Jess Franco, a.k.a. Jesus Franco, is a Spaniard who over the course of his career has directed almost two hundred films. His movies are something of an acquired taste due to his tendency to include rather explicit sex scenes. But compared with his later efforts, Franco’s first zombie opus, the French/ Spanish production Dr. Orloff ’s Monster, is almost unrecognizable as one of his films. In this early
period in his career, Franco produced movies he would later describe in many publications as “museum pieces.” By “museum pieces” he must have meant films with passable acting, a coherent narra- tive, and decent cinematography.
Also known as El secreto del Dr. Orloff, The Brides of Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Jekyll’s Mistresses, The Secret
of Dr. Orloff, and a million other titles over the years, Dr. Orloff ’s Monster is technically a sequel to the earlier The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962). It concerns the experiments of the lead character, the portly Dr. Jekyll—bet you thought he was going to be named Dr. Orloff! (In the English dub of the film he’s assigned an even more inappropriate and inexplicable name: Dr. Fisherman.) The doctor (Marcelo Arroita-Jáuregui) has created a pale, expres- sionless zombie named Andros (Hugo Blanco) who lives in a showcase booth in the doctor’s lab and resembles a late-1950s beatnik in a jet-black turtleneck and jacket. Blanco can be controlled like a dog with high-frequency sound waves, and at night the doctor sends him out to rampage and terrify the locals. In Franco’s world, rampages involve the zombie watching women slowly undress for minutes on end before throttling them to death.
When Arroita-Jáuregui’s niece Melissa (Agnès Spaak) arrives to collect her inheritance, she slowly (in fact, way too slowly) begins to notice everyone’s
In this behind-the-scenes still, Vincent Price is prepped for his return from death in Tales
odd behavior. She is perplexed by the mute Blanco—likely because he bears a striking resem- blance to her late father and stands over her as she sleeps with a longing look in his eyes. Spaak eventu- ally figures out that Blanco is, in fact, her dad, mur- dered by the mad doctor for having an affair with the now perpetually drunk Mrs. Jekyll (Luisa Sala).
While it’s all pretty laughable and not remotely scary, on a technical level the film actually looks quite good. It features some nicely subtle camera moves and effective black-and-white photography, including shots of the zombie Blanco walking slowly down shadowed and narrow passageways. As a zombie film it won’t appeal to any but the
most devout fans of the subgenre, but as a historical curiosity it may be worth a look, if only so that horror fans can see, with some surprise, that Jess Franco actually showed early promise as a filmmaker.
More Dr. Orloff films would follow (the remainder even featuring the titular Dr. Orloff in the lead role!), some not even directed by Franco. These efforts chronicled the doctor’s attempts to reanimate his dead mother, among others, but the films would be of declining interest to zombie fans as the decades passed, and none matched the, well, passable quality of this, the highest-profile Dr. Orloff film.
Maybe Andros (Hugo Blanco) should consider writing some beatnik poetry instead of going on a killing rampage in Dr. Orloff’s
“Why is this island called Voodoo Island?” asks dense swinger/novelist/man of action Tom Harris (William Joyce) in this goofball flick, a bizarre James Bond–influenced horror movie hybrid. Orig- inally titled Voodoo Blood Bath and also known as Zombie, this ultra-low-budget oddity was not actu- ally released to theaters until the 1970s, when the producer of the vampire flick I Drink Your Blood (1970) bought it and released the films together as a double bill.
Miami fills in for the Caribbean as the film desperately tries to capture a Dr. No and Goldfinger feel, throwing a zombie into the role of henchman to a power-hungry mad- man. As for the hero, despite Joyce’s best efforts, he displays little of Sean Connery’s charm. Think that first query is the only dense question he asks? Just wait until he fer- rets out the facts by blurting such subtleties as “I’ve heard a rumor that there’s an army of the walking dead on this island. Is there any truth to that?” or until he successfully romances women with come-ons like “What part of heaven did you fly down from?”
For gore hounds, there is no flesh eaten and almost no gore, except for an impressive decapitation via machete (well, it’s impressive considering they had no money for the effect). The main zombie seems inspired by Darby Jones in I Walked with a Zombie (1943), but he looks silly; he appears to be wearing a mud-covered facial mask, and his eyes look like oversized Ping-Pong balls with irises drawn on. The climax, which involves the island being destroyed, is achieved using a
terrible model and a firecracker explosion. With bad effects, horrible dialogue, and a Muzak-inspired score, this concoction is fascinating, and like so many other films of the 1960s, it’s almost entertain- ing in a so-bad-it’s-good way.