TheRedDeath30 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.

Leofwine_draca EYES WITHOUT A FACE is widely considered to be one of the landmarks of horror cinema, helping to usher in a new wave of grisly, physical horror movies in the 1960s. Seen today it's a good companion piece to LES DIABOLIQUES, going for a gutsy, visceral approach rather than a psychological thriller style, although it still has plenty of character depth. The simple storyline, about a deranged surgeon trying to graft a new face onto his disfigured daughter, has proved hugely influential even to this day.The film benefits from strong direction which delivers a chilly atmosphere to the proceedings. There's no faulting the acting either, but really it's the script that makes this work; the story plays out in a cold, dispassionate way that links nicely with the events on the screen. Even today, the surgical scenes are shockingly graphic and disturbing, and really pack a punch. The film is a slow burner that builds to a Grand Guignol-style climax that works a treat.

Hitchcoc A doctor is responsible for the disfigurement of his daughter, due to his carelessness behind the wheel. He sets about trying to graft facial skin from young women to bring her back. The film is, on the one hand, a horror movie about his ghoulish behavior. He is obsessed with continuing these efforts. He has an accomplice, a woman, who has been promised the same surgery. But this is a much deeper film. It has to do with the horrors of disfigurement and the inability to accept that the person is still just that. There is an incredible scene with some dogs that are kept. They are loving and care not for how one looks. Beautiful filmmaking that rises above the simple genre.

Nigel P What an incredible experience this is. A story that deals with such revulsion and bleak desperation emerges as a haunting thing of beauty. This is largely due to the performance of Edith Scob as the gracefully tragic Christiane, whose face is destroyed in a car crash caused by her father. She is condemned to flit through the prison her family home has become, equally imprisoned by the mask she wears to hide her ravaged features. The mask itself is simplicity itself, yet almost appears to emote at times – it is quite incredible how lifelike it can be in some scenes, and coldly sinister in others.The music is a major factor in this film's feelings of unease. Some scenes – such as Christiane visiting the latest 'victim' strapped down in her father's surgery – are accompanied by nothing except the howls of the many guard-dogs caged outside. Other scenes, including the story's opening, are scored with a deceptively jolly carnival suite. This deeply inappropriate music could rob the film of any horror atmospherics, instead it enhances the feeling of perverse unease.Filmed with slow deliberation, fitting for a story involving the intricacies of surgery, the style is reminiscent of other films of the time, notably Hitchcock's Psycho (another major horror contribution from 1960). It also brings to mind the more recent horror shocker The Human Centipede, which caused a similar reaction in cinemas in 2009. Two scenes stand out as being remarkably, repulsively powerful. One is the unflinching sequence involving the removal of a human face, and other is the gruesome attack on Christiane's father, Doctor Genessier (Pierre Brasseur), by the dogs – ironically rendering his face to pulp too.As for Christiane's fate – who knows? She frees the dogs, and drifts off into the night like a ghostly apparition, framed by the flitting of the pet doves she has also freed. We can only imagine what becomes of her – throughout, she has longed for death, sickened by her father's attempts to save her face, so her future is bleak. We will have to make up our minds.