Format: Streaming video from Plex on Fire!
I don’t typically watch a movie twice before writing a review, but I found that it was necessary for The Diabolical Dr. Z (or Miss Muerte if you prefer). There is a plot to this movie, but it goes in a lot of directions, and a lot of what is happening feels like it’s here specifically to get the running time to feature length. Co-screenwriter and director Jesús Franco has a story that he wants to tell here, but seems to have needed an editor to trim out some of the fat.
The truth is that The Diabolical Dr. Z should be called Dr. Z’s Diabolical Daughter. Our titular character, Doctor Zimmer (Antonio Jiménez Escribano) doesn’t make it all the way through the first act. We see him doing some experiments on an escaped felon. Eventually we come to learn that Zimmer’s experiments are in mind control, a process that appears to involve pushing large nails into people’s temples and spines. From here, Zimmer and his daughter Irma (Mabel Karr) arrive at a conference on neurology. Zimmer makes the claim that he can find the genetic roots of good and evil and that he should be permitted to experiment on human subjects (although he’s already been doing so). Rebuffed by a trio of doctors, Zimmer suffers an attack and dies.
Zimmer’s dying wish is for Irma to carry on his work, something she vows to do. She fakes her own death by killing a woman who looks just enough like her to fool people, then hunts for someone to use to enact her revenge. Who she discovers is our original titular character, Miss Muerte (Estella Blain). Miss Muerte, or Nadja, has an act that is somehow intriguing to people, although I can’t see why or how. Essentially, she dresses in a skin-tight outfit, rolls around on a floor painted to look like a spider web, and then attacks a mannequin. It’s bad performance art.
Regardless, Irma decides that Nadja will be the vehicle of her revenge. So, she kidnaps our Miss Muerte and brainwashes her into committing the crimes of murdering the three doctors who caused her father’s breakdown. She will do this by using her feminine wiles to seduce them in turn, and then scratching them with poisoned fingernails. At least that’s how it works in theory—some of the murders are gone about in different ways.
But, as I said at the top, there are a lot of places where this movie seems to be putting things on the screen just to have things on the screen. When Irma fakes her death, for instance, she does so by running over her victim with a car, then putting the victim in the driver’s seat, lighting the whole thing on fire, and pushing it into a river. They’re only at the river because Irma picks up a hitchhiker who looks like her and who happens to have no family or connections. But when she lights the car on fire, it appears that she burns her face badly. This is why we get a scene where Irma has surgery on her face. Why does this happen? It might be to bring up connections to Eyes Without a Face. It also might be there specifically to fill up space and give us scenes that hint at a little gore. In either case (or both), there doesn’t seem to be a point to this beyond that.
Eventually, the cops get involved along with the guy who was dating Nadja (Fernando Montes), who makes the amazing leap in logic that she has been kidnapped and is mentally controlled to commit the killings.
Jesús Franco has his fans, and evidently The Diabolical Dr. Z is a film that connects back to his earlier work, specifically The Awful Dr. Orlaf. I’m left to wonder if this film might have made more sense if I had seen that one first. However, a quick look doesn’t show any cast or characters in common, so perhaps not.
I always go into a film hoping to like it, even if I am worried about what I might see. In this case, watching this once clearly wasn’t enough for me to understand what was going on, but twice was far too much. There’s no reason for anyone to spend close to three hours trying to figure out why Dr. Z, who’s dead 15 minutes in, is apparently diabolical.
Why to watch The Diabolical Dr. Z: Jesús Franco builds on his own mythology.
Why not to watch: It’s not that easy to follow.
