THE VENGEANCE OF DR. MABUSE (Jess Franco, 1972) Kino Cult Blu-ray

Although the title of the new Kino Lorber Cult Blu-ray is THE VENGEANCE OF DR. MABUSE, the film contained within is not Jess Franco's LA VENGENZA DEL DR. MABUSE (1972). It's the reedited, redubbed German cut prepared by producer Artur Brauner who rejected Franco's director cut. The oncreen title of this version is DR.M STRIKES.

LA VENGANZA DEL DR MABUSE Blu-ray release: hot jazz bursts, dreamy lounge interludes, frenetic percussions written by David Khune aka Jess Franco. See the Spanish version first, if you can find it, before seeing/avoiding the recent Blu-ray, which was re-edited by the producer who hated Franco's director's cut. This version also has redubbed German dialogue which changes all of Franco's original dialogue and story. The story now takes place in America and they're talking about invading Mexico! They hired a new director to shoot additional scenes of a shoot out during a robbery and people talking in offices. All this additional footage is shot like a bland TV movie. Then they had a new editor cut it all together without Franco's involvement. This Producers cut was released in Germany . The Spanish director's cut was only briefly released in Spain and is now in the Spanish Filmoteca. I have the director's cut on video from VSOM. The Bluray has good video quality but is a mess. They should have included Franco's version as part of the release. Hopefully someone will contact a company like MONDO MACABRO or Severin to do a proper release

LA VENGANZA DEL DR. MABUSE, the original cut of this film, is a very interesting oddity, a very low budget sci-fi thriller, Jess Franco style. It opens with waves crashing onto a rocky shore (the film was shot in Alicante, Murcia and Barcelona) as lounge/jazz music, including some soft saxophone notes, vibes, lull the viewer into a receptive state until some bursts of le jazz hot sax stylings are later scored over action scenes. This score (which is altered in the Blu-ray version) was written by Jess Franco, as David Khunne, with an uncredited Daniel White (according to OBSESSION: THE FILMS OF JESS FRANCO) creates a mood unusual for a science fiction-crime film. Style usually dictates content in the filmography of Jess Franco, rather than vice-versa. The mise-en-scene of this film was affected by the low budget and initial demands of the producer, CCC CEO Artur Brauner, who presented Franco with an original treatment. Franco's response was a film which osscilates between the visual style of a B western and a Pop Art sci-fi film. I found my original review of LA VENGANZA DEL DR. MABUSE on the now defunct DARK WATERS website. It might be constructive at this point. This was written and published in 1998: -------------------------------------------------------------------- (a.k.a. DER MANN DER SICH MABUSE NANNTE; DER DOKTOR MABUSE) In a remote lighthouse lab, criminal mastermind Dr. Mabuse conducts mind control experiments on women who are kidnapped by his assistants. Mabuse uses a mineral from stolen moon rocks (!) to create a ray that turns people into obedient zombies. A stripper, a witness to one of the abductions, in turn becomes the next victim. Under Mabuse's telepathic guidance, she seduces an American diplomat. These rapidly escalating events are investigated by Thomas, the local Sheriff, who finally manages to locate the hideout. Mabuse is killed during a melee involving his brain damaged henchman, and the lab explodes. This obscure feature represents the last gasp of the long-lived Dr. Mabuse franchise, which had seen better days in the Fritz Lang thrillers of the 1920s and 30s. Franco's movie has a very rushed look, For intance, one scene is partially obscured by a section of the lens-cap which appears not to have been properly removed. Also, when the cops arrive at Dr. Mabuse's hideout, the shadow of the Manuel Merino's camera falls over the arriving police car. There's more: Some amusing touches include Mabuse's hulking henchman, Andros, who, with his sewn-up skull cap, looks like a refugee from a Hammer horror entry. The Red Garter "nightclub," which is just a parking garage with a few chairs and tables placed inside, is the setting for Ewa Stroemberg's minimalist striptease. The office of the local Sheriff (Fred Williams) looks like a leftover from some spaghetti western, and Williams appears throughout the film in a cowboy costume. Despite these curiosites -- and that Jack Taylor is miscast as Mabuse-like mad scientist -- the action is punctuated by a decent jazz music score, as well as some impressive photography. Most interesting are some extremely wide-angle compositions in Mabuse's lab and during the abduction scenes, which distort spatial relationships and employ lighting and color in a way which anticipate Kubrick's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. .................................................................................................................

