User Reviews

I purchased the BLOOD CASTLE DVD on eBay for a few bucks not knowing what it was and all I can say is that I wasn't disappointed with this purchase. BLOOD CASTLE is one of those trashy European horror films that has almost no redeeming quality except for being thoroughly entertaining, for all the bad reasons. The opening alone was worth the price of the DVD: our heroine, Dr. Ivanna, arrives at the castle where she's supposed to help a scientist, Baron Dalmar, who does experiments on dead tissue. On her way to the castle 1) a man tries to rape Ivanna. 2) the castle's housekeeper fights with her. 3) the maid wants her dead. 4) and finally, Baron Dalmar nearly spits on her and wants her out the next day. Hmm...something tells me she's not welcome. With such a miserable arrival, you'd think Ivanna would leave the place in a NY minute but no, like so many great trashy films, our "headstrong" heroine decides to stay put and even enjoys a candlelight dinner with the grumpy Baron on that same eventful day. The intro is so over-the-top trashy (it's even greater than the memorable first few minutes of that Canadian film, JUNIOR) that I knew I was going to enjoy this.

But the fun doesn't end there. Ivanna is repeatedly drugged whenever she goes to bed at night, only to wake up from unconsciousness, naked, bound and tortured in mild sessions of S&M by an unseen man. Even after experiencing these nightly S&M sessions, Ivanna stays at the castle, dully convinced by the angry Baron that what she's experiencing are nothing more than dreams. To be expected, even after being treated so badly from the get-go, Ivanna, falls in love with the Baron. Ivanna completely disregards anything negative about him, including the obvious fact that the dour Baron is popular with the young ladies. Every women at the castle (it seems only women work there) is in love with the miserable chump, who doesn't mind taking advantage of the pretty young things. Things get even sillier as someone lurks around the estate and kills (and has been killing) women. Basically, the Baron's physically disfigured brother, Igor is responsible for everything. In a very long winded scene, the brother warns the Baron he should not get too involved with Ivanna or he'll suffer the consequences. So what do the Baron and Ivanna do about this? Well, they get married of course! During the very brief marriage ceremony, the Baron is shot by one of the angry locals (father of one of the dead girls). But all of this doesn't deter Ivanna, who, amidst all the dead young ladies and torture surrounding them, cheerfully comforts the hurt Baron that "it's just a flesh wound" and the two can go on and enjoy their honeymoon at the castle, where the killer/rapist/torturer brother is. The whole thing quickly devolves into a nightmarish love triangle of sorts, between Ivana, the Baron and Igor. Blame it all on love!

Anyway, you get the idea: subtle it's not. Almost everything is over-the-top ridiculous in this film and when it's not OTT, such as the predictable climax, things get a tad boring. But for most of the film, the director or writer revel in one illogically trashy moment after another. I really love these kind of films, everything as subtle as being hit over the head with a sledgehammer, and populated by characters behaving illogically. Even those who made the Retromedia DVD realize this and when you go to the scene selection section, we hear one of the funniest bits of dialogue from the dubbed movie looped endlessly.

The production values are beautifully risible. The opening and closing credits, with those candles and red curtains...ah, a soupçon of class. The music sounds sometimes like something from a Tim Burton film, which only adds to the oddness of it all. And customary to these kind of films, when the young ladies take off their clothes, they just beg to be killed.

As a standard film, I rate this a 2, but as a "it's so bad it's good" film, I rate it a solid 8 stars. If you enjoy trashy films, please watch this one. It's a must see. The only thing left for me to ponder about it: what would it have taken for that woman to get out of that freaking castle?

Perfectly watchable with good looking cast and setting but doesn't bear too much thinking about. funny goings on in the castle where the hero's brother is said to have dies recently in a fire. Girls are also going missing and it is reckoned that as soon as someone falls in love with the surviving brother they die. Oh and also there is a laboratory in the castle where they are supposedly trying to reactivate the burned remains of the brother. The lovely Erna Schurer, later to be seen in Strip Nude For Your Killer, (she almost does just that in this too!) helps our hero, Carlos Quiney and the most unlikely looking scientists you could not imagine. Things go bump in the night and Erna gets transported to a cellar for some S&M but she doesn't seem to mind or even seem to care when it occurs to her that Carlos is the main baddie. As I say not a lot of sense to this if you start thinking about it, but colourful and diverting enough, and there is the wide eyed Erna.

Scream of the Demon Lover goes by many names. Blood Castle. Il castello dalle porte di fuoco (The Castle With Doors of Fire). El Castillo de Frankestein. Killers of the Castle of Blood. Altar of Blood. El asesino del castillo sangriento (The Bloody Castle Killer). Scream of the Demon Lover. Le monstre du château (The Castle Monster). Murhaaja kauhujen linnassa (The Murderer In the Castle of Horrors, what a title!). Ivanna: El castillo de la puerta de fuego (Ivanna: The Castle With the Doors of Fire). Mördaren i skäcken hus (The Killer In the House of Horrors). Das Geheimnis von Schloß Monte Christo (The Mystery of Castle Monte Cristo).

