MURDEROUS VISION

Following the case of a mysteriously disappeared woman, police detective Kyle Robashaw, assigned to the "missing persons" department, comes across a series of murders involving victims found with their faces flayed. Helped by a young medium, Detective Robashaw will discover that the perpetrator of these crimes is a plastic surgery student with the hobby of collecting the facial skin of his victims. We are in the early 1990s and the thriller/horror cinema is ready to undergo a profound change, a change not exactly positive that is destined to last for about a decade (all the 1990s). In fact, with the arrival of the '90s, it is very rarely that one comes across a high-quality thriller/horror; the times when cinema was ready to show us everything (brutal and macabre scenes, gore scenes or bordering on splatter) ended with the end of the '80s, to open the door to a new horror world, a "more refined" world, fearful of showing gratuitous violence, that rarely ventured into splatter and that rarely, therefore, managed to truly captivate fans of the genre. It was the year 1991 and here comes this new film, a film titled "Visions without a Face" ("Murderous Vision" in the original), which relies on a story that could have given life to an excellent thriller/horror: it speaks indeed of a killer who delights in surgically removing the skin from the faces of his victims to expand his "beautiful" collection of human faces. I am convinced that if this story had been filled with a multitude of original and well-executed murders, scenes that are not splatter but almost, a well-characterized and unsettling villain, this film could have truly given us something good, but the fashion that characterizes the 1990s does not take long to make itself felt by making a really poorly made film in all respects. The first mistake is found in the fact that from a worthy horror film story, a dull, very TV-like police film is made. The screenplay is definitely flawed, too amateurish, and proceeds as if the film in question were an episode of the TV show "Inspector Derrick"; while the direction, entrusted to Gary Sherman ("Dead & Buried"), is of no significance and also turns out to be really too TV-like. Another flaw of the film are the actors, incompetent and unsuited to the role; this is especially the case of the protagonist, Bruce Boxleitner ("Tron"), in the role of the detective and of Joe D'Angerio in the role of the Killer who appears definitely unsuited to the role to be played; noteworthy is the presence in the cast of Laura Johnson, an actress who appeared in other genre films such as the Italian thriller by Dario Argento "Trauma" and the horror (of little success) by master Wes Craven "Sonno di ghiaccio". Definitely wrong is the idea of revealing the killer's identity from the very first sequence of images; also because the killer appears as the worst villain in cinema history, shown as an ordinary man, not at all threatening, not at all unsettling... not at all suited to be a killer! Only in the last five minutes does he assume an attitude and a look from a horror film, but only five minutes in an hour and a half are a bit few! Moreover, as per the 1990s regulation, it is useless to expect from this film at least bloody scenes, in this film there is not even a drop of blood, also because there is almost no murder. In conclusion, this "Visions without a Face" is the classic bad film released during the revolutionary 1990s, which mixes in the worst way a story very predisposed to horror with TV-like police drama. To be avoided.