Alan Foster, a writer from London is skeptical that all of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are based on real events and ends up taking a bet from one of Poe’s buddies, Sir Thomas Blackwood, to try and spend a night in Blackwood’s castle. This castle is one of those castles where people are always accepting bets to spend the night and never coming out of it. What could possibly go wrong?
Sir Thomas makes some vague comments about how he always has people trying to stay in the castle on the night of the first full moon in November. Something about how the dead are alive that night and are able to bother everyone with the story of their lives.
This time, it happens to be on November 2, so even though the movie isn’t really worth your time, if you’re one of those weirdos that has to have a movie for every holiday, now you’ve got one for All Souls Day.
Sir Thomas gets some credit for not wanting to drag things out any longer and insists that they go immediately to the castle so that Alan can get on with losing his bet.
Poe goes along for the ride and he and Alan have a conversation about the nature of death or some similarly metaphysical bile that I always tune out whenever two characters are working their pieholes and one of them gets that faraway look in his eye that says “I am about to say something profound, therefore I must not look you in the face, for I may giggle at the absurdity of the lines I was given.”
Once Alan gets dropped off at the castle, the first order of business is to get spooked by the life-like painting of a blonde broad that hangs in the living room. Once that’s out of the way Alan meets Elisabeth.
Liz is of the Morticia Adams school of scary broads with her big eyes and long straight black hair. She’s really friendly towards Alan and before he’s at the castle ten minutes he’s declaring his love for her, making out with her and picking out names for their 2.5 vampire kids they’re going to have.
Liz explains that she’s Sir Thomas’ sister and when Alan remarks that Sir Thomas said that the castle was deserted, she says that he doesn’t really acknowledge her existence because she went and had an affair with the gardener.
No time to dwell on that because the chick from the painting shows up and makes a variety of catty comments to Liz. Her name is Julia and I don’t know that I ever figured out what her relationship was to everyone in the castle was, except for that relationship she was trying to have with Liz all over Liz’s bed later that night!
Eventually it comes out the Liz is pretty much dead and Alan runs into a guy milling around the castle called Dr. Carmus who perhaps holds the key to the strange goings on. Carmus explains that he’s working on some experimental stuff to prove that the death of the body isn’t as final as you might like to believe. If a person dies before their time or if they don’t really want to be dead, then they might yet still live based on feelings or spirit or just plain old fumes.
Alan is still in pooh-pooh mode for some reason, so Carmus “proves” his theory by whacking the head off of some hapless snake and then points at its still twitching head as evidence that he isn’t just your ordinary run of the mill mad scientist living in a haunted castle obsessed with playing God.
Maybe we all need some more proof though. Alan then witnesses a variety of scenes involving Liz, Julia, and Liz’s gardener boyfriend. He is shocked to learn that everyone involved is actually dead and then Carmus himself turns out to be dead. (This beefy gardener had a heck of an anger management problem.)
Liz must really like Alan because she explains to him that all these dead dudes (including herself) need his blood so that they can live again for that one day next November. She helps him escape, but can any man really escape an insanely dreary Italian horror movie?
I was barely awake enough to try and make sense of any of this. What was Sir Thomas’ motive to keep all this going? It was revealed that his real family name was not Blackwood, but Blackblood and that his ancestor was the dreaded Hangman of London, but other than that I couldn’t really see why he would have any interest in seeing these self-absorbed ghost-vampires perpetuate themselves.
I was also disappointed that Poe didn’t do much more than hang around at the beginning and end and say stupid stuff like “no one will ever believe that the story I write based on this incident actually happened.” Yeah, because first of all you didn’t write any such story and second of all because it was so freaking boring!
Director Antonio Margheriti surprises us with the lack of punch this movie has since so many of his other films such as Cannibal Apocalypse and Ark Of The Sun God are if not exactly high art, are at least not deadly dull.
And what was up with scripter Sergio Corbucci? The guy who gave us classics like Django, The Great Silence and even Goliath And The Vampires shows up with a story like this? I would say that he was saving his best stuff for his own movies, but the liner notes by Tim Lucas that come with the Synapse DVD say that he would’ve made this one except another of his flicks got the go ahead at the same time. (It was a Steve Reeves movie – how could he say no?)
Only worth a viewing if you want to have a look at Superargo (Superargo contro Diabolikus) without his mask on (he’s the crabby gardener).
© 2011 MonsterHunter
