Castle Of Blood (1964)
This is based on the classic Edgar Allan Poe work called Danse Macabre. Coming out in the mid-sixties around the same time as all those Roger Corman and Vincent Price Poe films, it was understandable that the Italians wanted in on some of that action. What is less understandable is why they based their movie on a work by Edgar Allan Poe that didn't actually exist. I'm guessing there's some spooky, supernatural reason for this. Maybe this is based on a work that Poe's ghost might have written if the curse that was laid down on his family hadn't resulted in his castle collapsing into the sea while the strange painting of his ancestor yawned mightily. I think I saw that in a documentary about Poe that starred Vicent Price.
In any case, you can damn sure bet that even if that foul portrait had to cross through the gates of hell themselves to let out an otherworldly yawn of utter and sheer boredom after being subjected to this movie, it would have done so without hesitation. For as I pondered weak and wearily as this movie unfolded like a wet napkin, I couldn't help but have terrifying flashbacks (complete with wavy effects and echo-y voices) of past deadly encounters with that scariest monster of all: the mid-sixties black and white atmospheric Italian horror movie. Vampires, grottos, castles, and characters that conveyed the terror of the moment by standing around flapping their gums like dull exposition was the universal language of fear. Actually, the only fear to be found is in Italian movies with "tomb," "cave," and or "castle" in the title. (We dare you to behold the unearthly monotony of Tomb Of Torture, Cave Of The Living Dead, and Nightmare Castle for starters.)
Lest you think I was all bad attitude when I went into this, you should know that when I read the write up on the back of the DVD from Synapse, I was intrigued. 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. How could I possibly go wrong? It must be my attention deficit disorder because whenever I hear "haunted castle" I'm thinking of suits of armor swinging battle axes at guys and banshees, but I could be overly influenced by Scooby-Doo. I keep forgetting that what these movies mean when they say "haunted castle" is a guy timidly plodding through musty rooms with a candle stick and meeting mysterious broads who are obsessed with blathering about their tragic past. Nobody cares about your lost loves, now where's the hidden passageway to the moat full of gators?
This writer, Alan Foster, takes Sir Thomas up on his bet and you can tell what sort mark this guy is when he insists that the bet not be for one hundred pounds as Sir Thomas wants, but for only ten pounds, because that's all he can afford. When you consider that the folks who put up with Geoffrey Rush and his dumb house in the 1999 remake of The House On Haunted Hill did so for a shot at a million bucks, Sir Thomas is either getting a hell of a bargain or inflation has hit the "bet you can't stay in my haunted house for one night" market.
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 goons that has to have a movie for every holiday (you know - like Mother's Day or April Fool's Day) 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."
Finally, Alan gets dropped off at the castle (thanks for the lift, just honk outside the front gate when come back here in the morning.) and he blunders through the grounds in an effort to ratchet up the atmosphere of the movie. There's some tree branches, little black cat, and a mysterious piece of lace that I was assuming was haunted by a bunch of really stank ghost B.O. before Alan finally gets inside the castle all prepared to pooh-pooh the evil spirits that will try and kill him all night.
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. You'd think that Liz's husband or regular boyfriend would be the one to get all pissy about that, but I'm not the one with the haunted castle, am I?
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! Egads! You just knew those Italians would find a way to work some lesbo action into this haunted castle! Edgar Allan Poe surely is spinning in his grave. At least if he actually had anything to do with this project other than lending his name to it. (The fact that his ghost didn't visit some awful vengeance from the great beyond on main writer Sergio Corbucci has to be the best proof of a lack of an afterlife I've ever run into.)
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. As we all know, any Italian can chop up some poor animal for his movies (see Umberto Lenzi's cannibal output), so Carmus turns it up a notch, which in this case wouldn't be terribly difficult because the notch we had been operating at for the first fifty minutes or so wasn't exactly sky high. As I endured all this shadowy, wordy malarkey, I was thinking that I would be glad to be dead and stay dead if it made this humdrum affair end.
Alan gets to witness 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 a insanely dreary Italian horror movie? Without spoiling the ending, Alan ended up like yours truly - short about ten pounds (what's that - about eighteen real bucks?).
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 because from what we've seen of him in the past, (Cannibal Apocalypse and Ark Of The Sun God) you can say an awful lot about his films, but not that they're snoozefests. And what was up with 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 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?).
The liner notes are informative with references to the fact that whomever played Julia was repulsed by the idea of her character having to act all lesbo with Liz and provide a nice background to the movie (as is usually the case, the behind-the-scenes stuff is far more interesting than anything up on the screen). Synapse also should be commended for busting their hump to get a complete version of the film stitched together from a number of sources, but you can't help but feel the effort was wasted on something this unremarkable. Perhaps only worth a viewing if you want to have a look at Superargo (Superargo Versus Diabolicus) without his mask on (he's the crabby gardener).