A model named Barbara Hallen disappears… Her father hires private detective Sam Morgan and sends him to find his daughter. Barbra’s trail leads to Dr. Flaman’s plastic surgery clinic. The detective’s investigation slowly uncovers the terrible secret behind the plastic surgeon’s fine reputation. The blood and organs of kidnapped young women… The closer Morgan gets in his unraveling, the more witnesses die gruesome deaths…
4k movies reviews
Richard Wagner is firmly associated with villainy by the creators of the Italian jallo. In Argento’s The Phenomenon, the house in which the murders take place is the Richard Wagner guesthouse where the composer once lived. In Fulci’s The Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, Salvador Dali’s famous sketch for the setting of Lohengrin hangs over the bed in which the character Florinda Bolkan has her mysterious dreams, and the swan from this sketch penetrates the very entanglement of her dreams. The jallo directors were probably guided by the stereotype that Wagner is a “Nazi” and almost darkly occult composer. The Spaniard Jesús Franco, who had adopted some of the features of Italian jallo, picked up on this as well. It is no coincidence that in “Faceless,” one of Dr. Flaman’s patients is a diva, whom he gallantly calls a “Valkyrie.”
And Dr. Flaman himself is no less than Helmut Berger, Dorian Gray from the 1970 Italian adaptation, Visconti’s lover, who played the role of the enchanted King Ludwig II of Bavaria, King-Lohengrin, Wagner’s patron, in the immortal film of his royal friend. However, Berger also starred directly in the Italian jallo – in Tessari’s The Bloody Butterfly, for example. But Ludwig, Dorian Gray, the neurasthenic decadent Martin from “Death of the Gods”, Giorgio from “Butterfly” – these are the roles of a young Berger. Here, however, we can see that the refined, coldly handsome man has become flabby, resting on his laurels. Jesus Franco did to Berger what he did to Klaus Kinski: he invited the “star” of “big cinema,” invented some dialogue on scandalous topics, added eroticism and didn’t bother with everything else. Along with the icy blonde witch, Dr. Flaman seeks out and kidnaps beauties for the needs of plastic surgery, which provides both nudity scenes and bloody meat scenes. But Berger is always ambivalent. He’s a suffering villain, not an actor in a role of the black as death monsters that Kinski and Julian Sands have not been squeamish about playing.
The end result is a fairy tale. The magician Flaman brings back women’s beauty – such is Dorian’s twist on the theme. But his own, touchingly beloved sister is disfigured. So Flaman, with the help of his blond beast, kidnaps women like Chernomor or Koschey the Immortal, in short, like an evil wizard. He wishes to take away their beauty in order to give it to his sister, whose misfortune makes him suffer and tremble. Without revealing all the mysteries of “The Bloody Butterfly,” let us mention that even the seemingly murderous Giorgio surprises the viewer with a final twist. And so Jesús Franco is entitled to sympathize with Dr. Flaman’s efforts to restore beauty to his sister, who has done nothing wrong – well, except to sadize a feeble-minded underling from the clinic, another sadist. However, the final shots make it pretty clear to the viewer whether good or evil will win out. If only there is good and evil in Franco’s world.
Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (73.9 Mb/s)
Resolution: 4K (2160p)
HDR: HDR10
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Audio
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
English: Dolby Digital 2.0
French: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
French: Dolby Digital 2.0
Subtitles
English, English SDH.
