted surgeon you see, which comes in handy when he gets into a fight with Tony Booth (Van Helsing versus the Scouse Git from Alf Garnett!) accidentally causing a powerful lamp to topple and ruin Ms Lloyd's face.If Polanski's Repulsion showed men as sexist pigs, this film shows women as conniving obsessed-with-their-looks Lady Macbeths. Only a young-looking Kate O'Mara bucks this trend.Cushing does a bit of research and with the aid of some pilfered glands he restores his girlfriend's good looks. It wears off though, and he resorts to murder to keep her beautiful.Much of this is ripped from the old Bela Lugosi disaster THE CORPSE VANISHES, and also THE MAN WHO COULD CHEAT DEATH. It ends in a death by laser body pile up, with virtually the entire cast getting it. With a better script this might have worked but all I was left with was a sense of bemusement! Not one of Cushing's better vehicles.

Leofwine_draca Once again a predictable horror film is lifted by the presence of Peter Cushing in the starring role who makes this film something of a minor classic. CORRUPTION tells the old story of a surgeon whose wife/girlfriend is facially scarred, and who must take tissue/organs from other living women in order to replenish the features of his wife. Of course the plot is borrowed from EYES WITHOUT A FACE yet refreshingly updated to the modern (well, '60s) day in swinging London, a place populated by mini-skirted dancers, sleazy photographers and jazzy music. Cushing is the upper-crust surgeon who is seriously out of place in the film's opening snazzy party, yet you know from the start that his character will change and sure enough, it's not long before he's rolling up the shirt sleeves to adopt his more familiar Baron Frankenstein role of grisly surgeon.However, CORRUPTION is a little bit more complicated than that. You see the script focuses on a little something called characterisation which a lot of movies miss. Cushing isn't a cold-blooded killer in this film, in fact he HATES killing. It makes him feel sick! The driving force behind the murders is his girlfriend Lynn, who is just like Lady Macbeth in Macbeth. Due to her vanity and her obsession with modelling, she demands Cushing to repeatedly restore her face when it decays and has no moral scruples about him killing in order to do so. Sue Lloyd plays Lynn, and is pretty good in the role although she does go somewhat over the top at the end.The film's first murder is a real shocking scene. In fact it was filmed in two versions, the soft and the hard. In the "soft" version - released in Western countries - we see Cushing enter the home of the prostitute and stab her in the stomach whilst embracing. This is bad enough as it is, but in the film's "hard" version - released in Europe - the previous version seems tame by comparison. Here, the prostitute takes her top off before wrestling Cushing to the ground. He ends up stabbing her and smearing blood over her naked torso. The next moment we see him sawing the head off her corpse like in a scene from BLOOD FEAST! If you never imagined old-fashioned Cushing in a splatter movie then this is the scene to see. It's certainly the sleaziest and most explicit scene he's ever shot.Well, Cushing is great in this film. He walks a fine line between being scary and being sympathetic. Watching him go into a despairing frenzy (with his hair all out of place and his clothes ruffled) as he kills the girls is pretty heartbreaking stuff. Then again watch the scene in the train carriage where he stares at the blonde girl. You can't get any creepier than that! This just goes to prove what a great actor Cushing was. Despite being a brutal murderer he also elicits the audience's sympathy and you end up rooting for him at the finale. A fine performance which goes above the call of duty, and which would be more at place in an A-film instead of a B-movie.The supporting cast is a pretty interesting one too, with lots of offbeat characters. For instance check out 'Groper' one of the members of the gang at the end of the film: you can't get much sleazier or more disturbing than this violent and dirty old man! Diana Ashley, Valerie Van Ost and Vanessa Howard lend glamour as potential victims. Kate O'Mara also pops up in a bizarrely non-glamorous role as Lynn's sister, Val. The highlight is seeing Tony Booth appear as a glamour photographer demanding his model to strip her clothes off.In all, this is an above average film bolstered by strong characters and a tour-de-force turn from the ever-haunted Cushing. The murders are truly disturbing without being graphic (apart from in that continental version, heh) and the ending is fantastic. A modern horror film which rises above the trappings of the genre thanks to an intelligent script and a good cast, this is definitely director Robert Hartford-Davis' best movie, and a near-classic at that. Probably the nearest that Cushing ever got to a strong contemporary horror, although this came probably about twenty years too early for our country's weak-stomached watchers.

Scott LeBrun The legendary Peter Cushing gets a particularly sleazy vehicle with this "Eyes Without a Face" inspired thriller / dark comedy. It's definitely unrelenting and delivers many lurid thrills. Directed with flair by Robert Hartford-Davis ("Black Gunn", "The Black Torment"), it's irresistible for placing the distinguished actor in modern swinging London. The characters are damn entertaining and the murders are effectively brutal. The only thing that really hurts "Corruption" is the loud and jaunty jazz score by Bill McGuffie; in one instance of a climactic chase scene, it's particularly intrusive. Otherwise, this is tons of fun, a silly and sordid tale of obsession written by brothers Donald and Derek Ford ("A Study in Terror"), and produced and photographed by Peter Newbrook, later director of "The Asphyx".Cushing plays a prominent surgeon named Sir John Rowan, who dotes on his fiancée Lynn Nolan (Sue Lloyd), a model, enough that he accompanies her to a party where he's clearly out of his element. While there, she begins to be photographed by slick and slimy Mike Orme (Anthony Booth), and not liking this, John gets into a fight with Mike that causes a flood lamp to come crashing down and burn & scar Lynns' face. Wracked with guilt, John works to perfect a revolutionary technique utilizing the pituitary glands of donors. When he realizes that he needs fresh specimens for the procedure to work, he's not above resorting to murder. However, he's willing to stop at one victim, while the demented Lynn is so hellbent on maintaining her beauty that she tries to convince him to commit more murders.The appearances of several new characters - including a thug named Groper, hilariously played by David Lodge - gives the movie a real shot in the arm, and helps to carry it along to an awe-inspiring big finish involving an out of control laser. Until then, there's enough amusing material here to keep the audience watching. One simply *has* to find out how all of this insanity will be resolved. Cushing is excellent, of course, and completely throws himself into his part. (He's never looked quite as dishevelled as he looks here.) Lloyd is deliciously nutty and the two of them are well supported by such players as Noel Trevarthen as Johns' colleague, Kate O'Mara as Lynns' sister, Wendy Varnals as comely "hitchhiker" Terry, and Phillip Manikum as smooth criminal Georgie.This comes highly recommended, to fans of trash and Cushing completists everywhere.Eight out of 10.