Dr. Orloff's Monster (1964)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

The Worst Film Ever

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Last night we watched 'The Mistresses of Dr. Jekyll'. It's a 1964 Jesus Franco film with his usual offbeat scenes and characters that I like. At least I'll say I liked them from this earlier point in his long career. One of his later films I recently viewed 'Killer Barbys' from 1996 was barely watchable. I tend to agree with those who say his early work was his best. Mr. Franco died very recently so my wife and I, watched this film in his memory.One thing about the story struck me right off, there is no well known Dr. Jekyll to be found anywhere in this story. At least not the infamous Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde we expect from the title. There is a Dr. with that same last name and no relation it seems. I have a feeling this last name was added later to help promote the movie as something it is not. I'm even doubtful there was more than one mistress in the story for this Dr. The title implies he had many. There is an alternate title 'Dr. Orloff's Monster' that's at least less misleading even if Dr. Orloff is only in a couple of very short scenes. Jekyll created the monster using Orloff's idea. I assume this is the same Orloff from Franco's other films. Orloff appeared to be on his deathbed at the beginning of the story telling his sonic sound secrets to Dr. Jekyll. Much later in the story we see Orloff looking healthy again; evidently he had a miraculous recovery off camera. Personally I think a more fitting title for this would have been 'The Zombie's Daughter'. Yeah, I guess that doesn't hold the titillation factor the "mistresses" title has. Hey, if Dracula and Frankenstein can have films about their "daughters" why not a zombie (wink)? But enough already about the title used. The plot is a bit slow moving and contains numerous excuses to show seductive women performing in night clubs. I expect that from Franco he does seem to appreciate the beauty of women. This was supposedly filmed in Spanish, if it was the dubbing to English was well done. The strange thing is it looked like the actors mouths were in time with the dubbed English words they were saying. I thought they had spoken the dialog in English and maybe it was later dubbed in Spanish for that market, just a thought, I have no facts on it. The zombie in the story is animated by some nonsense about using ultrahigh frequency sounds. I had to laugh at how they explained this like it made perfect sense. I also wondered why he wasn't being followed about by packs of dogs also hearing the sound. The victims are given a necklace that somehow attracts the monster. This is also explained by the police like it made perfect sense. The best part of the film was the zombie character; he was a cross between a slightly melting wax figure face and the mesmerized man in the silent 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari'. He has similar unblinking wide open eyes. The plot as I understood it involves a Dr. Conrad Jekyll who catches his supposedly beautiful young wife in bed with his better looking brother. His brother had been visiting and was seduced by Jekyll's wife. He kills his brother and makes it look like a failed operation he performed. He lets his own wife live after witnessing the murder, over the twenty or so years that follow she becomes a drunkard. We never learn why she hasn't told the police. Many years after the murder is when the film takes place. There is a brief flashback to what happened earlier. Dr. Jekyll now has a mistress on the side. Why he decides to use his zombie like creation for killing her and other night club performing women is beyond me. Oh, did I mention the zombie is the body of his dead brother? He somehow still looks relatively good considering how long he's been dead; he even walks through night clubs freely. At one point the Dr.'s college student niece comes to visit him. This is the daughter of the brother he killed 18 or 20 years earlier. She never knew her father since he died when she was young. She sees a photo of dear old dad for the first time. A photo her aunt still keeps of her lost lover. I guess her mom didn't keep any photos of him. After a few days the alcoholic aunt finally tells the niece the story of what really happened to her dad and of their brief passionate affair. The Zombie dad will not harm his daughter and even saves her life. Beats me how he recognizes this grown woman is his little daughter from years earlier. I won't spoil how it all ends except to say it's appropriate.The film did hold our interest and was pretty much what I expected. I enjoyed it for what it was. I like the offbeat nature of Spanish and Italian made horror films. Early in his career Franco make some decent ones. I'll remember him for those.

Dr. Orloff's Monster (1964) ** (out of 4)Jess Franco's sequel to The Awful Dr. Orloff is more of a remake than anything else. I watched the French version under the title The Mistress of Dr. Jekyll and this version features more nudity than the versions released in Spain and America. In the film. Dr. Fisherman (Marcelo Arroita Jauregui) kills his brother (Hugo Blanco) when he learns that he is having an affair with his wife. The doctor eventually brings his brother back as a zombie like creature to kill various women for him. I've never really been a fan of Franco's earlier period of Gothic horror films but you can certainly see that he has talent with these films. While I prefer his 70s work he does give this film a lot of style, which is something missing from those later films. The performance Blanco is pretty good but Jauregui comes off very boring and certainly can't fill the shoes of Howard Vernon from the previous film. The film is beautiful to look at and features a very nice score from Daniel White but in the end the film left me looking at my watch too much. The movie's pace is quite slow and all the stuff dealing with the police comes off boring. You can spot Franco during one scene. The DVD features some of the alternate scenes from the American and Spanish version of the film. I think I prefer the French scenes with the nudity as it makes the film stand out from countless other Gothic films of this period.

