The Awful Dr. Olof (1962)

Inspector Edgar Tanner (Conrado San Martin) returns from vacation with a fiance in tow, one Wanda Bronsky (Diana Lorys), a famous ballerina.  He wishes no more than to get married and go on his honeymoon, but immediately upon his return he is called on to solve a case where a number of women have mysteriously disappeared.  Descriptions of the killer vary wildly and it is feared that the kidnapper may be murdering them.

An apt fear as the kidnapper is one Dr. Orloff (Howard Vernon), a retired scientist who last served as a prison doctor.  He arranged the fake death of his wife Arne (Perla Cristal) so that she could escape and also brought along the sadistic killer Morpho (Ricardo Valle).  Morpho is also thought by the authorities to be dead.  In truth, however, he has been operated on by Orlof and now does his bidding - killing women so that Orlof may experiment on grafting their skin to his severely disfigured daughter Melissa (also Diana Lorys).  After several failures he decides to see if he will have more success with living women.

As the kidnappings increase so does the pressure upon the police and the inspector to find the perpetrator.  Fearing for her fiance's career, Wanda decides to do some investigating herself and quickly runs into Orlof.  Of course, he becomes enamored with her likeness to Melissa and decides she is the perfect candidate for his final experiments.

If some of this sounds familiar it is because the plot is rather close to Eyes Without a Face.  So close, in fact, that I'm surprised director Jesús Franco didn't find himself on the receiving end of a lawsuit.  There are enough differences here, and the rather straightforward story may be strange to many who are more familiar with Franco's later work.  Except for a couple of scenes this is uncharacteristically well-paced, and the cinematography is superior to that of many of his films.

Despite it being an unabashed rip-off of a superior film, The Awful Dr. Orlof is still an effective thriller and an enjoyable watch..  It was also successful enough that both Vernon and Franco returned to the character for numerous sequels.

The Awful Dr. Orlof (1962)
Time: 90 minutes
Starring: Howard Vernon, Conrad San Martin, Diana Lorys, Ricardo Valle
Director: Jesús Franco


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's...
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman'...
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in...
Read more