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Starring: Howard Vernon, Perla Cristal, Ricardo Valle, Diana Lorys, Conrado San Martin, Maria Silva, Jose Carlos Arevalo. Written and Directed by Jess Franco.
Spain. 90 minutes. |
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The Awful Dr. Orlof was not only the first horror film made by the legendary Franco, it was the first horror film ever produced in Spain. Far from original, the story is a combination rip-off of Robert Weine's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Georges Franju's Les Yeux Sans Visage. Oh, but what an inspired swipe it is, a creepy spectacle that makes up for its slower sections with memorable moments of orgasmic, hallucinatory horror.
In the early 1900's a prison doctor named Orlof (Vernon) goes mad from guilt when his daughter Melissa (Lorys) has one side of her face horribly scarred in a laboratory fire. Faking the deaths of female prisoner Arnes (Cristal) and a psychotic parricide named Morpho (Valle), he smuggles them out of the penitentiary so that they might aid him in his grizly mission. That mission, of course, is the murder and abduction of beautiful young woman and the pirating of their facial tissues to repair the face of his daughter.
To make Morpho a little more useful and obediant Orlof uses his surgical skills to turn the killer into a blind, bug-eyed monster who staggers about using his keen hearing to seek out his victims (who usually aren't that hard to find in the first place since they're conveniently corralled by the not-so good doctor and tend to shriek a lot). Wearing a flowing cape, the hideous Morpho latches onto his victims with his hands tears their throats open with his teeth. Like the result of a cross-pollination of Dracula and the somnambulist Cezare in Caligari, he sweeps the freshly exsanguinated trollops up into his arms and follows the rapping sounds of Orlof's cane to the nearby boat with which they make good their escape.
Given the job of solving these confounding series of murders is Detective Tanner (San Martin), a romantic gentleman cop whose girlfriend Wanda (Lorys again, minus burn make-up) pursues the invesigation on her own. In addition to being a performer at the cabaret where Orlof usually likes to pick up his victims, she's also a dead ringer for his daughter so it's not long before the mad surgeon fixes his hungry, all-consuming eyes on her.
Shot in spooky black and white, Orlof represents Franco (if not at his most original) at the peak of his talent for creating delerious and dreamlike pulp horror kitsch that, even at its most outlandish and absurd, has the power to chill and fascinate. It's ripe with memorable imagery. Orlof keeps his daughter in a glass coffin behind a cage-like gate in his crypt-like laboratory. The hideous and horrifying Morpho with his "chalk white face" and "measured tread of one going to a funeral" who (like Conrad Vedit's Cezare in Caligari and Boris Karloff's rendition of the Frankenstein Monster) simultaneously inspires feelings of revulsion and pity.
Like most of Franco's films, Orlof slithers at a snail's gait when dealing with the white-bread hero, spending far too much time with him and not nearly enough with the villains (who are always Franco's real focus of interest anyway). But when Orlof and Morpho on the hunt... look out! It's nightmare time!
**1/2 |
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