"Actor: Perla Cristal"

• The Awful Doctor Orlof | DVD | (22/04/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Jesús Franco, Spain's crazed cult auteur, had made a couple of features before The Awful Dr Orloff, but this infamous thriller (reportedly Spain's first horror film) gave birth to Franco's brand of erotic horror and surreal madness. The story of a mad surgeon who kidnaps and disfigures beautiful showgirls in an attempt to restore the face of his scarred daughter is clearly influenced by George Franju's Eyes Without a Face. The style, however, is a mix of foggy Universal monster movies and sexed-up Hammer horror, which Franco pushes to the limits of Spain's 1960s censorship restrictions (and beyond). A gaunt and hollowed Howard Vernon plays the sadistic surgeon Orloff (a role he revived in a number of sequels), and Ricardo Valle dons a phoney but freaky mask to play his grunting, blind, bug-eyed henchman, Morpho, who has a savage habit of taking a big bite of the victims. It's a smooth, elegantly orchestrated thriller with handsome sets and vivid locations, and the fogbound cobblestone streets, dark alleys and eerily empty mansions create a genuinely spooky ambience. He also tosses in a wild, creepy, thoroughly modern experimental score. Franco went on to direct more than 150 films under a dozen pseudonyms, most of which make the brief flashes of flesh and perversity here look tame, but this trendsetting landmark is still considered one of his greatest.--Sean Axmaker, Amazon.com

• Dr Jeckyll`s Mistress | DVD | (09/10/2017) from £9.98   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Melissa a student at college in Austria is invited to spend the festive season at the impressive castle of her uncle Dr Conrad Fisherman. What she finds on arrival, however, is a mood of peculiar solemnity and ambient menace. Her aunt, Ingrid seems to have been driven mad, and her uncle acts suspicious. A photo of her father, who died before she was born, sets off her curiosity still further. But terror is unleashed when she discovers that her uncle has reanimated her father and is using him as a undead killer...

• Doctor Jekyll's Mistresses | DVD | (09/09/2002) from £17.53   |  Saving you £-7.54 (-75.50%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Devotees of prolific Spanish schlockmeister Jesus Franco won't be too surprised that Dr Jekyll's Mistresses features neither Dr Jekyll or his mistresses; the current title is a meaningless substitute for the original The Secret of Dr Orlof. A notional sequel to Franco's breakthrough The Awful Dr Orlof, it opens with a dying scientist revealing a lack of judgment in estimating the character of a colleague ("You're ambitious, but you're a dedicated genius not an unscrupulous madman") to whom he wills his researches into turning corpses into pasty-faced killer zombies who can home in on ultrasound emitted by junky costume jewellery. Having murdered his own brother for fooling around with his wife (Luisa Sala), the genial scientist (Marcelo Jauregui) reanimates his relative (Hugo Blanco) and for some obscure reason sends the creature out to strangle tarty girls who work in a nearby nightclub. When the monster's innocent daughter (Agnes Spaak) shows up at the castle to claim her inheritance, she catches on that something is amiss ("'Ever since I came here, I've sensed something secret in this house--the life you live with Uncle Conrad is just too tragic for words"'). Technically far more competent than most Franco films, this makes eerie use of Spanish landscapes and manages an odd noir-ish cheesecake in the killer-bothered, jazz-scored nightclub scenes. Too slow actually to be good, it is undeniably weird, and the dubbed dialogue is consistently funny. On the DVD: Dr Jekyll's Mistresses on disc is an English dub of a French release cut with a surprising amount of nudity for a 1964 film as the monster ogles and strangles strippers. These scenes (one is still in French) are a little wobblier than the rest of the picture, as if spliced in from another source. Print quality is excellent, with lovely deep blacks. The packaging misspells the title as Dr Jeckyll's Mistresses. --Kim Newman