Despite some similarites between A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and LA VENGANZA's visual styles I doubt if Franco had seen a pre-release of Kubrick's film or read the original 1962 Anthony Burgess novel before making his film. Orson Welles, a Franco mentor and favorite filmmaker, used similar wide angle lensing and shock lighting in his 1958 Film Noir, TOUCH OF EVIL. That said, Franco's film is not really an adaptation of the Dr. Mabuse character created by Norbert Jacques in a 1921 novel. Fritz Lang made an epic length, two part film based on the book in the early 1920s when a dissatified character was in prison waiting to take over Germany, create the Nazi party and war machine, launch World War II and operate concentration camps where millions of Jewish people were exterminated. Lang made two more Mabuse epics, THE TESTAMENT OF DR MABUSE in 1933, which Hitler admired so much he offered Lang the leadership of the Nazi film machine. Lang declined and slipped out of Germany for a career directing Hollywood films. Lang returned to Germany in 1960 to kill of Mabuse in THE THOUSAND EYES OF DR. MABUSE. THIS film was Lang's last but producer Artur Brauner, who ran CCC Films, produced 5 more Mabuse adventures during the 1960's which unfolded in descending order of interest. Brauner also became successful producing numerous German Krimi films, gritty crime stories which became boxoffice hits in Germany and Europe.

In 1970 Brauner decided to resurrect the Dr. Mabuse character for a new generation and gave Jess Franco a treatment to direct, which he did in late February, early March, 1971. Brauner resented that the film didn't follow his treatment and hired a team of directors and editors to shoot new scenes and reedit the footage as DR. M. Strikes. That is the film presented on the KINO CULT Blu-ray. Here is the copy on the back of the slipcase: [A criminal mastermind (Jack Taylor, Female Vampire) deploys poison gas and a beautiful whip-wielding assassin (Beni Cardoso) in a plot to steal government secrets in The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse (Dr. M schlägt zu). But his elaborate schemes risk unraveling when a small-town inspector (Fred Williams) stumbles into the scene. An unauthorized entry in the Dr. Mabuse cycle, the film makes no reference to Norbert Jacques’s clairvoyant criminal (the M-word is carefully avoided). Instead, director Jess Franco used the project as a chance to revisit his own sci-fi thrillers (The Awful Dr. Orlof, The Diabolical Dr. Z). Fold in a disfigured henchman (Rocha), a striptease dancer (Ewa Strömberg, Vampyros Lesbos), and wrap it all in a feverish jazz score, and the result is a spicy cinematic mélange that could only have been concocted in the demented mind of Jess Franco.]................................................................................................................

The name Dr. Mabuse is not mentioned in either the German version or LA VENGANZA DEL DR. MABUSE. Instead Spanish horror regular Jack Taylor is Dr. Farkas in the latter, who stages a wild west type of robbery (helped along by toxic gas) of "moon rocks" from a delivery van from the a local scientific institute. He is "the man who would be Mabuse" as a translation of the German shooting title indicates. The German version mentions that coded plans which Taylor, renamed Dr. Cranko, is seeking to sell to international criminals in Mexico. When it is discovered that the scientific plans may be encoded, Dr.Cranko panics and sends out the thugish Andros (Moises Augusto Rocha) on a kidnapping spree to leverage some blackmail. The name Andros references Franco's 1964 THE SECRET OF DR. ORLOFF, where a radio controlled robot named Andros was the center of attention. There's also a Dr. Orloff in this film, as a legit scientist who is attacked by Cranko's staff. It should also be noted that the violent kidnappings here are staged and edited to reference Franco's first horror film, GRITOS EN LA NOCHE (1961).

The western atmosphere is established by a pan shot over a sunbaked desert plain to the Spaghetti Western style police station of the local Sheriff (Fred Williams), who is assigned by his superior, played as a cigar chomping taskmaster by Franco himself, to investigate cascading situation. Williams, who had already played the lead in Franco's previous Brauner production, THE DEVIL CAME FROM AKASAVA, an action krimi with Soledad Miranda in her final role, is not an exciting actor. Dressed in cowboy gear, inhabiting an office interior which seems out of Howard Hawks' RIO BRAVO, he's there to re-establish the Euro-Western motif. Working in the shadow of Fritz Lang and Sergio Leone may not be as much fun as it would seem. The subsequent action toggles between a B Spaghetti Western, a B minus sci-fi film and a minimalist crime-action adventure. Nontheless, Franco manages to maintain interest in the comic book proceedings via frenetic pacing, tilted, color gel lit camera set-ups and non-stop esoteric in-jokes for genre buffs and Franco fans. All of these arcane references in the Spanish dialogue are wiped in the German language dub. The improv-style jazz-lounge score helps to maintain some kind of aesthetic cohesion. As Franco himself noted, he considered himself a musician-composer who made films. The rigidity of the cast inhabiting the ramshackle sets suggest a fun visit to a cinema theme park at a run-down carnival. So, go ahead and collect this Blu-ray if you must, maybe it will hold you over until a composite or a restored double disc LE appears in the near or far future. (C) Robert Monell, 2025

DIE MARQUISE VON SADE

Enter a hushed parallel world of Sex and Death...


Strange shadows in empty rooms. A bleak mise-en-scene...


DAS BILDNIS DER DORIANA GRAY/DIE MARQUISE DE SADE/DIRTY DRACULA/EJACULATIONS:
SWITZERLAND/WG-1976, 79m.
I think this film, best known as DAS BILDNIS DER DORIANA GRAY (1976), works a whole lot better without the distraction of the closeups mechanics of hardcore sex. just as LA COMTESSE NOIRE (1973) works best without the hardcore footage, which really drags it out.

