Eyes Without a Face

Slightly overrated, though influential horror film from Georges Franju about a brilliant, though slightly crazy surgeon perfecting a technique of grafting facial tissue from one person to another (or from a recently deceased person to another, if you catch my drift). The surgeons daughter has been horribly disfigured in a car crash, leaving only her eyes in tact in regards to her face, so daddy dearest is determined to fix her face. Strangely enough, a number of young girls, about his daughters age, have been disappearing throughout Paris of late. Coincidence, you say? Probably not. Easily the most memorable images from the film involve the daughters frighteningly life-like/lifeless mask which was later copied (not as well) in Open Your Eyes/Vanilla Sky. The script was by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac who would later go on to write Vertigo and Les Diabolique. However, Franju is no Hitchcock. In fact, he's not even a Cluozot. The film is too slow, and its science-is-evil message a bit too juvenile to make this a great film, yet it is atmospheric and has that understated thriller quality which the French have mastered, though would display better in later films. Nevertheless, it doesn't take someone with 20/20 vision to see its influence in horror films to this day.