Eyes Without A Face (Les Yeux sans visage) (1960)

It doesn't add up to anything terribly important, but Georges Janu's prefunctory 1960 horror is a visual pleasure and obvious inspiration for myriad horror movies to come - Vanilla Sky, Eyes Wide Shut, Halloween, Get Out, and The Silence of the Lambs are some of the horror movies I was reminded of watching many memorable scenes: a hard-to-watch face transplant, for example, and the haunting sight of a masked Ědith Scobe as Christiane picking her way through a mansion, its gardens, and dog kennels, like a bizarre marionette.

★★★★☆

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The Substance (2024)

The gothic fairytale The Substance very efficiently sets up how the peculiar science at its core works - an unboxing scene reveals boldly labelled products, one after the other, that neatly, cleverly explain the workings of a substance that promises rejuvenation to Demi Moore's has-been tv star Elisabeth Sparkle - but then the movie uses voiceover and those bold labels repeatedly flashed on screen to hammer home again and again what has been firmly established, making the really very humorous body horror movie more and more of a camp pantomime for imbeciles as it goes along.

★★★☆☆

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