The lacklustre mash-up of ¨The Sinister Eyes of Dr Orloff¨ but with short budget , little enthusiasm and lousily paced. Dealing with Melissa , she was a child (brunette Flavia Mayans , Antonio's daughter) she witnessed the murder of her father (Antonio Mayans) by unknown assailants . In his dying breath, his head bleeding and bashed in, he beseeches her to revenge him, then falls into her lap and leaves an eternal bloody stain , while she's in process of psychoplasmosis . Somehow Melissa got it in her head, that her father is still able to speak to her, and he wants her to punish those responsible for his death. Grown-up Melissa (Lina Romay, Jesús Franco's wife) is a paralysed woman who is being taken care of by her two aunts sisters (Mabel Escaño, Carmen Carrión) who want to take her inheritance . Here a blonde wigged Lina Romay is being haunted by visions of her dead father, so much so that she eventually just snaps.
This low-budgeted film contains lots of odd details , thrills , chills , intrigue , brief nudism and several murders, but it is all very subdued . It's an embarrassing film directed by prolific filmmaker Jess Frank and also produced by his own production company , Manacoa Films, and he uses his usual marks such as zooms , foreground on objects , filmmaking in ¨do-it-yourself effort¨ style or DIY and managing to work extraordinarily quickly, but here lacks the languid textual beauty and the atmosphere of otherwordly depravity of his better 70s and 80s films. A psychological slasher movie but the flick even lacks nudity and sleaziness enough , typical Franco characteristics, but in true '80s Jess fashion it is stripped down to its core. It results to be a mostly de-sexualized mixture of Franco themes , botchery and mainly claustrophobic scenes. Stars the regular Lina Romay as Melissa whose father was mysteriously killed when she was still a child and nowadays she seeks vengeance. And involving Antonio Mayans as the undead father and other Franco's regulars , such as : Mabel Escaño , Carmen Carrión, Mary Carmen Nieto and Ricardo Palacios who starred Jess Frank's ¨The Blood of Fu Manchu¨.
Mediocre cinematography by Juan Soler filmed on location in Alicante where Jess Frank lived , however , being faded by the odd colouring of the old VHS, I would like to see this get remastered on blu-ray. It contains anticlimatic musical score composed by his usual composer Daniel White . A sleepy horror movie with no much interest and badly made by Jesús Franco. He often used a lot of pseudonyms , among the aliases he used, apart from the names Jess Franco or Franco Manera, were Jess Frank, Robert Zimmerman, Frank Hollman, Clifford Brown, David Khune , Toni Falt, James P. Johnson, Charlie Christian, David Tough , among others. In many of the more than 180 films he's directed he has also worked as composer, writer, cinematographer and editor. Jesús's influence has been notable all over Europe . Jess was a Stajanovist, restless writer, producer, director who realized over 200 pictures. His career spans over 50 years with a few successes and lots of flops, making all. From his huge body of work we can deduce that Jesús Franco is one of the most restless directors of Spanish cinema and often releasing several titles at the same time. Many of his films have had problems in getting released, and others have been made directly for video. More than once his staunchest supporters have found his "new" films to contain much footage from one or more of his older films. Jesús Franco is a survivor in a time when most of his colleagues tried to please the government administration. He broke up with all that and got the independence he was seeking and getting , at times great eye for composition. He was a hard-working filmmaker, directing a lot of ridiculous movies. However, making some acceptable films , such as : ¨We are 18 years old¨, ¨The awful Dr Orloff¨, ¨The Bloody Judge¨ , ¨Count Dracula¨, ¨99 women¨, ¨Parxismus, ¨The Blood of Fumanchu¨, ¨Faceless¨ and a few others. He always went upstream in an ephemeral industry that fed opportunists and curbed the activity of many professionals. But time doesn't pass in vain, and Jesus' production diminished since the 90s , but he went on working untin his death .
