Castle of the Living Dead (1964)

When you hear that a lead actor like Christopher Lee had to improvise most of his lines while dubbing the film afterward because the woman in charge of continuity lost his script you wonder what kind of movie you might be in for.  Truth is, Lee starred in so many of these movies as a villain of some sort that his lines were probably interchangeable from movie to movie.  What amazes me is that he even remembered doing many of these quickie films.

This one is an Italian production which is also known for being Donald Sutherland's movie debut.  The director, Warren Kiefer, is best known for being his son's namesake.

Bruno (Jacques Stany) leads a troop of actors shortly after the Napoleonic wars, the main act which features him as an executioner and the harlequin Dart (Luciano Pigozzi) as a criminal to be hanged.  After a dispute over money, Dart quits, making threats toward Bruno and stealing the horse of Eric (Philippe Leroy), a former army captain.  Eric agrees to join in Darts place when they receive an offer from a strange man named Sandro (Mirko Valentin) to perform for the local Count Drago (Lee).

Eric begins working his wiles on Laura (Gaia Germani), the female member of the troop, while the dwarf Nick (Antonio De Martino) has forebodings of his own after the group is warned by a witch (Sutherland) about going to the castle.  Bruno, caring most about money, decides to continue on to Drago's castle, which is filled with taxidermy.  Drago explains that he is working on ways of perfectly preserving animals after death.

Of course, those animals also include humans, and Bruno is given cognac with the Count's serum.  He dies during the hanging scene, and Dart, still on the loose, is blamed.  A local gendarme (Sutherland again) visits the castle and learns of the death and agrees to go after Dart at Eric's behest.

Drago's intentions become apparent after Nick's performance partner Gianni (Ennio Antonelli) disappears and Sandro attacks the dwarf, who is rescued by the witch, who reveals that she was Drago's first human experiment.  It is up to him and Eric to save Laura and bring the Count to justice.

Donald Sutherland plays three roles, and I confess I didn't know he was playing the witch throughout.  I thought he was just playing Sgt. Paul, the bumbling policeman, but he also plays another role as an old man in the film.  Christopher Lee, despite having to guess at his lines, still is gives it his all, but it is Mirko Valentin as Sandro that is the real sinister presence here.

While the movie is standard (and predictable) Gothic fare, it is still quite fun.  I am also happy that Nick gets to be quite a hero in this rather than being treated as comic relief.

Castle of the Living Dead (1964)
Time: 90 minutes
Starring: Christopher Lee, Philippe Leroy, Gaia Germani, Donald Sutherland
Director: Warren Kiefer


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's...
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman'...
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in...
Read more