The Awful Dr. Orlof / Nightmares Come At Night / A Virgin Among The Living Dead
Wildly prolific Spanish trash auteur Jess Franco (who died earlier this year at age 82) never met a beauty he didn’t want to undress for some onscreen psychosexual madness, as evidenced by Redemption’s deluxe Blu-ray releases of three early Franco efforts.
By far the best of that trio is 1962’s The Awful Dr. Orlof, which put Franco on the cinematic map, and is often said to be Spain’s first horror film. Shot in luxurious black and white, the story concerns Howard Vernon’s titular mad doctor attempting to restore his facially scarred daughter to her former gorgeous state. That surgical plan requires the skin of other women—specifically, whores, whom Vernon abducts and brings to his remote castle. He does so with the aid of Ricardo Valle’s blind, lumbering serial-killer lackey, whose own reconfigured visage, defined by giant eyes that never close, is as strangely terrifying as anything in the Franco canon.
Befitting the director’s legendary fondness for nude female flesh, The Awful Dr. Orlof boasts more than one instance of laughably gratuitous T&A. Yet, relative to his later work, Franco does a reasonable job integrating such titillation into the action proper. Despite a script full of silly plotting, the film—aided by a soundtrack of bizarre cacophonous noises—is defined by a delirious gothic-horror atmosphere.
