El siniestro doctor Orloff

Jess Franco resurrects his Dr. Orloff franchise again, in a mixed bag of plot themes and characters borrowed from his 1962 "Awful Dr. Orloff."

The doctor is there, "Melissa" is there (still scarred in a trancelike state), the blind "Morpho" character is there (this time named "Andros," as in Franco's 1964 "Dr. Orloff's Monster." The opening scene recreates the opening of the 1962 film, with a drunken prostitute coming home alone late at night, only to find Morpho/Andros hiding in the closet, waiting to abduct her. There are many other plot similarities to follow.

One big difference is that this time it's Dr. Orloff's adult son who is doing the killing in an attempt to restore the face and life of Melissa. This time, Melissa is not the daughter of Dr. Orloff but the mother of his son...and their relationship is borderline incestuous. The plot revolves around the son seeking and killing hookers (sometimes with Morpho/Andros in tow), to use in experiments he hopes will restore mom's face and vitality.

Although set in the punked out, slovenly attired '80s, the film does manage a sort of mood or dreamlike tone. What is perhaps most surprising is the lack of sex, especially considering this was a Franco film shot in the postmodern era. With the son and his henchman cruising for prostitutes night after night, there is a perfect opportunity to depict him and Morpho/Andros taking care of their business with the hookers before dispatching them. However, this does not happen and nobody really gets laid during the course of the movie.

Franco fans will enjoy seeing Howard Vernon late in his career, and handsome. Antonio Mayans is easy on the eyes, even if he never takes his clothes off (surprising for someone who did so much softcore for Franco in other movies). But the absence of Gothic Ephemera--gloomy moors, crumbling castles, classy late Victorian suits and dresses, etc., results in a cheaper looking, less impressive film overall.

For years, Spanish director Jess Franco exploited the success of his breakout flick, the 1960 horror The Awful Dr. Orloff, with numerous virtually identical movies, finally making a worthwhile follow-up a mere 27 years later with Faceless (1987). The Sinister Dr. Orloff is one of his less impressive and more forgettable attempts, the film delivering none of the style of his original film (as 'original' as a rip-off of Les Yeux Sans Visage can be) and little of the sleaze and gore of his 1987 version.

In this film, Alfred (Antonio Mayans), the demented son of Dr. Orloff (Franco regular Howard Vernon), continues his father's experiments, sending his blind assistant Andros (Rafael Cayetano) to abduct young women with loose morals and bad hair, using their energy to try and reanimate his lifeless mother, for whom he has the hots.

What follows is repetitive and extremely dull: Franco at his most uninspired, with even a spot of torture (the flogging of a naked woman) proving really boring. Each abduction is followed by an unsuccessful experiment, the woman strapped naked to a bed, allowing Franco to get in his quota of snatch shots. This is repeated ad nauseum until, like in The Awful Dr. Orloff, the girlfriend of Inspector Mario Tanner (Antonio Rebollo) decides to lend a hand in the investigation and becomes the doctor's latest victim.

The most remarkable thing about the whole film is that Alfred is not only able to get into a nightclub wearing a really horrible shell-suit top, but he also manages to score.

'El Siniestro Dr. Orloff' (1984) is yet another audaciously absurd, perversely peccadillo-laden 80s Jesús Franco horror classic that is sure to put some extra lice in ya' grave-cooled cocktail, and hopefully put the liquid funk back into poor mommy Orloff's mortally dried out pumpernickel! Cum on!!! Take a big bloody bite outta maestro Franco's lip-smackingly libidinous, super-sensually sinister celluloid smorgasbord of supernaturally skewed motherly love, as we blissfully boggle at the triumphantly twist-headed necromantic antics of Orloff Jr., whose grievous adoration of his terminally sickened mother inspires a sublimely lurid spree of pseudo-scientific insanity! Euro-cult esotericists will be happy to note that Teutonic terror icon Howard Vernon colourfully reprises his signature role of the invidiously maleficent medico Dr. Orloff, and the arrestingly charismatic Spanish actor Antonio Mayans is on pleasingly sleek, tightly-buttocked, bats-nutso form as his calamitously unhinged son Alfred Orloff.

Full frontal crudity, frequent flank-flaying frankness, and gross anatomical infamy abounds as the Oedipally outrageous Alfred desperately attempts to revivify his comatose mommy Melissa (Rocío Freixas), but in order to put a zesty zip in his mother's inertial hip he must first nefariously purloin the tenderest fleshly morsels of exotically perfumed midnight flesh-peddlars, and this despicable, murderously misguided mommy revivifying modus operandi finally puts a schism betwixt the grief-stricken Alfred and sombre big daddy Orloff. (Howard Vernon) As the increasingly disturbed, mountingly macabre, maternally wanting Alfred goes about his terminally toxic task the nihilistic narrative wends its wicked way to suitably sordid finale. Avid fans of the original, and far superior 1962 Franco classic shouldn't turn their noses up at this low budget, agreeably sleazy, gratuitously garish reprisal of the Orloff legend as, hey!!! Even BAD Orloff is marginally better than absolutely no Orloff at all! By no means one of the more essential examples of Euro-horror, Franco's grubbily half-cocked film's laudably brief 77 minutes running time still contains enough of skin-sinister maestro's iconoclastic outré strangeness to maintain baser B-Movie interests, the sadly underappreciated Grindhouse shocker 'El Siniestro Dr. Orloff' would make a fun midnight movie pairing with the far more gruesome 'Faceless' (1987).

Antonio Mayans is Dr. Orlof, a spanish doctor who's obsessed by his father's past and a woman-hater as a bonus. He stalks and kills prostitutes in order to reanimate his dead mother. His father, played by an aging Howard Vernon, does not agree with these "ethics" and warns him to stop killing. This may be considered as a funny thing since Vernon was the first Dr. Orlof, who did the same thing in the '62 Franco classic GRITOS EN LA NOCHE, except that he was peeling off his young victim's faces to heal his daughter.

Yes, Jesus Franco seems obsessed by this theme he first saw in LES YEUX SANS VISAGE by George Franju. He did countless versions of this movie over the years, including his recent (2001) remake of GRITOS with Paul Naschy in the lead role ! He also did a version, in '88, called FACELESS, with a big budget and a fabulous cast (Florence Guérin, Brigitte Lahaie, Telly Savalas, and Vernon once more...).

This spanish production is one of the best he shot in the eighties, with an oppressed narration by Mayans, and a very interesting pathological link between the father and the son. The camera work is absolutely fantastic, as always when Franco does not shoot in a hurry, and the haunting keyboard music was composed and played by Il Maestro himself. A personal and highly enjoyable work that'll mostly please to die hard Francophiles.

Sinister Dr. Orloff, The (1984)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Once again director Jess Franco remakes his very own The Awful Dr. Orloff but this time there's the added glory of naked women and sleaze. In this version, Dr. Orloff's (Howard Vernon) son is going out seducing women so that he can kidnap them and use them as experiments to bring his dead mother back to life. I'm not a fan of the original film but I did enjoy Franco's previous effort, Revenge in the House of Usher (1982) as well as the future one, Faceless (1988). This version here runs pretty good, although nothing too fresh ever happens. Throughout the 82-minute running time we see Orloff's son kidnap women and then try the experiment on them. This is pretty much all that happens but Franco creates some nice atmosphere and there's a great music score to keep the film moving. Vernon appears to be having a blast in his few scenes as does Franco himself who shows up in his (for the time) popular "gay" character. Politically incorrect for sure but it makes me laugh. Viewed in Spanish without subs.