ORLOFF AGAINST THE INVISIBLE MAN (1970)
(a.k.a. LA VIE AMOUREUSE DE L’HOMME INVISIBLE / DR. ORLOFF’S INVISIBLE MONSTER / ORLOFF AND THE INVISIBLE MAN / ETC. / ETC.)
Article #1769 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-17-2006
Posting Date: 6-16-2006
Directed by Pierre Chevalier
Featuring Howard Vernon, Brigitte Carva, Fernando Sancho

A doctor is called to the castle of Dr. Orloff to help his daughter from an illness bought on by traumatic shock. Unfortunately, Orloff has an invisible monster on the loose…

I open this review with my jaw hanging open. Why? Because a perusal of the credits reveals an amazing fact – Jesus Franco had nothing to do with this movie. This blew the review I was planning to write out of the water, as it pretty much hinged on the incorrect assumption that this was a Franco movie. This is doubly amazing because this movie sure feels like a Franco movie.

So what did I like about this movie? Well, there’s a beautiful shot of a funeral procession as seen in the reflection of a lake that is simply breathtaking, and it is the type of shot I’d expect in a Franco movie. It’s all downhill from there, though. I thought at first that the movie could have been improved if they had simply omitted the scenes where nothing is happening (there are a few scenes of people just standing around doing nothing), but, truth be told, these scenes are only marginally less interesting that the ones where the invisible monster tries to rape naked women. There’s more of a plot than I’d expect from a Franco movie, but it’s not a very good one as it lurches from scene to scene without any real rhyme or reason. The worst moment is towards the end, where our young couple observe the castle’s devastating “conflagration” (which consists of a few puny fires, a smidgen of smoke, and the sound of crackling embers from a fireplace) and talk solemnly about how nobody could have survived such a thing. And once I got a glimpse of how our invisible monster really looked, I found myself missing Morpho more than ever. For fans of Pseudo-Franco only.