The film begins as murderer Hans Bergen (Guy Mairesse) makes a daring escape from prison, only to collapse at gate of Dr. Zimmer (Antonio Jiménez Escribano). Bergen is taken to Zimmer’s laboratory, where robotic, spider-like arms clamp around his body and hold him in place while his body is prodded for experiment. Next, Dr. Zimmer and his daughter, Irma (Mabel Karr), interrupt the International Neurological Congress, where Dr. Zimmer reveals that he has continued controversial work begun by Dr. Orloff, and has discovered that the brain and spinal column control impulses towards good and evil, and that morality is part of our nervous system and not psychological. Zimmer has made a “Z-ray which can neutralize or stimulate these zones.” When he asks for permission to test on human subjects, the congress—lead by doctors Vicas, Moroni and Kallman—scorn Zimmer, who immediately dies of a heart attack. His daughter vows to carry on with the work.
Irma’s plan begins when she murders a blonde hitchhiker, Juliana (Ana Castor), leaving a ring on her finger so as to identify her as Irma, and then sets the corpse and car on fire, pushing it into a lake. With her death faked, Irma visits nightclub performer Nadia (Estella Blain), aka Miss Death, who unbeknownst to her is dating her ex-lover, Dr. Philippe Brighthouse (Fernando Montes). Disguised as a booking agent, Irma lures Nadia to a theater, where the brainwashed Hans Bergen captures her. In the basement of the abandoned family mansion, Irma puts Nadia under the Z-ray, turning her into a mind-controlled assassin, and uses her to hunt down the three doctors responsible for her father’s death: Vicas, Moroni, and Kallman.
For viewers only familiar with Franco’s work post-1970, what’s immediately noticeable is the sophistication of the script and its intricate plotting. This is only a fraction of the story, which ultimately clocks in at around 86 minutes. Franco’s co-writer was Jean-Claude Carrière, who at that point had scripted Luis Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), Pierre Étaix’s Yoyo (1965), and Louis Malle’s Viva Maria! (1965), and would go on to become one of France’s greatest screenwriters, and whose later credits would include several more for Buñuel, like Belle de Jour (1967), The Milky Way (1969), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), The Phantom of Liberty (1974), and That Obscure Object of Desire (1973). In these works, Carrère distinguished himself as a master of subversion, eroticism, satire, and surrealism, and all of those qualities are on full display in The Diabolical Dr. Z, making this not only a key film in Franco’s body of work, but in Carrière’s, as well.
Franco and Carrière’s script is at once very classical—filled with gothic horror tropes—yet very post-modern, particularly in the way it pulls elements from a variety of genres, styles, and other films, and remixes them into something quite new and strikingly original. Zimmer’s medical aspirations certainly harken back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, while his visual appearance suggests a hint of Fritz Lang’s The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960). Irma’s revenge quest famously borrows from Cornell Woolrich’s 1940 novel The Bride Wore Black, and her arch-villain ingenuity and omnipresence suggests not only all of Lang’s Mabuse films, but also silent classics by Louis Feuillade like Fantômas (1913–1914) and Les Vampires (1915). Elements of kidnapping and facial surgery also suggest Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960), and the Zimmer laboratory and Z-ray lovingly evoke a long-line of B-movie gadgetry. Franco also pays homage to forbears in other ways: a phone call from “Bresson” informs that “a man escaped,” an allusion to Robert Bresson’s film A Man Escaped (1956); and a bicycle wheel in front of the frame during the shot when Nadia attacks the maid, Barbara (Lucía Prado), is a nod to similar compositions from Joseph H. “Wagon Wheel” Lewis, who framed many of his westerns in such a way. In the commentary, Franco scholar and Video Watchdog publisher Tim Lucas suggests another nod to Lewis is the sequence when Irma picks up the hitchhiker, which is filmed from the back seat, like Lewis’s famous shot from Gun Crazy (1950).
In many ways, The Diabolical Dr. Z is a nexus between Franco of the past and Franco of the future. Most overtly, Dr. Zimmer refers to Dr. Orloff, who was the subject of Franco’s first horror film, The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962). The plot of using medical science to control people and turn them into assassins was earlier used in Dr. Orloff’s Monster (The Mistresses of Dr. Jekyll, El secreto del Dr. Orloff, 1964). The daughter’s revenge would be later be rested in She Killed in Ecstasy (1971), Daughter of Dracula (1972), and The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein (1972). Stylistically, Miss Death’s erotic stage show and the hallucinatory murder of Moroni and his wife foreshadow many similar sequences in later films. In his commentary, Tim Lucas does an extraordinary job illuminating even more connections within Franco’s filmography, reinforcing how necessary it is to view any of Franco’s films within his greater body of work.
But as crucial as this is to other films, The Diabolical Dr. Z holds its own in a way that few other Franco films do. In some ways, it’s because the film superficially bears the conventional trademarks of quality that his later films might not. The script holds together very cohesively, with a strong plot and complex characters. Irma, in particular, is much more than a stereotypical arch villain. Franco strongly sympathizes with Irma, allowing her to grieve in her own way: first with alcohol, then by reuniting with a past lover, and finally by taking the mantle of her father’s work, which leads her on a path of murderous retribution. Even by the film’s end, her downfall appears more tragic than just: there’s no catharsis to her demise, just sadness that she, like her father before her, gave their life to work that was unappreciated.
The film is also so beautiful to look at (both the Kino Lorber Blu-ray and Kino Cult streaming prints are delights for the eye). The black-and-white cinematography from Alejandro Ulloa is simply stunning. From the opening prison-break to the chilling murder sequences, the use of light and shadow is absolutely striking. Ulloa would later lens spaghetti western classics like Sergio Corbucci’s The Mercenary (1968) and Compañeros (1970), Tonino Valerii’s A Reason to Live, A Reason to Die (1972), as well as giallos like Lucio Fulci’s One On Top of The Other (1969), Luciano Ercoli’s The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (1970), and Eugenio Martin’s train-horror classic Horror Express (1972).
The strongest segments of the film, and the most haunting, and also the most characteristically Franco: the first two murder sequences, in which Nadia stalks her victims. Franco uses lighting and montage to transform reality into an erotic nightmare. In these sequences, the actors exist in a purely cinematic space, one with no ties to logic or realism. When the train with Vicas and Nadia goes into a tunnel, Franco alters the lighting to deliberately artificial, purely psychological lighting, with solely their eyes illuminated, simultaneously conveying both Vicas’s attraction as well as Nadia’s predatory gaze. But it is the death of Moroni and his wife that is the real Franconian standout in the film. Two deaths are cross-cut, like counterpoint melodies in a cinematic symphony: Moroni is lured by Nadia through vacant, shadowy streets, in which his own libido leads him from ecstasy to terror, while his wife is attacked and murdered in her own home by Bergen. In this sequence, Franco destroys the security of our mind (fantasy) and home (reality), allowing the uncanny and irrational to overtake the narrative. These are the rules which will govern many later Franco films.
The version I streamed on Kino Cult looked so gorgeous, and I was so enthralled by the film, that I immediately ordered their Blu-ray (part of the Redemption Films line). And I’m glad I did, I watched the film twice: first on its own, to appreciate the rich depths achieved in the digital transfer of the black-and-white celluloid, and second with commentary from Tim Lucas, who gives compelling insight into the production, personnel, and interpretation of the film.
Streaming on Kino Cult, or available on DVD/Blu-ray.
–Cullen Gallagher
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