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There’s an old say­ing in the busi­ness world that goes “If it moves, sell it.” Nowhere is this more true than the world of schlock.  Anything that gar­ners even the faintest whiff of suc­cess the first time is guar­an­teed to be repeated ad infini­tum by the schlock mer­chants who made it.  How else would you explain all those sequels to Leprechaun and Children Of The Corn?

And this rule remains true no mat­ter what level of the busi­ness you are at.  For instance, con­sider the case of Jesus Franco.  He scored a note­wor­thy European hit in 1962 with The Awful Dr. Orloff, an Eyes Without A Face knock­off built around a mad sci­en­tist who spe­cial­izes in plas­tic surgery exper­i­ments.  After it did well in the ter­ri­to­ries, Franco sub­se­quently brought the char­ac­ter back another seven times.  Whether the good Doctor was a lead or just a cameo, his cin­e­matic life extended through the next few decades and involved mul­ti­ple actors.

The Sinister Eyes Of Dr. Orloff was made in 1973 and is one of the lesser-known Orloff/Franco ven­tures.  The story is built around the tra­vails of Melissa (Montserrat Prous), a trou­bled young para­plegic bedev­iled by nightly bad dreams about the mys­te­ri­ous death of her father.  The extended fam­ily mem­bers she lives with — mainly the vain, status-obsessed Aunt Flora (Kali Hansa) and cousin Martha (Loreta Tovar) — are not exactly con­cerned with her well-being.

Enter Dr. Orloff: this time, erst­while spaghetti west­ern reg­u­lar William Berger plays the role.  He is brought in to eval­u­ate Melissa’s psy­cho­log­i­cal con­di­tion and he warns her that her father was mur­dered before leav­ing abruptly.  That night, Melissa has a dream in which she can walk and mur­ders her Uncle Henry (Jaume Picas).  As her mur­der­ous night­mares blend with a death-filled real­ity, she begins to won­der if some­one around her is try­ing to drive her crazy.  It is inevitable that every­one, regard­less of their motives and machi­na­tions, will soon dis­cover that Orloff is pulling the strings.

It’s sur­pris­ing that this film is so rare because it is actu­ally one of Franco’s more con­ven­tional films.  The plot makes sense in its own clunky way and the film focuses on this story instead of the car­nal fas­ci­na­tions and self-conscious artsi­ness his work is usu­ally known for.  Even the end­ing avoids the expected Franco dime-store sur­re­al­ism in favor of a t.v. show-style end­ing that neatly ties every­thing up.

That said, none of the con­ces­sions to nar­ra­tive film­mak­ing make The Sinister Eyes Of Dr. Orloff what any­one would con­sider a com­mer­cial film.  The dia­logue mixes awk­ward expo­si­tion with curi­ous stabs at poetry (par­tic­u­larly dur­ing Orloff’s mono­logues) and the act­ing has a cer­tain blank-faced campi­ness to it.  Franco films it all in a hasty style that favors handheld-camera flour­ishes, result­ing in a style that falls some­where between exploita­tion film and artsy stu­dent project.  The film also fea­tures a pretty hilar­i­ous folk song per­formed by “rock star” char­ac­ter that sounds like Jandek try­ing his hand at bub­blegum music.

In short, The Sinister Eyes Of Dr. Orloff is a mid-level Eurocult odd­ity that occu­pies its own phan­tom space in the Franco fil­mog­ra­phy: it’s nei­ther the best nor the worst thing he’s done yet it’s not a rep­re­sen­ta­tive exam­ple of his film­mak­ing either.  Even the way it uses its most saleable asset — Dr. Orloff — is far afield from what the char­ac­ter is known for.  It’s prob­a­bly best left to the Franco com­pletists, who will no doubt find it a breath of fresh air when com­pared to the video-based quick­ies he’s been crank­ing out over the last decade or so.