April 29: Regional Horror — A regional horror movie. Here’s a list if you need an idea.

Released regionally as False Face in 1977 through United International Pictures (a joint venture of Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures that distributes their films outside the United States and Canada; it started as Cinema International Corporation) and was made on a $400,000 budget in Atlanta and Covington, GA. Most of it is shot in Covington’s antebellum Turner mansion, one of the few Southern mansions spared by General William Tecumseh Sherman during the Civil War.

In 1979, it was re-released by AVCO Embassy, cut to PG and called Scalpel.

Phillip Reynolds (Robert Lansing) is both a plastic surgeon and a sociopath. He’s probably already killed his wife and when he watches his daughter Heather (Judith Chapman) make love to her boyfriend, he becomes so upset that he kills the boy and makes it all look like an accident. Heather runs away, which is inconvenient, as Phillip’s dead wife’s father gives his fortune to her instead of Phillip or Bradley (Arlen Dean Snyder), the old man’s ne’er do well son.

What does one do at this point?

Find an exotic dancer whose face has been beaten into nothingness, train her to be his daughter and collect the estate.

Everyone is convinced of the ruse except Bradley, who is killed while Jane — and Heather, who has returned — watches in horror. Of course, by this point, Phillip is dating his fake daughter, which is another level of strangeness that we expect from regional films. At this point, the women find one another and set upon making things right.

Directed and co-written (with Joseph Weintraub, who usually was an editor) by John Grissmer (who also directed Blood Rage and wrote The Bride, which is so worth watching), this is a slice of Southern Gothic by way of horror but yet made, as all regional greatness is, outside of the traditional system.

You can watch this on Tubi.