My take: It took me several tries to get all the way through this movie without dozing off. It was boring, derivative and the characters were all annoying.
Rating: 0 out of 4 stars
The title of The Awful Dr. Orloff could be shortened to just awful. That’s exactly what it was: awful.
In my mission to watch even movie in Studies in Terror, this is the fourth film to feature a mad doctor/scientist on a mission to save the woman he loves by killing other women. As you may recall, I didn’t like Mill of the Stone Women when it seemed to copy its predecessors in this now-cliché plot line. This one was even worse.
In this movie, we follow an inept police inspector who is trying to find a killer. Unbeknownst to the inspector, there are actually two murderers: Dr. Orloff and his creepy zombie assistant Morfo (à la Humphrey Bogart in The Return of Doctor X). Dr. Orloff has been killing women in an attempt to graft the skin onto his daughter’s damaged face (Eyes Without a Face, anyone?).
Dr. Orloff is in the foreground on the right, while Morfo and a passed-out girl are in the background.
The inspector’s girlfriend ends up conducting a better investigation than her boyfriend, by dolling herself up, hitting the town and waiting for the killer to come to her. It works but she puts herself in serious danger in the process.
According to Studies in Terror, this movie was the first real horror film out of Spain. Apparently, the director had to take his sponsors to see Brides of Dracula at a theater in Nice, France, in order to convince them to fund this film.
While that is a good set-up for a first horror film, it fails to make up for all of the film’s shortcomings in my mind. The movie felt like a cheap ripoff of films I have seen before. The poor dubbing in the version I watched did not help either.
I watched it on Netflix’s streaming service. Here’s the trailer on youtube, which is better than the film:
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