The Diabolical Dr. Z 1966

I'm having a hard time getting through the later 70s Franco, so I decided to reestablish my faith and revisit the movie that made me his fan, The Diabolical Dr. Z. I'm pleasantly surprised that its better than I remembered and there's a convincing argument that its his finest film in total. My memory of DDZ was a very murky, visual, classy old-school horror film in the Hammer film vein. Now, I sense the wildly disparate influences of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Coffin Joe movies, James Bond movies, Godard and Orson Welles. Franco worked so well under the financed but heavily censored Spanish film industry. That previous life under rule of Generalissimo Franco informs all of his creative work and the uncompromising, unrepressed, anti-collectivist attitude towards his own life. But under these constraints, his genius was more combustible, angry, subtle, very, very professional and not yet bitter, disillusioned or demoralized. Given just a little more leeway, like filmmakers in the States, Jess Franco could've become a massive director in the mainstream realm.

Diabolical Dr Z is that superior kind of horror film that is appealing in broad ways but owns an authentic strangeness and audacity. The plot centers not on Dr. Z but his daughter and how she has inherited his madness and a violent sexual repression from him. Cold, cerebral and beyond sexual relationships, "Irma Zimmerman" does love a male scientist who is in love with a jazz club burlesque dancer, who is in touch with her sexuality and femininity. Irma uses her dad's mad science to turn the stripper into a kind of sexy somnambulist killer to aid her in murdering the enemies of her late father. This is the most plot any Franco film has and, given its comic book logic, all of it makes sense and is played seriously. No other Franco film that I've seen has so much attention to character, plotting, pacing and a satisfying ending, which is still ambiguous in Franco fashion.

Maybe because Franco was still finding his lane, he injects so many different ideas, experiments and references. With a built-in wide audience, he pays more respect to the tastes and expectations of the average viewer. And with so many rules on content, Franco is way more clever and understated in his handling of violence, sex, social commentary and satire.

Besides being endlessly watchable, its important in understanding the context of later Franco films. The Other Side of The Mirror would resurrect the themes of frigid females and their oppressive fathers. The manipulation games, power struggles and use of guilt between women in the feminist movement would be visited often in his lesbian/vampire/women in prison films. And Dr. Z may represent Franco's ego best as an unpopular mad genius who is attacked and exiled by his contemporaries to live a life of solitary, vengeful experimentation of the minds, hearts and sex organs of those who wrongfully judged him.

* Having new seen Franco's earlier The Awful Dr. Orloff, I can re-contextualize Diabolical Dr. Z as essentially a gender-swapping remake. DDZ is still a much better film but not the the originator of its plot. (But TADO wouldn't exist without Eyes Without A Face sooo...) Franco was one of the earliest post-modernists in film, combining plot elements into Frankenstein creatures. DDZ is a hybrid of Orloff and his already established franchise of feminist films.