Original title: Amanti d’oltretomba
Though stylishly shot in glorious black and white by Enzo Barboni and making good use of an actual mansion (the Villa Parisi in Frascati, Lazio), Mario Caiano’s Nightmare Castle is a rather pedestrian affair despite a good opening act. It owes a considerable debt to Mario Bava’s trailblazing La maschera del demonio/Black Sunday (1960) (and a bit to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-tale Heart too) but brings little new to the Italian Gothic horror films of the 60s.
Scientist Stephen Arrowsmith (Paul Meuller) discovers that his wife Muriel (Barbara Steele) is having an affair with the gardener, David (Rik Battaglia) and takes his revenge by disfiguring David with a hot poker, scarring Muriel’s face with acid, torturing them and finally electrocuting them to death. He learns that the heir to Muriel’s estate is her mentally unstable stepsister Jenny (also Steele) so marries her while using blood from David’s and Muriel’s hearts to rejuvenate his servant, Solange (Helga Liné). While trying to drive Jenny insane, Muriel and David return from the dead to take their revenge on their tormentor.
The various shoddy video transfers over the years did little justice to Barboni’s photography but while later digital releases showcased his work to great effect, it only highlighted how deficient the film is in other departments. It’s a fool’s game to start picking on the dubbing of 1960s and 70s European films but when a dub is as poorly written and performed as it is here it’s impossible not to. No matter how good or bad the cast may be (Steele is magnificent as ever no matter the quality of the transfer or the dub) their hard work is inevitably compromised by the leaden dialogue and flat delivery of the dubbed version. It’s doubly disappointing that the dub is so poor given how much gabbing there is in Nightmare Castle.
But even in its native Italian it’s unlikely that Nightmare Castle would have been all that scintillating. There’s some eye-opening sado-masochistic violence in the opening act, with Arrowsmith splashing acid, tying up victims in his private torture dungeon and inflicting pain and misery with unseemly enthusiasm but it all gets a bit silly as it goes along with Liné’s old age make-up being particularly laughable and Arrowsmith’s plan to keep her young being head-scratchingly obscure. After that bravura opening act it fizzles out depressingly quickly.
There are things to enjoy here – Jenny’s dream sequence is wonderfully eerie (it’s faceless protagonist is the source of one of the film’s many English language titles. The Faceless Monster), Steele is fantastic (Caiano has said that the film was intended as a love letter to Steele) and despite a few syrupy string motifs here and there, Ennio Morricone’s is as distinctive and emotional as you’d expect. But it’s not enough to save a film that’s poorly plotted, indifferently acted by the supporting cast and by the end, more than a bit dull. It’s hard to understand how a film with so many potentially exciting components – creepy old castles, disfigured ghosts, torture, Barbara Steele, mad scientists – can end up being so dreary.
Caino is no Bava, lacking the latter’s eye for detail and ability to conjure up an atmosphere that helps tide us over some of the sillier moments in his films. He shows no real flair for horror and only infrequently returned to the genre, often with mixed results at best. In 1988 he was fired from Nosferatu a Venezia, the unofficial sequel to Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979). It was an extraordinarily troubled film officially credited to Augusto Caminito but which also passed through the uncredited hands of Pasquale Squitieri (also fired) as well as star Klaus Kinski and other directors like Maurizio Lucidi and Luigi Cozzi who chipped in scenes here and there.
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