One of the best film books of this decade is Julian Upton’s Offbeat: British Cinema’s Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems, which opened my eyes to, well, some of British cinema’s curiosities, obscurities and forgotten gems. I finished the book with a to-watch list with more titles than life will allow me to get around to. One toward the top, however, was Corruption, a mad, mod variation on France’s wildly influential Eyes Without a Face.
From Black Gunn director Robert Hartford-Davis, Corruption casts Hammer horror icon Peter Cushing as “the famous surgeon” John Rogan, who has quite a lovely fiancée in Lynn (Sue Lloyd, Revenge of the Pink Panther), a model whose camera-beloved face is scarred hideously when a scuffle at a party knocks a photography lamp onto her right cheek. Ridden with guilt, Dr. Rogan experiments furiously until he’s able to restore Lynn’s va-va-voom visage via dead tissue. The procedure is unethical, yet utterly remarkable … until it no longer is and the scarring resurfaces.
The trick, of course, is that in order to make the procedure stick, he must acquire living human tissue. And for that, of course, he must resort to murder.
That’s where Corruption becomes really oddball, because seriously, where else can you see Star Wars’ Grand Moff Tarkin wrestling with a topless prostitute? Although the good doctor becomes quite adept at beheading babes, the film is not quite the festival of sleaze as advertised; in truth, it is not too far removed from Hammer’s level of gore: now near quaint.
With horns blaring and sweat dripping, there’s an urgency and immediacy to the scenes in which Dr. Rogan claims his victims, but for true Corruption, look to Lynn, who increasingly pushes her hubs to kill for the benefit of her beauty. By the second half, the gorgeous gal has gained an ugly heart. Similarly, Hartford-Davis’ film loses its luster in the last half hour, when it trades Georges Franju’s aforementioned Eyes for Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, but with a laser. —Rod Lott