First of all, let's talk about that title. You'll notice the header image is for the original Spanish release of the film in 1965, under the title of Miss Muerte, while the title of the review (and subsequently the title of the English release) is The Diabolical Doctor Z. (It also ran under Dans les griffes du maniaque (In the Grip of the Maniac) in France but I couldn't find any posters with that title, so it doesn't really count for our puposes here.) The cut of the film I saw ran under the latter title, but I've opted to go with the Spanish poster for reasons largely pertaining to a disconnect between the American poster and the actual content of the film. Miss Muerte reflects a central element of the film's story, and while The Diabolical Doctor Z could potentially refer to the actual main character of the film, the poster's tagline indicates quite the opposite:
See, despite the fact that the poster would rather like you to believe Doctor Zimmer the elder is the central figure of the film and the creator of Miss Death, the film ACTUALLY concerns itself with his daughter, Irma Zimmer. The Doctor Z of the American title dies ten minutes into the film, serves as more of a motivating factor, and while he does in fact create the apparatus used to create Miss Death, it's actually Irma who does the dirty deed. Though one could argue the title does still refer to Irma, as she's likely a doctor in her own right, the prominence of Mister Doctor Z on the American posters and taglines rather indicates the marketers of the film just didn't watch it.
Either way, Miss Muerte/The Diabolical Doctor Z comes to us courtesy of Jess Franco, a Spanish filmmaker who often did work out of France in order to avoid censorship and create more violent products. We'll be seeing a little more of him as we go through the list, and a good thing too, as several of his films apparently contain rather oblique, easy-to-miss cross-references to one another. Think of him like the Quentin Tarantino of semi-erotic Spanish-Franco horror films. Even the film under review today contains references to his previous most notable film, The Awful Doctor Orloff. He's apparently got a bit of a cult following, so let's not beat around the bush any longer, and see if he actually deserves it.
The primary plot of the film concerns the family of one Doctor Zimmer, who reports to his associates a fantastic discovery - using the previous work of Doctor Orloff as a basis, he has devised a surgical method of compelling anyone who undergoes it towards the extremes of good and evil. What's more, he has already practiced the technique in secret, turning an unrepentant escaped death row inmate into a docile servant. His colleagues, naturally horrified by this development, hound and harass him until he collapses to the floor, dead. Several years later, his daughter Irma (played by Mabel Karr) fakes her death, and begins an elaborate revenge plot against the three men most responsible for her father's - Doctors Vicas (Howard Vernon), Moroni (Marcelo Arroita), and Kallman (Cris Huerta). With the help of Nadia (Estella Blain), an erotic dancer by the name of Miss Death whom she surgically altered into a sensual assassin, the race is on for the police to stop the strange slew of deaths before all who brought Doctor Z to his death are corpses themselves.
Before digging into any of the actual merits and flaws of the film, I'd like to slow down a little to pick at a very particular nit. The machine Irma uses to bring Nadia under her control functions by pinning the victim subject face down on a raised metal slab, drilling a hole through the side of their temple, and piercing a hole into the spinal cord right on the small of the back. Her father claims the technique is capable of driving individuals towards moral extremes, but I'm personally convinced he didn't have the slightest idea what he was talking about. Based on what the machine actually DOES, it seems less like Doctor Z found a way to compel goodness or evil, and more like he found a way to induce or subsume extreme violence through clever application of sharp pointy objects alone. When we also consider that Nadia "comes out of" her surgically induced state several times during the film, I can only conclude the Orloffian technique is nothing more than stumbling across a means of sledgehammering people into submission for a few days, and declaring it a universally successful procedure without engaging in replication or even a validity check.
Then again, the death row servant from the beginning remains perfectly obedient and functional throughout the whole film, so it may just be that the science here is entirely bunk. Whoda thunk it?
Of course, much as it might annoy me as a student of psychology, criticizing the scientific principles in a mad scientist movie is rather like bashing Frankenstein for not depicting a fully accurate means of reanimating dead flesh - which is to say, missing the point entirely. What Franco really has to offer us here is a tight hour and a half of spine-tingling with a little erotic content thrown in for good measure, and on those merits, I'd say it succeeds - though not without some qualifiers.
First and foremost, I really have to admire the look of the movie. Jess Franco apparently didn't do any work in black and white after this, but he evidently had a pretty good grasp on how to employ it here. I'm no expert in black and white cinematography (or really any form of cinematography, come to think of it), but the way he employs shadowing and the contrast between lighting in various scenes makes it an interesting movie to look at during certain stretches. It's not all dark and moody, though, with some sequences early on that remind me a little of Breathless, which work to good effect. If it's not among the upper echelons of beautiful black and white films, it's at least well-styled enough to engage your attention for the entire runtime.
Expect quite a few shots like this.
I also feel the need to hand out praise to Blain as Nadia, and Karr as Irma. Blain's character spends a lot of the movie either in a surgically-induced daze, or as a cold-blooded murder machine, so she doesn't have all that much range to play around with in terms of facial expressions or dialogue. As such, the mileage she gets out of just the way she carries herself and her facial expressions is rather impressive, and she sells both the "hypnotized" assassin and repentant victim quite well. As for Karr, she's given more opportunities to show off, but instead chooses to keep herself measured and refined for most of the running time, only giving little hints of the malice and venom running through her veins through sharp, cold delivery and some rather intense glares. The overall effect becomes a 60s horror film with two female leads that treats them more as characters than helpless screaming fainters or sex objects.
