I saw this movie on a Saturday afternoon horror movie show in Chicago in the mid-1970s, and for me, it's one of those mysterious movies you remember but know nothing about! I knew it wasn't 'Eyes Without A Face' but until yesterday had no idea what it was! Fernando Rey? How strange.
The really odd thing is the movie I saw on TV was re-edited.
Yesterday, I watched it all the way through, and remembered every scene except for the final laboratory climax; scrolling through it I realized the movie I saw as a kid had been heavily re-edited, and after the laboratory confrontation the film ended weirdly abruptly with a bizarrely edited Police chase that made no sense at all, and the main character is killed in an automobile crash, pieced in with a totally different car, from a totally different sequence in the movie!
One of the reasons the movie stuck with me was that utterly baffling ending which, honestly, despite not being strictly narrative, was so effective in communicating the death of the character, it's stuck with me all my life. I think it's because it made little sense, and in fact because the woman doesn't die while committing a criminal assault it made the movie tragic.
In the movie I saw and remember she makes it, she's free, driving a car, and then just... inexplicably crashes and dies.
The death of the scarred woman in the lab is not part of my memory; in the TV version I saw as a kid, in her attempt to escape she seems to crash a car and die, and the film 'ends' with the Doctor and the blonde in the lab, and then just... stops.
I vividly remember the unusually bad dialogue/dubbing, the B&W cinematography, especially the facial scarring, but the ending I saw was a supremely crude editing job that cut out the original ending; but was actually extremely effective despite the crude edited-for-TV/or re-release, re-cut, 'montage' work.
Yeah, she confronts the doctor, then is driving one car, than another, there is a crash, and the doctor and the blonde woman are making some comment, the police are there... Utterly weird.
Anyway, I finally got to see a movie from the dimmest recesses of my memory, and I'm grateful for that.
Review of Face of Terror
