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Some months after “Eyes Without a Face” came out, there was this movie, “The Heir of Satan”, which for some reason was changed to something completely different in the English release from what I’ve seen, and it was also edited and badly dubbed, which explains why it has such a low score everywhere.
Although most of the plot is quite the same, the premise this time around has to do with the mad scientist wanting to operate on a stripper after she got disfigured after an accident purely out of scientific interest, before obsessing over her both because of her beauty, and because of his own work. On one hand, that makes him for a bit better protagonist and villain than his French counterpart, on the other hand his selfish motivations are petty compared with those of the character from the previous movie, and the whole thing moved away from thriller or horror, to a sappy drama.
Being the first surgeon thriller after that French movie, this one adds several elements to the formula, first, it shows the accident, which didn’t happen before, it changed the female assistant to make her a villain on her own (and honestly, a disposable character for the sake of the plot), and it introduced the mute assistant that should be there to help the villain, but honestly most of the time he’s just there to be slapped around.
The improvements it went for on its own is giving some sort of scientific explanation and reasoning for what the villain is doing, it must be complete bullshit but at least is there, and aesthetically that also meant that he has all kinds of machines and special effects happening around him, which are pretty good for its time, transformation scenes included. Oh, and the music in this movie doesn’t suck and isn’t misplaced like in “Eyes Without a Murder”. On paper, these elements could have made it a better movie, but they didn’t.
First of all, the script is really weak. Nonsensical science apart, some of the lines are just plain dumb or poorly delivered, if not both, and the acting itself can’t compare with the one from the previous movie, and no, I did not watch the infamous horrible English dub, I watched the original Italian version.
Second, the pacing is very slow, half the movie is spent on setting up the premise and all that talking about science, that is pretty much nonsense anyway, so it’s a waste of time.
Third, the romantic aspect is very poorly integrated into the plot, partly because the main girl herself, who is a terrible character, jumping from one guy to the other whenever the script wants her to, and partly because the couple has close to no shared screentime, let alone any kind of chemistry.
Fourth, from this point forward, these movies thought that mixing some comedy in it would make them better, because who says there can’t be silly jokes on a supposed serious thriller, right?
Fifth, the writing of the plot becomes very trashy on the second half, and even more so in the resolution, ruining a plot twist (although it was already ruined by the cover, if you happen to watch the English version) by making it function at the will of a character in whatever way it suits the plot, and a character with no personality nor agenda whatsoever suddenly became reactive enough to defy the main villain, just for the sake of getting to the ending, which was also very poorly written and directed.
Thus, despite its few additions to the formula and its attempts to make a better movie, what you get is a very slow and poorly written soap opera instead of a thriller, which even comes off as pretentious for trying to sound scientific, and also becomes very trashy during its second half. Overall it’s a way worse alternative to “Eyes Without a Murder”, only mildly important because of its innovations to the formula, but nothing worth spending time on.
4/10
