Corruption (1968 film)

Corruption
Theatrical poster for Corruption (1968)
Directed by	Robert Hartford-Davis
Produced by	Peter Newbrook
Written by	Derek Ford Donald Ford
Starring	Peter Cushing Sue Lloyd
Music by	Bill McGuffie
Cinematography	Peter Newbrook
Edited by	Don Deacon
Production company	Oakshire Productions
Distributed by	Columbia Pictures
Release date	December 1968 (UK) December 4, 1968 (USA)
Running time	91 minutes
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English

Corruption is a 1968 British horror film directed by Robert Hartford-Davis, from a screenplay by Derek Ford and Donald Ford, and featuring Peter Cushing, Sue Lloyd, Noel Trevarthen, Kate O'Mara, David Lodge and Antony Booth.

The film is a loose riff on the plot of the 1960 French horror film Eyes Without a Face, and is notable for its atypical contemporary setting (most of Cushing's Gothic Horror films were set in the past) and its extreme (for the time) gore and violence.

Sir John Rowan (Peter Cushing) is a prominent plastic surgeon with a beautiful and youthful fiancée named Lynn (Sue Lloyd), who works as a fashion model. At a raucous party, Rowan—much older than any of the other attendees, and clearly uncomfortable around the countercultural excess of the late 1960s—gets into a physical altercation with a sleazy photographer, and during the scuffle a hot lamp falls on Lynn, severely scarring her face. Rowan pledges to reverse Lynn's disfigurement, experimenting with laser technology to revive her skin and eventually coming up with a cure-all, a Frankensteinian transplantation of glands. Driven by a combination of guilt and love, Rowan goes on a murder spree, killing young women in order to use their glands to restore his fiancée’s beauty. The procedure is successful, and the couple goes off on holiday to a seaside cottage, where all is fine until her face starts to show signs of deterioration.

In need of more surgery and a new "donor" the couple tries to entice a young girl (Wendy Varnals) who they meet at the beach and take back to their cottage. Complications ensue, first because Rowan doesn't want to commit another murder, and then because this girl isn't what she seems to be. In fact, she is part of a gang of robbers who break into the house and hold Rowan and Lynn hostage. Soon they discover evidence of the murders, and begin to menace the couple. After a short confrontation, everyone is killed when Rowan's surgical laser goes out of control.