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Jesús Franco has been haunting the catacombs of my mind for a long time. The man directed over 200 films in almost every genre. I am most familiar with his output in horror (shocker). Surreal, exploitative, insane and boring are all words that can describe his work. Sometimes, all words could be used to describe just one film of his. Franco treads familiar waters with The Awful Dr. Orlof, yet he does so in a way that it becomes something not often associated with Franco's work: classic. If one wishes to explore the deep ocean that is Franco's filmography, I would recommend you come to this film a little later down the line. It may falsely convey the notion of Franco as a master. I enjoy the majority of his films, I love a few and I avoid a good amount. His early output is stronger than what came later and The Awful Dr. Orlof remains one of my favorites (I still believe Miss Muerte is his greatest film). If he had carried on in this fashion he may have gone down as one of the most essential horror directors of all time, instead he hits more on infamous and carries a deserved cult icon status. I'd rather have him as the latter anyways. The film opens with a drunken woman stumbling and singing in the middle of the street. She makes it home and continues to sing as she shuffles around her room like me at my nephew’s birthday party. Unlike that classic time I was being awesome, she meets her end upon opening her closet, when Morpho emerges and strangles her. Morpho is a towering, caped and deformed gentleman who carries off the recently perished woman into the night. The tapping of a stick by some unseen person leads the blind beast in the proper direction. Our poor blitzed babe is not the first woman to disappear. A newly engaged inspector is on the case and is, sadly, getting nowhere. He is not privy to the same information as us; we soon learn that Dr. Orlof is the mystery man in control of Morpho. His night out with a beautiful lounge singer concludes with murder and more Morpho. Orlof is using the skin of his victims in an attempt to cure his daughter's fire-born disfigurement. I'm not sure how he is going about it. They don't explicitly show his treatments like they did in Eyes Without a Face (which is the definite inspiration for Franco's film), but it's not working. He decides he must use a living host in order for his treatment to be a success. As Orlof does his weird surgery thang, we spend some more time with the inspector. He's following clues and trying to piece together why his witnesses seem to be seeing two different murderers. With a helpful push from his fiancée (who just so happens to be the spitting image of Orlof's daughter) the inspector comes to the realization of the tag team murder scheme afoot. This still seems to get him nowhere. His fiancée, being the awesome woman she is, decides to go undercover to flush Dr. Orlof out. This all leads to a whole lotta death and a whole lotta Morpho. If you failed to notice, I fucking love Morpho. Ricardo Valle makes for an imposing "monster". His makeup is goofy as hell but he still manages to give me the chills after all these years. This is helped in a major way by Franco's atmospheric direction. In contrast to his later catalogue, The Awful Dr. Orlof shows an assured hand all the way through. You'd get moments of this in his later films but it was rarely frequent and it became noticeable Franco was getting bored with the humdrum expectations of the era. The familiar Franco aspects are also present but not yet prevalent. Breasts are fondled, jazz erupts, lounge/club numbers (although not as intrusive as they would become) appear and Howard Vernon is his usual wonderful self. Not as psychopathic as some of his other films, Orlof maintains its status as genuinely accomplished cinema. Find it and enjoy it but do not judge the man's work by it.
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