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Ulmer's estimable Bluebeard holds stylistic sway, thus "un nouvel Barbe Bleue" on the loose in a plaster Belle Époque. Abducted tarts, the latest one stumbles sloshed in her apartment while someone hides in her closet, the doors are flung open and scarred eyeballs stare into the camera. The blind brute (Ricardo Valle) is a maniac presumed dead while doing the bidding of one Dr. Orlof (Howard Vernon), who proclaims his fascination with "juvenile grace" while caressing the skin of unwilling patients. His obsessive mission is to repair the charred visage of his daughter, incidentally a doppelgänger of the ballet star (Diana Lorys) engaged to the police inspector (Conrado San Martín). "Men just aren't romantic anymore." A sturdy template for Jesús Franco's delirium, purposefully warped with each subsequent film. The cabaret kitten is brought to a dilapidated mansion and doesn't notice the hearse parked outside, the villain's lackey plods "as if following a funeral procession" but seizes her all the same, biting her neck as she faints from fright. (Her breasts are duly exposed at the surgery table as the scalpel makes its way down her torso.) Les Yeux sans Visage, but also Brahm's Hangover Square and Sirk's Lured. Faust at the grand theater plus a Sartrean jest on "le criminel respectable," the anguished assistant (Perla Cristal) who cries for an end to the experiments plus the vagabond informant (Venancio Muro) who firmly believes in vino veritas. The heroine leads an investigation of her own to the very end, with a salute to Universal horror and a springboard for José Mojica Marins. With María Silva, Mara Laso, Félix Defauce, Elena María Tejeiro and Faustino Cornejo. In black and white,
--- Fernando F. Croce |