El siniestro doctor Orloff

For years, Spanish director Jess Franco exploited the success of his breakout flick, the 1960 horror The Awful Dr. Orloff, with numerous virtually identical movies, finally making a worthwhile follow-up a mere 27 years later with Faceless (1987). The Sinister Dr. Orloff is one of his less impressive and more forgettable attempts, the film delivering none of the style of his original film (as 'original' as a rip-off of Les Yeux Sans Visage can be) and little of the sleaze and gore of his 1987 version.

In this film, Alfred (Antonio Mayans), the demented son of Dr. Orloff (Franco regular Howard Vernon), continues his father's experiments, sending his blind assistant Andros (Rafael Cayetano) to abduct young women with loose morals and bad hair, using their energy to try and reanimate his lifeless mother, for whom he has the hots.

What follows is repetitive and extremely dull: Franco at his most uninspired, with even a spot of torture (the flogging of a naked woman) proving really boring. Each abduction is followed by an unsuccessful experiment, the woman strapped naked to a bed, allowing Franco to get in his quota of snatch shots. This is repeated ad nauseum until, like in The Awful Dr. Orloff, the girlfriend of Inspector Mario Tanner (Antonio Rebollo) decides to lend a hand in the investigation and becomes the doctor's latest victim.

The most remarkable thing about the whole film is that Alfred is not only able to get into a nightclub wearing a really horrible shell-suit top, but he also manages to score.