| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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THE AWFUL DR ORLOFF
aka
CRIES IN THE NIGHT; THE DEMON DOCTOR; THE DIABOLICAL DR SATAN
(Gritos en la Noche)
Rating: 
Spain/Italy. 1962.
Director – Jesus Franco, Based on the Novel by David Kuhne [Jesus Franco], Producers – Leo Lax & Serge Newman, Photography (b&w) – G. Pacheco. Production Company – Leo Lax/Plaza Films International.
Cast:
Howard Vernon (Dr Orloff), Conrad Sanmartin (Inspector Edgar Tanner), Diana Lorys (Wanda Bronsky), Riccardo Valle (Morpho), Perla Cristal (Arne), Venancio Muro (Jean Rousseau)
Plot: London, 1912. Police comb the city for a killer who is abducting and killing women. Behind the killings is the brilliant surgeon Orloff who, with the aid of his zombified assistant Morpho, is determined to perfect a means of grafting a face onto his disfigured daughter.
The Awful Dr Orloff was the first film of Jesus Franco, who would later become the genre’s most prolific director, having directed some 170 films to date. Franco is most well known for films like Venus in Furs (1970) and Count Dracula (1970), but ventured into many genres including horror, pornography, spy films and sf. Franco became one of the most notorious genre directors as well, he singlehandedly having created the notoriously sadistic Women in Prison genre.
Although there is quite a cult that surrounds Franco, most of his output is cheap, terrible and sometimes downright nasty. Dr Orloff is just dull and dreary. The plot of a surgeon killing women in order to slice their faces off and attach them to his mutilated daughter is a blatant ripoff of the French film Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux Sans Visage) (1959), released two years earlier. At least if Dr Orloff had been made a few years later, when the death of Generalissimo Franco (no relation) allowed a greater freedom of censorship in Spain, Franco would have overrun it with lots of nudity and fixated on the feminine facial mutilation. But without the cheap titillations of later Franco films it is a dreary, plodding effort that doesn’t even have that dubious aspect in its favour.
The film was popular and Franco made two sequels: The Secret of Dr Orloff/Brides of Dr Jekyll (1964) and The Sinister Dr Orloff (1984). The monster Morpho later turned up in Franco’s superheroine film Sadisterotica (1969).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2000
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