Scalpel is very dark melodrama with a southern Gothic ambiance and style. This is one mean and nasty little thriller, but is really well made and superbly performed by the actors. Robert Lansing is a plastic surgeon that makes a disfigured stripper look like his disappeared daughter to get an inheritance. Judith Chapman looks great and delivers a fine performance. Robert Lansing is fantastic as the very unscupulous and psychotic doctor. Scalpel delivers big on sleaze, violence and darkness with murder, nudity, incest and leading characters that have no morals and revel in depravity. This is one sick flick, that is actually really good and a deranged and seedy soap opera with graphic sex and violence with foreboding and bleak southern atmosphere. Very creepy and effective , haunting and gritty. Thumbs way up if you have similar dark tastes in cinema.