Face-Change Surgery in Movies

Les yeux sans visage

Angelic Alida Valli's big eyes stare out of a featureless mask as her mad doctor father tries to find the right skin from dead women to graft onto her face.

A doctor experiments with skin grafts on a mysterious woman with a damaged face. She ends up looking just like Elena Anaya, and the doctor becomes obsessed with her.

Okuyama becomes a new person with his mask on and it drives him to do crazy things.

He has some good lines:
"A man without a face is free only when darkness rules the world."

"The face is the door to the soul. When the face is closed off, so too is the soul. Nobody is allowed inside.

A cop and a criminal exchange faces and lives in this ultimate face change movie. In a secret operation a surgeon temporarily transplants the face of a criminal in a coma onto an FBI agent so he can impersonate the criminal to his brother to find out the location of a bomb they planted. But the criminal accidentally wakes out of his coma. When he finds himself without a face, and find the FBI agent's face in storage, he calls his men to kidnap the surgeon and forces him to transplant the agent's face onto his face. Then he kills everybody who knew about the FBI agent's secret surgery. The two men then live each other's life. When the two finally face off the criminal is killed and a surgeon removes the FBI agent's face from the criminal and puts it back on the agent.

Going to the plastic surgeon at the mall to get a new face is something South Korean kids do on weekends for kicks, before hitting the karaoke brothel. This film was made as a public service message about the dangers of this surgical fad: Kids, if you're having an identity crisis, it's safer just to dye your hair blue than to go under the scalpel, because even if you do, you'll just end up running around kicking the same big tree and making a scene at the coffee shop, ruining everybody's day like you always did.

If I escaped from prison, got back-alley plastic surgery, then took off my bandages and saw that I looked like Humphrey Bogart, I'd ask for my money back. That's what happens in this movie, but since Lauren Bacall falls for the man with the Bogart face, he is definitely not complaining.

This guy must have watched Dark Passage and then paid Bogart's plastic surgeon to give him the same face job.

Clown Gypsies perform home plastic surgery on a young boy so they can save money on greasepaint by not having to put makeup on him for every performance. They plug a big grotesque toothy smile into his face that leaves him permanently depressed. He grows up, becomes a star, and falls in love with a blind beauty who can't see his smile and wonders why he's such a buzz kill all the time. But in the end he has the last laugh.

This was the inspiration for "The Joker," or maybe it was the Victor Hugo novel "L'Homme Qui Rit" on which this movie was based.

Lon Chaney plays Erik the Phantom who wears a mask because his face resembles the face of a rotting corpse. When he is unmasked by Christine, his prisoner of love, we get to see Lon Chaney's creepy mask that makes him look like the Phantom not wearing a mask and we wish that he would put the other mask back on.

An alien dresses up in a Scarlett Johannson booty suit and uses her irresistible face to lure sex-hungry male humans into a giant tar pit where their bodies are harvested for some never-explained reason. (Seriously? They couldn't come up with a more efficient plan for harvesting humans? If they were looking for quantity, why didn't they just go to the Midwest where they can get two to three times as much flesh per victim than from those skinny Scots?)

In a touching scene at the end, when her human flesh has been peeled away like a banana, we see the alien's face for the first time holding the still-animated ScarJo face in its hands as they look into each others eyes.

A mad doctor kidnaps beautiful women and tears their skin off to use it to try to fix his daughter's burned up face. Sound familiar? See Eyes Without A Face.

6 Japanese people get plastic surgery to replace 6 kidnapped American industrialists so they can sabotage their defense plants just before WW II.

A man stages a flaming car crash to fake his own death so he can run away from his wife with a nightclub singer. It works for a while until a real flaming car crash burns his face. After plastic surgery he looks nothing like he used to. Then police arrest him for his own murder but he refuses to defend himself in court so he is ultimately convicted of murdering himself.

Nancy's face is torn off in a car accident on her way to elope, but her fiance's mother pays to get her a new face but she can't see him again - and he thinks she's dead. The new face is much prettier. Get your hankies ready for some sappy romantic twists ahead.

Sir Philip Kimberley is the former head of the British Secret Intelligence Service who defected to Russia. He is an old heavyweight man who sounds exactly like Michael Caine. After the Russians perform plastic facial reconstruction surgery on him, he also looks like Michael Caine with a porn mustache. He trains at martial arts and loses weight then he's given a new identity and sent to Britain to retrieve valuable documents he stole and hid years ago. None of his old colleagues or even his daughter recognize him, but his fingerprints give him away.

A plastic surgeon gives a female criminal the face of a woman he loves who left him. He marries the woman with the face of his love, but she can't shake off her criminal life. All sorts of craziness ensues when the woman with the real face comes back to the surgeon.

A gang boss kidnaps the police commissioner and gets plastic surgery to resemble the commissioner so he can take his place and get away with murder.

An alien made of bugs crashes his flying saucer then tears the skin off a farmer and drives around in a pest-control van wearing a body and face that are three sizes too big.

Leatherface sort of qualifies for this list, since he wears a mask of pieces of skin sewn together, but it's not really clear if he needs the mask to hide a deformed face. In this sequel he is attracted to a female victim so he skins off her friend's face and puts it on her so she can hide from his family members who want him to kill her. She gets a new face, but it doesn't last long.

After Nazis shoot the face of a concentration camp survivor, doctors give her a new face. When the bandages come off, she locates her husband, but he doesn't recognize her. He thinks his wife is dead and asks the new woman to impersonate his wife so he can collect her inheritance money. She keeps hoping he'll realize the truth as he teaches her to look and act like her former self.

Foxy's ex-undercover Federal agent boyfriend gets a new plastic surgery face, name and identity to hide him from the criminals he testified against.

An older man is turned into Rock Hudson through plastic surgery.

Bogart plays 'Baby Face' Martin who is not recognized when he returns to his old tenement neighborhood because plastic surgery changed his face. Ten years later in Dark Passage Bogart played an escaped convict who also has plastic surgery that makes him look like Bogart.

An "ugly" talented woman can't get a good job or a date until she gets plastic surgery following an auto accident that makes her "beautiful." Then everybody wants her.

Gangster Broken-nose Dawson gets a nose job that makes him unrecognizable, then kills all the witnesses. Then he goes to Hollywood to act as a gangster in the movies.