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| Images courtesy of Mondo Macabro |
In 1962 Spanish low-budget B-movie director Jess Franco was
only a few films into what evolved into a prolific career in tawdry perverse
exploitation when he unveiled his wholly original creation The Awful Dr.
Orlof regarded as one of the very first game changing Spanish horror
movies. Starring Howard Vernon as the
titular mad scientist Orloff, it told of a doctor seeking to surgically repair
his disfigured daughter’s face by grafting skin from the bodies of other women
with the help of an eyeless henchman named Morpho. Over the years, despite shifting scenarios
and timelines (usually set in France to avoid Spanish censorship) throughout
his filmography, Jess Franco would invariably return to Orloff and Morpho’s
beautification shenanigans roughly seven more times throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Which brings us to today’s Mondo Macabro
offering of 1984’s The Sinister Dr. Orloff (with an additional f at the
end), a film dripping with sleazy gratuitous nudity and surreal neon
fluorescent scope cinematography that feels somewhere between a slick synthy
proto-gialli and a filthy pubic Tinto Brass film.
On the coast of Alicante, Spain, decades after the events of
the first movie, the titular sinister Dr. Orloff (Howard Vernon) has all but
relayed the duties of trying to resurrect his naked dead wife Melisa Orloff (Rocío
Freixas) to their son Alfred (Antonio Mayans).
Taking to the streets and cruising nightclubs in search of available
prostitutes to sic his eyeless brother Andros (Rafael Cayetano) on kidnapping
and imprisoning them in a secret lab where they’re stripped naked, strapped
down and some ort of technology is designed to transpose the soul of the woman
unto the dead woman. Mostly an excuse
for writer-director-composer Franco and his cameraman Huan Soler to ogle exposed
female behinds and crotches, it freely traverses into sexploitation territory
as it bores on before amping up the surreal synthesized electronic music and
neon-blue/purple lighting.
A bit nonsensical and more than a little tawdry, again
bordering on Tinto Grabass filmmaking concentrated on photographing every
nuance of curvature of the female ass, The Sinister Dr. Orloff works
less as narrative storytelling than psychedelic phantasmagorical gothic-horror
sleaze. With tight 2.35:1 scope closeups
of faces and eyes, almost cramming the face into every corner of the frame as
Franco’s woozy doozy synthwave score rises and falls radiating like whitecaps
hitting the shore, the film over time becomes less about characters and
narrative than simply an exercise in slick Eurosleaze style. Functioning as travelogue of scenic beauty
and again an excuse to mix mad science with sexploitation, the ensemble piece
with occasional cameos by the aforementioned Howard Vernon is largely intended
to play out as surreal experimental filmmaking rather than conventional
narrative storytelling.
Released in the US on blu-ray disc for the very first time
outside of Spain by Mondo Macabro who have taken a special liking to the exploitation
horror cinema of Jess Franco, derived from a new 4K scan from the original
camera negative as well as a new interview with leading actor Antonio Mayans,
interview with writer Stephen Thrower and running audio commentary by Troy
Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson, The Sinister Dr. Orloff is a painterly
chunk of slickly polished filth skirting a fine line between stylish thriller
and softcore pornography. For Jess Franco
fans as well as disciples of the Dr. Orloff film series, the Mondo Macabro disc
is one of their strongest transfers from a technical end as of recent with
crisp visuals and a strong radiating soundtrack. While this may not be the best example of the
Dr. Orloff series for newcomers, as for myself it felt a lot like Lucio Fulci
by way of Dario Argento with audiovisuals that clearly influenced such horror-oriented
exploitation provocateurs as Nicolas Winding Refn or Panos Cosmatos. Filthy dirty smutty but of a particular brand
only Jess Franco could serve up.
--Andrew Kotwicki
