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:

My take: This film is full of strange elements that fail to come together to make an even remotely scary whole.

Rating: 1 out of 4 stars

I’m starting to see a theme in late 1950s – early 1960s cinema: all doctors and professors are obsessed with their work. And they all must use that work in their attempts to save some young female. I’ve seen this in Eyes Without a Face, where the doctor killed to replace his daughter’s damaged face. The same plot exists in the Brain That Wouldn’t Die, where a doctor was trying to find a replacement body for his disembodied head of a fiancé.

It would really have sucked to be a doctor or professor in 1960. Apparently, everyone thought you were a psycho-killer out to steal their body parts.

Such is the same in Mill of the Stone Women, but this time it is a professor who is trying to save his sex-pot daughter from a rare blood disease. The plot revolves around a young art student named Hans. He goes to the “Mill of the Stone Women” to interview the mill’s owner, the professor. The mill has an utterly creeping rotating display of life-size figurines depicting the deaths of famous women.

Poster for Mill of the Stone Women, which was released as il mulino delle donne di pietra in Italy.

While at the mill, Hans spots the professor’s voluptuous young daughter. He becomes enamored with her, but quickly learns that she has a rare disease where any sudden fright could result in her instant death. (Is this a real thing? I doubt it.) It also becomes clear that the professor has been going to tremendous, devious lengths to keep her alive.

The movie has a few creepy elements in it, but they fail to come together to make the whole interesting. I find this to be an utterly forgettable film. Instead of watching this, I would recommend that you watch Eyes Without a Face and the Mystery of the Wax Museum. This film is just a hodge-podge of those plots.

I got the movie on a disc via Netflix. Here’s the trailer for your edification. Warning: it makes the film sound a lot more interesting than it actually is.

My take: Just a terrible film. I recommend only watching the MST3K version of this movie.

Rating: 1 out of 4 stars

Was schlock a word that was commonly used in the early sixties? Regardless, I am attributing that word to this film: it was pure schlock.

The film is about a doctor who is driven to experiment with transplants, even if he must experiment on patients and with discarded limbs from the hospital where he works. When driving to check on one of his “experiments” with his doting fiancé, he careens off the road and his girl is severely injured.

So what does he do? He somehow chops off her head and carries it back to his countryside laboratory. He hooks some wires to it and places it in pan of liquid, and lo and behold! Her head lives and somehow speaks despite the lack of lungs.

It’s not just a brain that won’t die, it’s a whole head. I guess that wasn’t as good of a title.

The young doctor then must go out in search of a body, which is truthfully my favorite part of the film. Cheesy, porn-style music plays as he goes to questionable establishments as he looks for a replacement body for his fiancé. It so bad and so over-the-top, it is downright funny.

This film is bad enough, in fact, that it has its own Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) episode. I recommend watching the MST3K episode instead of watching the Brain That Wouldn’t Die without the witty commentary.

If you insist on watching it, I found it on Amazon Prime’s instant video service. Also, here is the trailer so you can see how terrible it really is:

My take: It’s got an interesting premise but it is drowned out by cheese and confusing twists.

Rating: 1 out of 4 stars

Macabre begins with a voiceover showing a clock and stating this warning:

“Ladies and gentlemen, for the next hour and fifteen minutes, you will be shown things so terrifying that the management of this theater is deeply concerned for your welfare. Therefore,  we request that each of you assume the responsibility of taking care of your neighbor. If anyone near you becomes uncontrollably frightened, will you please notify the management so that medical attention can be rushed to their aid.”

That’s quite the warning. And at first, I was right on board with it because the premise is downright terrifying. The story is about a doctor who returns home to take his three-year-old daughter and secretary out to dinner. But when the secretary , the nanny, and the doctor start looking around the house, they find the girl is missing.

While the doctor is out looking for his girl, the secretary answers the phone where a voice informs her that the girl’s funeral has already taken place, she is in the place of the dead, and there is very little time. The doctor and the secretary immediately fear that the girl has been buried alive.

The doctor and his secretary, Polly, searching for a fresh grave where the girl may be buried alive.

It’s a pretty scary start to the movie. But, unfortunately, the story becomes more and more muddled as time passes. It tries to hard to set up a Clue-style mystery where too many suspects could be guilty. It even has an Agatha Christie-style reveal where the culprit is named. Maybe it is just because I have read too many mysteries and watched too much Poirot, but I found this too be utterly cheesy.

I would only recommend this to people who want to watch a corny mystery from the 50s.

I rented it online via Amazon. Here’s a trailer I found on YouTube, that shows what the opening warning was like at the beginning: