[miketardis]

CORRUPTION {1968} aka LASERKILLER
Directed by Robert Hartford-Davies, with Peter Cushing, Sue Lloyd, Noel Trevathen, David Lodge, Anthony Booth, Kate O'Mara and Valerie van Ost
This obscure Cushing movie is gob smacking in its awfulness yet contains numerous priceless scenes and is highly recommended for connoisseurs of the bizarre. The basic story is a rip-off of EYES WITHOUT A FACE with Cushing as a famed plastic surgeon who has to keep murdering women in order to extract a gland from them in order to repair the damaged face of his fiancee Lloyd. Lloyd gets her face damaged during a fight between Cushing and photographer Booth (father-in-law of Prime Minister Tony Blair) at a Swinging London party. The expression of bewilderment on Cushing's face as he watches the proceedings and pot smoke waft pass during this episode is absolutely legendary and worth the eBay hunt alone. Later on, he visits a Soho prostitute and removes her head with a scalpel - in the UK version titled Corruption she's clothed and Cushing spends most of the time fretting and sweating whilst she's on the phone; in the "Continental" version titled LASERKILLER she's topless, played by a different actress, and they have a long struggle on the bed before he smears blood all of her breasts and then hacks away at her neck. Hartford-Davies films his various murders with a distorted fish-eye lens and uses an anachronistic score which seems like outtakes from the BATMAN TV series. The finale still has me in stitches as a group of "beatniks" [yes - the word is actually used although I didn't think there were any in 1968] invade his house and then his operating laser goes berserk and....
Special mention to the creator of David Lodge's thick glasses with a visible hole in the middle of them for him to see through. Lodge plays a character called "Groper" who likes to squash fruit in his hand.
The movie is terrible but thoroughly entertaining and Cushing actually gives one of his best performances if you view it about a man who simply can't cope with the Swinging Sixties yet has to perform appalling acts worse than anything he is afraid of in the new era in order to cure his nagging girlfriend (and Lloyd is a real bitch).
We need a DVD release badly.