...OK, that's not ENTIRELY fair. I can't 100% praise a film for being progressive when one of its two principle characters is slinking around in this -
- and other assorted outfits that cause her nipnops to pull through the top, but you really have to dole out praise for progressiveness in a measured manner when it comes to older films. Nobody's going to look at Miss Muerte and claim it's some kind of lost feminist classic, but it is still nice to see the matter of murderous women in fiction treated as dangerous due to cunning and intelligence, rather than due to seductiveness or sex appeal. Of course, Miss Death is chosen as Irma's assassin due to her background as an erotic dancer, but even that has some tinges of "I know my enemy and will destroy them without them seeing it coming" rather than the usual "women are hot and can ONLY get at men in this manner because otherwise they'd just be helpless" schtick. Even if it's not the most forward-thinking film out there vis a vis gender roles, I can still admire it for what success it does achieve.
The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for the film's primary subplot, concerning Nadia's lover, Philipe (Fernando Montes). In the sections dedicated to him and the police investigations of the murders, the film stops feeling like a well-calculated chiller or a send up to Godard films, and more like a rather barebones, run of the mill Hitchcock ripoff murder mystery. And when I say barebones, I really do mean absolute barebones. No to spoil the ending or anything, but Philipe figures out how to solve the mystery and confront Irma through a line of logic that boils down to - and there is NO exaggeration here, I promise you - "I sat down, thought about it for a few minutes, and figured it out." When you combine such stunning detective work with the nature of his role in the climax in contrast to how the rest of the film played out, and all the sections with the police start to feel a little on the useless side - even though I am pleased at the inclusion of a kitten in one of them.
You'll note the references to Godard and Hitchcock up there, as well as the one to Frankenstein a little higher up. I believe those get at my biggest potential issue with the film, and the factor that may make or break my recommendation depending on how I choose to construe it - it feels like almost every element in the movie has been done before, and done better. Saying this with the benefit of an additional fifty years to look back on may seem a little silly, but even chopping out everything that has become cliche and rote over the intervening time, Miss Muerte still feels like simply an OK example of what its predecessors and contemporaries did. If pressed, I could probably identify superior versions of the frantic chase scene through the foggy French streets, the sensuous set-up and murder of the first colleague on the train, the mad science minutia talk, the police investigation scenes - hell, there's even a bit early on where Irma's face is damaged and she has to have it surgically removed that seems to come straight out of Eyes Without A Face.
Originality is not the undisputed king when it comes to judges of a work's quality. One can easily get away with a lack of original ideas if one is capable of putting together time-tested (or even worn-down) tropes together in an interesting manner. Some special stylistic flair or exceptional acting can make or break a film, and while Franco appears to coax effective enough examples of both out of his film, I don't believe I can claim there's anything particularly special here. It is all competent enough, holding attention and intrigue throughout the runtime, but as soon as the curtain falls and The End flashes on screen, it doesn't take long before a feeling of "seen it all before" starts to wash over. On that particular dimension, the film fails.
And yet, for its lack of standout elements, the film still managed to hold me under its spell for its entirety. Whether this has more to do with its actual merit, or simply a lack of refined taste on my part, I really can't say, but the fact of my engagement remains. To this end, I have to decide which criterion is more important when judging a work: it's ability to draw one in and remain in its grip, or its perceived quality once the illusion is over?
Quite personally, I believe longterm impact should apply more pertinently. Should you ever wish to watch the film again, you'd naturally want it to have a similar effect to the first time, and if you find yourself thinking about how cliche and unoriginal the scenes are to the point of diminishing their hold... well, that's a flaw. Without taking the time to sit down and watch again (something my time and the length of the list doesn't really allow in the immediate future), I have no means of saying if this actually holds true for Miss Muerte, but it certainly feels as if the magic would be lost. However, another question follows: should ALL films be subject to the same criteria, if their intent is decidedly not to have a long term impact?
One of the taglines Franco's American publicity team (or whoever was responsible for the posters stateside) chose for the film was "The Last Word in Shock," implying an intent to hit hard once, and then never again. By this standard of judgement, it shouldn't really matter whether or not Miss Muerte works in the long term, as it was never really designed to. If we're feeling really pedantic, we might extend that same logic to pretty much all horror films, and claim that any criticism of flaws or shortcomings shouldn't matter so long as you were sufficiently spooked. In all honesty, I don't like the implications there, as I firmly believe all works should strive to have some longterm value beyond the visceral emotions they elicit upon first exposure.
Ultimately, I have to say Miss Muerte may not be worth your time. It's competently executed and has some enjoyable elements, but lacks a certain specialized oomph to give it a big enough push. Still, it's free (I managed to dig it up on archive.org of all places, though I needed a transcript open in another window to understand, as it was in French and subtitled in Spanish), so if the above sounds at all worth an hour and a half to you, give it a go. But personally, I'd say you can miss it without much regret. Unfortunate, but one must maintain standards if one wishes to attain credibility.
Body Count: Nine - though it's only eight depending on whether or not you count dropping dead from stress a kill.
Franchise Potential: I debated with myself on this one a little. Miss Muerte is a standalone film for all intents and purposes, but its connections to The Awful Doctor Orloff and Franco's other filmography made me doubt whether or not I should introduce a category I was holding off on until we get something that's unabashedly a franchise. Since the connections are minimal, though, I went with the usual question instead. In this particular case, I have to say no. There's only so much one can do to alter the premise of the film before getting too far away from its intent, and while some more scientifically accurate exploration of how the Doctor Orloff technique actually works would be nice, once again it should be noted that desiring such a thing is missing the point.
Join me back here next time, whenever my life allows for it (seriously, I watched this movie a week ago and only got around to writing out the review now), when we sit down to review 1981's Bloody Birthday.
Adieu, adieu...
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