ALONE AGAINST TERROR (1983)

The shadow of Dr. Orgaf (Ricardo Palacios), a distant relative of Franco's iconic Dr. Orloff, lurks over Jess Franco's 1983 psychological thriller, SOLA ANTE EL TERROR.

Jess Franco has managed to produce numerous remakes, semi-remakes and rebrandings of his own films throughout his career. SOLO ANTE EL TERROR is a 1983 remake of his third film featuring Dr. Orloff as a medical villain, LOS OJOS SINIESTROS DEL DOCTOR ORLOFF (1973), which already had plot elements from NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT (1970). Shot in Barcelona and the Canary Islands, LOS OJOS... has always struck me as the weak link in the original Orloff quadrilogy which includes GRITOS EN LA NOCHE (1961), EL SECRETO DEL DR.ORLOFF (1964) and EL SINIESTRO DR.ORLOFF (1982). In any case, it's not an "official" remake of the earlier film. It exists more as a reimagining of the same character in an overall similar plot. Set in the archetectural labyrinth of Ricardo Bofill designed buildings, Xanadu and La Muralla Roja in Calpe. OBSESSION: THE FILMS OF JESS FRANCO sums it up as "A remake of LOS OJOS SINIESTROS DEL DR. ORLOFF minus the acting skill of the original model which was already tedious." The 1973 film is indeed slack and very low on the rich and strange atmosphere of Franco at his very best. 1983, however, found Franco in a more inspired mode, with more personal Franco projects in production, including his minimalist-Gothic version of Poe's THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, which emerged as LOS CRIMINES DE USHER), and two very personal and stylish neo-noirs CAMINO SOLITARIO and LOS BLUES DE LAS CALLE POP (aventursas de Felipe Marlboro, volumen 8).

An unapologetic remake of THE EYES OF DR. ORLOFF, SOLA ANTE EL TERROR is in some ways a more experimental iteration of the same story and characters. Greed, mind control and tragedy are the governing themes in SOLA ANTE... as they are in LOS OJOS... only the mood is more heightened and downbeat. The abstractions of the Bofill structures are alienating and jagged edged. William Berger was excellent and well cast as the unethical Dr.Orloff in LOS OJOS... in SOLA... the hefty Ricardo Palacios as Dr. Orgaf, resulting in a less exotic depiction of a favorite Franco villain. He seems to have stumbled onto the plot by Melissa's sisters to drive her mad and grab her inheritance, after Orgaf signs the committments papers. But plot and character are on the back burner of Franco's oven this time. Instead, an atmosphere thick with suspicion, personal betrayal, unfulfilled love and psychic tension fill the runtime. The paraplegic Mellisa (Lina Romay), pushed around in an infant stroller rather than a wheelchair, becomes a pawn in the hands of her evil sisters, Orgaf and the magnetic pull of her murdered father and her younger, innocent self (embodied by Flavia Hervas) intruding to drive her to vengeance. At the chronological halfway mark of Franco's feature fim career, things were changing inside the mind of the prolific director.

Mind control and Cinema as psychoanalysis are always major themes in the filmography of Franco, going all the way back to EL SECRETO DEL DR. ORLOFF (1964), in which a student of Dr. Orloff creates a violent radio controlled robot who murders several exotic dancers when activated. Mind control scenarios are also prominent in MISS MUERTE (1965), SUCCUBUS (1967) and KISS ME, MONSTER (1968). The scenario of ALONE AGAINST TERROR also resembles the 1969 Franco script THE NIGHT HAS EYES, noted by Francisco Cesari and Roberto Curti in their book, THE JESS FRANCO FILES, VOL. 1, FOUR SCREENPLAYS AND A SYNOPSIS BY JESS FRANCO (VIAL BOOKS, 2017. The book traces the literary roots to the 1941 novel by Cornell Woolrich (as William Irish), NIGHTMARE. Elements of the plot also appear in several American film noirs, such as NIGHT HAS 1000 EYES (John Farrow, 1948). THE NIGHT HAS EYES was filmed by Franco as NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT (1970), an outstanding psychoanalystic crime-drama featuring impressive performances by Paul Muller and Diana Lorys as criminal mastermind the exotic dancer whom he uses to eliminate his partners in a crime. The plot of a vulnerable woman whose unconscious mind is used to achieve a double cross was further developed in THE EYES OF DR. OLOFF (1973) and MIL SEXOS TIENE LA NOCHE (1983).

While not as stylistically poised as MIL SEXOS TIENE LA NOCHE, featuring Jess Franco himself as the psychiatrist who saves the programmed killer (Lina Romay), a psychic in the grip the deadly clutches of her manager (Daniel Katz), at the last minute. Melissa (Romay) in ALONE AGAINST TERROR, dies tragically as she attempts to put a stop to the plans Dr. Orgaf has for her future. What's more interesting here is that Franco seems more interested in creating an overwhelming atmosphere of confinement and paranoia than he is in retelling the same story with different actors. The Bofill structures become psychic entanglements between imprisonment and death. No happy endings here. Most interesting of all is the way the characters of the young Melissa (Flavia Hervas) and her father (Antonio Mayans are integrated into the present tense of the film. They seem to exist in a kind of parallel dimension rather than a prosaic "past". At one point we see the adult Melissa photographed in the foreground of the limestone landmark EL PENON DE IFACH, jutting out of the Calpe coastline, the camera lens imperceptibly moves toward her and then slightly pans to reveal the young Melissa standing in the same position, magically, or so it seems, occupying the same spatial-temporal unit in an unbroken shot. No editing or special effected needed. The film concludes with the now united dead father and remembered daughter walking away from the preceding narrative construction. What could have been is as crucial at this point as the tragic end suffered by the adult Melissa. But that would be another film, and this would be the final time Franco returned to this story and these characters.

The Penon de Ifach, iconic landmark in Spain and iconic location in the filmography of Jess Franco.

(C) Robert Monell, 2025