Nightmare Castle (1965)
There was a time when I thought that Madacy's "Killer Creature Double Feature"
series of discs was a great idea. You get two movies, cartoon, and trailers
all for about ten bucks. After watching about four of these movies, I'm
beginning to realize that the kinds of movies they could afford to charge an
average of five bucks a piece to own, are the kind of movies that nobody but
someone like me would pay five bucks for. I mean, having to watch dross like Tormented, Werewolf In A Girls' Dormitory and The Werewolf vs. Vampire Woman really tests your mettle. So it was with heavy eye-lids and a fair
amount of my cousin's prescription drugs that I reluctantly and roughly inserted
the disc (I thought maybe I would "accidentally" break it.) that featured the
second movie on the Track Of The Vampire disc. This time, my sentence was ninety minutes in Nightmare Castle. It sounded like a busily entertaining movie on the back of the box, what
with a mad scientist, adultery, ghosts, strange experiments, and an inheritance
to get. Plus, I was assuming that this all took place inside a spooky castle.
You can imagine the fear that gripped my spine when the sick realization washed
over me that I was about to sit through another one of those, "I'm going to
drive my crazy wife crazy so I can get her money" movies. Hadn't we
just seen this concept ineptly executed in the mercifully short The Screaming Skull?
Yes we had, but this time it would be thirty minutes longer and substantially
harder to sit through. I consoled myself with the fact that some dame named
Barbara Steele was playing dual roles in this one. Reportedly, lots of Italian
horror geeks (you know the kind - they worry about stuff like finding
soundtracks to these movies) think she is da bomb. (The kids still say
that, right?) I'm all about watching bombs, so I popped the top on a Miller Lite, shoved a Vicks Inhaler in each nostril and prepared for the
worst.  Besides having a name you can't help but giggle at everytime you hear it, Dr.
Arrowsmith is one of those mad scientists that is always running off
to some convention or other, leaving his sexy wife at home with the hunky
handyman. I'm pretty sure his wife held out as long as possible before having
an affair (just until after she heard the carriage take off, I'd wager) with this
dude, but a sexy gal has needs that a scientist obsessed with inventing a
rejuvenation formula for his girlfriend is too busy to satiate.
Dr. Arrowsmith is halfway to the Mad Scientist Convention when he realizes that he
left his paper, On the Benefits of a Young Virgin's Blood For Rejuvenating
Beauty-Impaired Hags, up in his greenhouse. He gets an eyeful when he runs
into his wife and the gardener and he can't tell where she ends and he begins.
Mad scientist quickly becomes Insanely Jealous Mad Scientist and smacks the
hunk in the eye with some type of poker or stick or something. Next stop for
these two faithless dogs is the secret torture room that the doc keeps on
standby for just such an event. As far as cuckolded husbands go, Dr. Arrowsmith seems to be more interested in torturing
these two, than in getting even with them for their dirty deeds. He's got his old lady chained up to a bed that is hooked to some type of Die Hard car battery
and delights in zapping her every now again as her boyfriend watches helplessly
from the chair he is chained to. Eventually, Dr. Arrowsmith cranks up the
juice and his wife rides the lightning for the last time. Then he lets the
boyfriend go over to her and hold her, which allows the doctor to fry him to a
crisp as well. Later, we see the doctor at work in his secret lab where he has
removed some goopy stuff from the two lovers (their hearts, I presume, but the
picture was so muddy in this movie I had a hard time telling what he was
holding) and dumps that into a fishbowl. Then he drains out some of their
blood and I guess we were supposed to understand that his
girlfriend, the head of the household or whatever (I was never able to figure
out what exactly she was doing at the house except frowning and looking at the
various characters that Barbara Steele played with disdain) whose face
resembled Im-Ho-Tep's during his less than stellar moments would be using it to stop the aging process. At this point during the movie, I had lined out two horror gimmicks the movie was going to be using: murdered lover's ghosts taking revenge on their killer and blood used to revive someone's decaying looks. But that wasn't all that was going to be happening in this film. In spite of the terminal boredom you'll experience upon viewing this, they trot out a bunch of different story elements in an effort to get this
behemoth moving. None of it works.  See, when Arrowsmith's wife was being tortured she pulled the old laughing in his face bit about his inheritance. It turns out that she had a sneaking suspicion that he would react unfavorably to her heating up the
greenhouse with the help, so she changed her will so that her crazy sister would get everything in the event of her torture-related death. Dr. Arrowsmith hears this and immediately formulates a foolproof (with emphasis on fool) plan to get his hands on
the inheritance anyway.
