Sometimes a film grabs you by the throat. Other times, it gently pats you on the back, hands you a warm cup of milk, and politely asks you to die of boredom. The Mistresses of Dr. Jekyll — also known by its grindhouse aliases The Secret of Dr. Orloff and Dr. Jekyll’s Mistresses — is the cinematic equivalent of falling asleep in a velvet coffin: it sounds sexy and gothic, but you’ll just end up itchy, confused, and wondering how you got there in the first place.
Jess Franco, that beautiful maniac of Eurotrash cinema, was clearly nursing a hangover when he made this one. This isn’t the Franco who gave us Vampyros Lesbos or Succubus or any of those softcore hallucinations where plot is optional and nipples are mandatory. This is Franco on autopilot — and not the sexy kind of autopilot where everyone’s shirt falls off. This is Franco riding a tricycle down a cobblestone road, too drunk to pedal, and too proud to stop.
Let’s unravel the plot. Or rather, let’s try. Because it’s less of a plot and more of a foggy wine dream scrawled on a cocktail napkin.
A young woman named Melissa—our stiff, expressionless protagonist—returns to the crumbling estate of her dead father, Dr. Conrad Jekyll (because apparently the rights to “Henry” were too expensive). She discovers that her uncle, Howard Vernon (reprising a role that’s legally not Orlof but spiritually very Orlof), is up to no good. You see, Uncle Jekyll has continued his late brother’s experiments… which involve using Morpho (again!) to hypnotize and abduct topless women for reasons that range from vague science to “we need a reason to justify a zoom-in on a woman in a negligee.”
Melissa drifts through the movie like a bored ghost, occasionally pausing to stroke furniture or gaze meaningfully at candleholders. She’s surrounded by a supporting cast of sex workers, caretakers, and one-liner-spouting weirdos who exist solely to deliver clunky exposition or die in soft focus.
Here’s the thing: The Mistresses of Dr. Jekyll wants to be a Gothic horror film. It thinks it’s got the haunted atmosphere of a Roger Corman Poe flick, the psychological dread of Eyes Without a Face, and the sensual elegance of a Jean Rollin film. Instead, it ends up feeling like a community theater adaptation of Dark Shadows directed by a taxidermist with a thing for mannequins.
Let’s talk about pacing. Have you ever watched paint dry? Now imagine the paint is whispering in Spanish, badly dubbed in English, and the camera keeps cutting to someone looking pensively at a fireplace for ten minutes straight. That’s what you’re dealing with. Every scene drags like a Victorian corpse in a taffeta gown. The characters move like they’re wading through syrup. The suspense has the pulse of a sedated housecat.
And the horror? Please. I’ve seen more terrifying things at IKEA. Morpho—Franco’s ever-loyal hench-monster—is back, and somehow even less menacing than before. He creeps around like he’s trying not to wake up the neighbors, abducting women who all seem far more annoyed than scared. “Oh great,” they seem to sigh, “another night chained up in the wine cellar with a guy who smells like mothballs and speaks in grunts.”
Howard Vernon, God bless him, is trying. He delivers his lines like he’s reading a Shakespeare monologue in a brothel. His eyes dart around like he’s checking for an escape route. At one point, he actually tries to seduce his niece — because why the hell not — and you can almost hear his dignity packing a suitcase and walking out the door.
And then there’s the editing. Scenes start with no warning, end without reason, and sometimes loop in on themselves like Franco spilled espresso on the film reel and decided to just keep going. The cuts are jarring, the transitions nonsensical, and the camera zooms in and out like a toddler playing with a telescope. You’ll get dizzy before you get scared.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Jess Franco film without some nudity. But even that feels phoned in. The film features multiple scenes of women undressing, bathing, or writhing in chains — but none of it has the usual sleazy energy Franco fans came for. It’s like the actors are doing their taxes in the nude. The camera leers, but even it seems bored. At one point, a woman gets undressed so slowly it felt like a punishment. I aged five years waiting for that corset to come off.
You’d think a movie called The Mistresses of Dr. Jekyll would lean into the perversity. Give us mad science! Give us lust and danger and moral decay! But no. What we get is a Frankenstein of half-baked ideas, stitched together with disinterested acting and a script that reads like it was written by someone who fell asleep during biology class and woke up in a bordello.
And that title? “Mistresses” implies some scandal, some fire, some smutty intrigue. But this movie doesn’t even know what to do with its women. They’re not mistresses, they’re plot furniture. The closest thing to agency they have is deciding whether to scream or faint. Most of them do both, in slow motion, while the camera zooms in on their ankles.
Still, there’s something oddly charming about the whole mess. Franco’s fingerprints are all over it — the obsession with hypnotism, the love of fog and shadows, the ever-present Morpho, who’s starting to feel like a bad penny in a gorilla mask. It’s like watching a director play with his own cinematic action figures, acting out a story only he understands, and daring you to follow along.
By the time the “climax” limps into frame — complete with a last-minute moral dilemma, a betrayal, and a fiery conclusion that’s about as fiery as a wet matchstick — you’re just happy it’s over. You’ll stumble out of the experience dazed, confused, and maybe a little angry. But you’ll also kind of respect the sheer audacity of it.
Because that’s Jess Franco. He’ll give you Gothic castles and mad doctors and sexy zombies — but he’ll also make you suffer for it. He’s not here to entertain. He’s here to inflict.
Final Verdict: 1.5 out of 5 misplaced corsets.
A dull stew of necrophilia, science fiction, and Franco’s wandering libido. Approach with caution — or at least with coffee.
