With Faceless, director Jess Franco updated — unofficially, of course — 1960’s Eyes Without a Face, George Franju’s groundbreaking French classic about a mad surgeon who’ll do anything to give his facially wrecked daughter a new visage, even murder. The main changes in Franco’s work is that he made the victim the doc’s sister, and he threw in the sex and gore not permissible two decades prior. While messy onscreen, the results are tight by Franco’s standards.

In Paris, Ingrid (Christiane Jean, 1982’s Les Misérables) wears a mask to hide her acid-ravaged mug from an attack meant for her brother, Dr. Flammand (Helmut Berger, Salon Kitty). Her face looks like Wheaties left in a cereal bowl, but not forever, provided her brother can find the perfect “donor.” To that end, the physician has been kidnapping and imprisoning the most beautiful women across Gay Paree, and hired a Nazi doctor (Anton Diffring, Fahrenheit 451) — a former colleague of Josef Mengele, no less! — to aid in the surgery room with the “total face transplants.”

Unfortunately for Team Flammand, one of its recent acquisitions is a coke-snorting model (Caroline Munro, The Last Horror Film) whose pappy (Telly Savalas, Lisa and the Devil) has hired a P.I. (Christopher Mitchum, Ricco the Mean Machine) to locate her.

That he will is a given — how many murders will occur between now and then is the unknown variable, but with Franco at the helm, viewers can be assured the numeral won’t be low. Even without all the botched face-transplant procedures, Faceless is full of realistic-looking ick, from a syringe plunged in the eye to a power drill bored through the forehead. (More offensive is the film’s smooth-jazz theme song, played nearly as many times as Franco has movies, and definitely more times than Mitchum has expressions.)

With a concept that worked wonders for Franju, Franco virtually was assured a notch in the win column. That the X can be bolded is a sign of him giving this one some tender love. As graphic horror, as a sex-charged thriller, as a time capsule of big hair, as proof of Munro at her most drop-dead gorgeous, Faceless succeeds with a smile on your part and a scream on theirs. —Rod Lott

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Meet Frank Zito. He’s a Maniac, Maniac, I sure know, and all because he was locked in the closet as a boy.

As played by Starcrash‘s Joe Spinell, who co-wrote the screenplay, Zito is a sweaty louse, looking like a slightly taller Ron Jeremy. He has extreme mommy issues, to the point where he sleeps with and talks to mannequins, which he dresses up in lingerie, makeup and wigs.

He also spends his nights murdering women, from strangling a hooker in hot pants to stabbing a nurse in a subway bathroom. Seconds after each kill, Zito scalps them. While the ladies are his target, pity any man who should get in his way — ergo, the film’s famous slow-motion explosion of the head of effects artist Tom Savini (credited as “Disco Boy”) via shotgun.

In professional photographer Anna (Caroline Munro, Slaughter High), Zito actually meets a woman he doesn’t want to kill — at least not immediately. To get close to her, Zito fibs that he’s a painter. Speaking of, Maniac is a portrait — both literal and metaphorical — of Times Square at its seediest. Director William Lustig (Maniac Cop) seems to capture every grain of dirt, every bead of sweat, every smear of grease, and every puddle of God-knows-what. It looks as grimy as its subject matter feels, so much that you might want to shower afterward.

As 42nd Street-ready as they come, the flick enjoys an undying reputation as being so gory it’s disturbing, but I found it more dull and slow than anything else. —Rod Lott

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More lucid than Jess Franco’s usual directorial output (but not much), Bloody Moon sets its slasher sights on a language school in Spain. Sporting a sign with those peel-and-stick letters from your local Ace Hardware, the new institution has 40 female students and nearly as many red herrings.

One of its employees, Manuela (Nadja Gerganoff), gets a new roomie in her brother, Miguel (Alexander Waechter). Noticeable because the entire right side of his face is a giant scab, Miguel arrives fresh from serving time for stabbing a girl with scissors. Soon after he moves to campus and renews his incestuous relationship with Sis, the school’s elderly benefactor (María Rubio) is torched in bed, setting off a string of brutal murders.

The remaining victims, however, are the students. Since they’re all beautiful, it’s tough to tell them apart. I could do so only by how each is dispatched: a knife through the nipple, a head removed by a circular saw, and so on. Eventually, we learn we have a lead by default in the lovely Olivia Pascal (1977’s Vanessa).