It's sometimes hard to keep your faith in Jess Franco when you've seen so much of his by-the-numbers horror and sleaze crap like I have... This notorious Spanish director made over 180 films in approximately 40 years. That's an average of more than four films each year, so it shouldn't be a surprise that really a lot of his movies are carelessly filmed and poorly edited routine jobs. However, his older films (let's say, everything released before 1972) are definite cinema classics and particularly the black & white Gothic horror try-outs of the early 60's are highly listed among my personal favorites. "Dr. Jekyll's Mistresses" is some sort of sequel to Franco's biggest success "The Awful Dr. Orloff", even though it mainly introduces new characters and an entirely different storyline. The uncanny castle setting was maintained, however, and so were the sinister atmosphere and inventive camera angles. Beautiful young orphan Melissa spends Christmas with her drunk aunt and scientist uncle up in their old, ramshackle castle. The uncle, Dr. Conrad Jekyll, can't dedicate much time to her as he inherited the secret formula of his tutor Dr. Orloff, which causes the dead to walk again and their actions can by controlled by ultrasonic noises. Jekyll resurrects his own dead brother (whom he killed for having an affair with his wife) and uses him to strangle random strip-bar dancers and prostitutes. Deceased Andros slowly begins to develop his own will again when he finds out that his poor and defenseless daughter stays at the castle. The script leaves too many questions unanswered (does Jekyll has anything against strippers or are they just test cases for his experiments?) but it's more coherent than most of Franco's other movies and there's a constant tension surrounding the film. Many sequences are stunningly beautiful and almost poetic, like when the "zombie" visits his own final resting place at the graveyard or when he pays nightly visits to his daughter's bedroom to look at her. The sound effects during the murder sequences are quite disturbing and the acting performances are overall very adequate. Even the dialogues are professionally written and that truly proves that "Dr. Jekyll's Mistresses" is one of Jess Franco's absolute finest achievements. Recommended!

If you've suffered through some of the hack work Jess Franco cranked out in the last two decades, you may find it difficult to believe that he once took some pride in his craft and evinced a certain mastery of cinematic technique, as well as a modicum of discipline. "Dr Orloff's Monster" is a case in point. Despite the title, it bears no direct relation to the creepy and perverse opus, "The Awful Dr Orloff", which put the director on the map back in the early 60s. However, it shares the same doom-laden aura -- with the expected (but always riveting) kinky asides -- that so resemble that earlier picture as well as the German Edgar Wallace 'krimi' series which was reaching its peak at the same time.The picture is rife with carefully-executed camera angles and atmospherics, something that would become anathema to Franco's slash-and-burn methods of the 80s. The best scenes are reminiscent of (dare I say) Lewton and Franju. It builds up a strong pathos for the title character, thanks to a subtle, wordless portrayal that evokes Cesar in 'Cabinet of Dr Caligari' and Christiane in 'Eyes without a Face' (such homages were a Franco specialty). There is a particularly poignant sequence in which the zombie stumbles about near his own tombstone in a bleak, wintry cemetery. No matter what depths Franco's movies plunged to, they always offered a few wonderfully oddball cabaret scenes in smoky jazz or rock bars, and this is no exception. One singer performs a wacky, rhythmic Latin ditty that must have sparked the imagination of the members of the retro band 'Les Rita Mitsouko'. (These cabaret scenes were a welcome staple of the Euro-thriller genre of the 60s, also perking up the krimi series, several of the campier works of the Italian Gothic revival, and especially the outlaw melodramas of Jose Benazeraf.)There are already foreshadowings of the director's latter-day carelessness -- a few too many zooms, cutting from the middle of one scene to another, and a general neglect of motivation. And, of course, he'd end up doing the revenge plot to death. But overall, this one (along with the much more perverse 'Sadistic Baron von Klaus') comes highly recommended for Franco skeptics and genre fans alike. Surprisingly, this film was immediately followed by his magnum opus, the delirious 'Succubus' (aka 'Necronomicon'), which in its pseudo-sophisticated Radley-Metzger-like style is miles removed from the Gothic horror of his early work.