This is where the movie finally comes in with its "torment the crazy wife into going more crazy" element that the movie had been promising. The doctor's plan seemed to be full of, um, optimism, as it were. You see, I think it was pretty optimistic of him to think that no one would ever ask him what happened to his wife and the gardener with the rippling abs. I think it was optimistic of him to think that he could just roll on up to the nuthut where the crazy sister was staying and immediately marry her ("I don't know what happened to your sister. Do you want to marry me?"), even though they
didn't know each other and he was presumably already married to her sister, and that she was so crazy that she needed to be locked up. Is this really an option for all those lonelyhearts out there? Are the days of mail order Russian brides and second
cousins over as the last refuge for the dumb, ugly, and shy? Can we now just all hop on a bus, hit the local asylum and have our pick of the whacko yet beautiful (and very available.)? Once he got married to the crazy broad his plan was to either kill her or drive her even more crazy so that the titular castle would be his to share with his old, nasty girlfriend. Doesn't anyone think that it would be suspicious that this dude was married to first one sister, than another and somehow these two young women would just up and die leaving him with all the goodies? The crazed sister is also played by Barbara Steele and you can see the depth of her acting range in that she's able to carry off the roles of both
sisters by wearing a blonde wig for this one. Or maybe she wore a black wig for the other role. I probably should just give the credit to those wigs! 
Initially the doctor
and his honey try to drug the new wife to drive her crazy, but there's a screw up and they don't get her drugged. Luckily, she's crazy anyway and starts seeing and hearing things. Unluckily, she's hearing and seeing the murders of her sister and her
lover. Now, for reasons that I must have repressed, Dr. Arrowsmith calls in a psych doctor to hang out and look after his new wife. I'm not sure what the point of all that was. Maybe he was hoping that this doctor could certify the wife as insane thus
giving our boy all the reason in the world to kill her (and he does need to kill her to get all the parting gifts). Whatever the reason, this new doctor soon becomes a thorn in everyone's side when he starts to believe everything that this crazy chick
is telling him! This leads to the single funny scene in the movie where Arrowsmith rigs up a bathtub to electrocute the doctor by running wires out second story windows and into windows on the ground floor, like when I have to run the
cable wire from my buddy's trailer into my trailer, cause I'm a little behind in my account. Then he sits in an adjoining room waiting to hear the dude get into the tub so that he can throw the switch. Well, he hears someone mucking around in the tub
and throws the switch, but somehow its the butler that ends up fried! Eventually, the ghosts of these murdered lovers come back and get their revenge on both Arrowsmith and his girlfriend. The headshrinker and his patient manage to escape out
of the castle and we are finally able to close a dark chapter in Italian cinema. This is a movie that tried it all and failed over and over. All the various plot points were ill-conceived, boring, or just plain didn't make any sense. The worst part of
all this was Dr. Arrowsmith and his girlfriend. The doctor never seemed to really care one way or another about any of these events, frying the butler simply elicited one of those shoulder shrugging looks and he didn't seem that bent on getting rid
of the new wife very fast. I also didn't understand the relationship that he and his girlfriend had. Why were they together? What exactly was her problem with needing blood to stop her aging? Why didn't she just use Oil of Olay? Inviting the hunky new
doctor didn't add up and only compounded Arrowsmith's problems in getting rid of the wife. Then you had some ghosts milling around periodically, but not as much as you would expect from a pair of vengeful ghosts. An unfocused mess with unmemorable performances by all involved.
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