Predictably, Franco loves to paint his canvas with the bright-red stuff, so it should not disappoint fans of ever-decreasing casts. Bloody Moon is equally colorful in depicting the landscape’s tranquil beauty as it is scenes of savagery. There’s a feeling of mishmash that exists in the shapeless script by Contamination’s Erich Tomek — one that willy-nilly throws in can’t-be-accidental nods to Psycho and Halloween — so laser-accurate focus is not to be expected. Pouring plasma, however? Positive. —Rod Lott

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Horror author Clive Barker’s last (to date) directorial effort Lord of Illusions manages to cram almost everything I love into one two-hour package. It has Clive Barker (natch). It has gore. It has magicians. It has seedy detectives. It has pseudo-profundity. It has religious fanaticism. It has practical makeup effects courtesy of KNB. It has Famke Janssen (X-Men). Only if you threw in an appearance by Fast Times at Ridgemont High‘s Vincent Schiavelli would I love it more. Wait, he’s in it, too!

Scott Bakula (TV’s Quantum Leap) gets an all-too-rare leading role as Harry D’Amour, a P.I. who finds himself constantly drawn to supernatural phenomena. A case involving the apparent death of a Las Vegas illusionist (the invaluable Kevin J. O’Connor, Deep Rising) leads D’Amour to Nix, a cult leader better known as The Puritan (The Faculty‘s Daniel von Bargen, just wonderfully crazy).

Barker isn’t nearly enough of a stylist to pull off the vibe he’s going for (Raymond Chandler meets The Exorcist), and there are times when I find myself wishing someone like John Carpenter had been allowed a crack at the material. Working with his largest budget, Lord of Illusions is an accomplished movie, but it could use a healthy dose of the low-budget dementedness Barker brought to 1987’s Hellraiser.

But somehow, for me, it doesn’t matter that the technique is lumpy, or that a few of the special effects are iffy. Because there’s a private dick who describes an exorcism as “the usual,” and who greets the resurrection of a demon-man with a perfectly timed “Fuck.” There’s a decayed demigod who intones, “I was born to murder the world,” before slaying all of his followers. There’s an acolyte who waves knives and prances about menacingly in spandex pants. There’s a magic trick involving falling swords that goes horribly wrong. There’s a corpse-reanimation sequence that gave me nightmares. There’s a hole that appears to literally reach the center of the Earth.

And again, there’s Famke Janssen. —Corey Redekop

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In the despicable, dirty and even depressing The Killer Snakes (that’s all the recommendation you need, right?), the saddest sad-sack character I may have ever seen in movie history works one dead-end job after another and sleeps in a shack with pornographic pictures taped to the ceiling over his bed.

He gets bullied a lot by just about everyone with whom he comes into contact — skinny, street-corner whores included. The guy is in such dire need of a haircut and a flea dip that I could barely stand to watch him. I’m still unsure as to whether his character is supposed to have a mild mental handicap or if the movie is just that poorly dubbed.

After a hard day of being fired from the place where they serve the innards of snakes’ gall bladders and being caught masturbating by the woman he loves from afar, this miserable little man befriends an injured cobra in his shack. The cobra is sad because his gall bladder has been taken from him without his consent. So our hero zero sews him up and nurses him back to health, affording the same treatment to all the serpent’s equally scaly pals, also robbed of this organ.

Somewhere along the way, he trains the snakes to attack and kill, although we never see this most difficult of training processes. It’s time for revenge. First he goes to the whorehouse where earlier he was the recipient of much kicking and abuse. He does his business with the hooker most resembling circus clown Emmett Kelly (in a scene so entirely disgusting you’ll want to shower) and then lets the cobras go full-fang at her bodyguards, while she faints. He takes the unconscious whore home, ties her up and then lets the slithering creatures have sloppy seconds.

Starring Kurt Lang (Purple Storm), Maggie Lee (Kung Fu: The Punch of Death) and “1001 killer snakes” (per its poster), the Shaw Brothers production is one of the more perverted and sick-minded exploitation offerings I’ve seen. Its X rating is well-deserved. —Rod Lott

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