As with LA COMTESSE NOIRE, Franco made this film as a hardcore female vampire film with the main character sucking the "essential liquids" from her victims and also as a version without the XXX action inserts.Then there was a horror version where the character is sucking blood from victims, as in the novel DRACULA and all the films based on it. But I don't know of any version of DORIANA GRAY which has traditional vampire scenes of the main character sucking blood from her victims, as the EROTIKILL version of LA COMTESSE NOIRE has. This version was distributed by Force Video in the mid 1980s in the US and lasts just over 75 minutes and is cropped at 1.33:1, which takes much of its impact away.

Many critics have complained about the numerous out of focus shots and seeming technical "errors" in LA COMETESS..., like Lina Romay bumping into the camera lens during the credits sequence. But I find these moments part of the film's uniquely dreamlike quality. To paraphrase the late Henri Langlois, sometimes Franco's failings become his greatest strengths.


It opens with one of the most stunning images in Franco's extensive filmography and justs get better as it goes along. An almost dialogue-free film the impressionistic and low level sound mix is very appropriate to the theme. DORIANA GRAY tells the same story as LA COMTESSE NOIRE with the same characters but in a slightly different key. An lonely female vampire leading a life of quiet desperation in lavishly appointed isolation. Adding a Conradian "secret sharer" in Doriana's torment, her twin sister, separated at birth, who suffers hidden away in the clinic of Dr. Orloff. First seen in a mirror sing songing a macabre nursery rhyme Doriana's twin is one of Franco's most haunting creations, a pathetic creature, a sexually addicted victim of her predatory sister's erotic experiences. She thrashes about having the climaxes denied to Doriana, who telepathically, or somehow, transfers the orgasms to her imprisoned sister who is almost always seen either sexually stimulating herself in between Doriana's transmissions.

It's a world without love, only compulsive sexual behavior, frustration and screaming release for the sister. Punctuated by the cries of birds and set to the minimalist sitar score of Walter Baumgartner the film is clinical, remote and deeply disturbing. The reduced, but luminous, color scheme which lights the way to world of shadows is rigorously explored by Franco's drunken camera.

Designed in slate greys and eye popping pinks (Doriana's see-through robe), set within a castle perched above a jungle (Portugal, probably), much of the run time is taken up with Franco zooming in to study the architecture of the estate. The endless rains pour from the mouths of gargoyles onto the hard tile floors of the mansion while Doriana slowly walks through pillared patios and down long, mysterious hallways to her next deadly assignation. Like Irina Von Karlstein she dies in private bath evoking the last lines of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." It works as unique version of Wilde's THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, while evoking Ingmar Bergman's THE SILENCE and Kieslowski's THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE.

Having re watched the 2003 VIP DVD from producer Dietrich's ELITE FILMS, taken from original camera negs and superbly restored, I find it somewhat technically flawed with some motion glitches, unless there's been a replacement transfer since then.
The English language track grates due to distracting voice casting. I do wish for a new English subtitled NTSC disc which ideally would contain both the non-hardcore version as well as the XXX one.

1976 was a rather amazing years for Jess Franco in that he managed to turn out three of his best films, all in different genres (erotic vampire; nunsploitation; gore/true-crime thriller) and styles: DORIANA GRAY, LOVE LETTERS OF A PORTUGUESE NUN and JACK, THE RIPPER. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Since I wrote the above text there has a been a Blu-ray release of DORIANA, with both versions on Dietrich's THE JESS FRANCO GOLDEN COLLECTION, which I haven't yet seen. I have now seen the non-hardcore version, DIE MARQUISE VON SADE, made in Southern France and in the Dietrich Studios in Switzerland, first in a XXX hardcore version, usually titled DAS BILINDAS DER DORIANA GRAY, then in a non-hardcore version with inserts shot by producer Dietrich (according to FLOWERS OF PERVERSION; THE FILMS OF JESS FRANCO). As Dietrich states in his OBSESSION interview, there were more than one version of both the non-hardcore and the hardcore produced. DIE MARQUISE... is a version I have seen on AMAZON PRIME, running approximately 69 minutes with the inserts replacing all the hardcore material. I much prefer this version as it overall plays in a quiet, daydreamy tone, which is often interrupted by graphic hardcore close-ups of genitalia and oral sex in DORIANA. It's more of a tone poem than an arty porno epic. Some references note a 74 minute version of this re-edit, and there may be more of both out there. The softcore version contains several scenes with Lina Romay, wearing a markedly different hairstyle, descending a staircase while holding a large flower, scenes of Romay smoking something from a pipe, seen through rain spattered window eating the flower. This nude descending a staircase and other footage replaces all the hardcore footage.

Here is a link to an updated article on both versions of the film, along with new interviews with actress Monica Swinn about the making of the film. Also included are research notes and bibliographical information. Written by Michael Orlando Yaccarino. https://www.dorianavilla.com/ (C) Robert Monell, 2025