In the U. S., New World Pictures cut it down to 78 minutes so it could fit on a double feature with The Velvet Vampire. It was also syndicated for television with all of the nudity missing, of course.

Biochemist Dr. Ivana Rakowsky (Erna Schurer, Strip Nude for Your Killer, Deported Women of the SS Special Section) is a very rare thing: a woman in an Italian gothic horror film who is capable and not just a damsel in distress - well, she is at times, but work with me here - but a capable scientist who travels to the castle of Baron Janos Dalmar (Carlos Quiney, who played Zorro in three films, Zorro's Latest Adventure; Zorro, Rider of Vengeance and Zorro the Invincible) to assist him in his experiments. She has some problems getting there. The only person that will give her a ride to the castle, Fedor (Ezio Sancrotti), tells her that she'll die in there and then tries to assault her.

The Baron isn't very kind to her either. Not at first, as he believes no woman can be a scientist. She shows him that she can handle it, even if his housekeeper Olga (Cristiana Galloni) has issues with her. Also, seeing as how this is an early 70s Italian/Spanish horror movie, there are also plenty of psychosexual moments. You see, Dr. Ivana sleeps in the nude and she has dreams where a scarred man visits her bedside and tortures her. Somehow, in the midst of all this, these two mismatched leads fall in love after science fonds them.

Castle Xenia has many secrets. After all, Igor Dalmar, the last owner, blew himself up real good and the Baron is his brother. Igor's body is in a milk bath and he wants Dr. Ivana to help him bring Igor back to life. Olga, in case you didn't guess, used to be with the Baron. And the new maid, Cristiana (Agostina Belli, who somehow went from being in movies like this and The Eroticist to being in the original Scent of a Woman), seems to want the lady doctor more than any man in this movie that still has his skin on.

As you can imagine from the town in the open of the film, young women are dying and everyone thinks it's the Baron. The man who keeps torturing the good doctor with a red hot poker and fumes while whispering, "Stay pure," hints that these girls have all died because they weren't virgins. And even more to the case of whodunit, each of these young ladies has lost their innocence to the Baron before they were killed. So who is it? Olga, who hates every women who gets near her forever lost lover? Cristiana? Or is Igor perhaps not so bereft of life? And why does the Baron have a library of werewolf and occult books that rivals Danzig's?

Director José Luis Merino also made the Paul Naschy movie The Hanging Woman, another movie with a ton of other titles but I prefer Beyond the Living Dead.

This movie hits all my buttons. Foggy castle. Strange science. Gorgeous young scientists with diaphanous see-through gowns carrying candelabras through a cobwebbed castle. Gnarled up monsters sneaking their way through the countryside with dogs howling in the Bava-esque moonlight. Man, I've been thinking about this since I watched it and every review I read that says that it's a boring dubbed Italian piece of schlock makes me want to conduct sinister experiments in the night and get this thing up to a higher rating on IMDB while unleashing my hound - a five-pound chihuahua - on anyone with the bad taste to dislike this epic.

A fun little Gothic horror movie in the tradition of Antonio Margheriti and Riccardo Freda which may be a little slow-moving for some. This Spanish/Italian co-production (filmed in Spain) borrows heavily from the atmosphere of the exceptional early '60s Italian Gothic era, with candlelit corridors, dank and cobwebbed rooms, and a castle which holds a terrible secret. For Euro-horror fans there is much to enjoy; from the fetching leading lady who regularly disrobes for the camera, to the brooding atmosphere of hidden tension and underlying danger.

Things begin in a cod-European village (familiar to fans of Naschy work from the period) as the town drunk discovers the mutilated corpse of a young woman, whose throat has been gashed with claws or fangs. At the funeral of the girl, rather hilariously, a sound of women crying has been looped and thus plays over and over again, giving a rather odd effect as you listen to the same sound repeatedly - it's certainly weird! The police are rather ineffectual, aside from the chief detective (who looks like Nicholas Farrell and is a pretty good actor) who suspects that something dodgy is going on at the local castle.

Here we are introduced to the lead, a pretty young blond scientist who has applied for a job at the castle. She's rather a brash young lady who still manages to end up as a screaming victim, due to movie convention (Spanish movies are notoriously dependent on previous movies and influences rather than looking forward and creating their own, which is why the country's horror product is usually passed over in textbooks). The scientist is taken to the castle by a local driver, who then attempts to rape her before driving off when the Baron arrives. This leads to a hilarious scene where the police convict the man of attempted rape WITHOUT actually speaking to the victim or hearing the testimony of any witnesses! How they came to their conclusion is beyond me - unless the castle is equipped with CCTV which I somehow find unlikely.

The Baron - a bearded, 40-ish bloke who is introduced atmospherically with a pair of slavering dogs in a storm (rather like Barbara Steele in Bava's BLACK Sunday, come to think of it) is a short-tempered chap. He takes on the blonde lady and the pair slowly - think very slowly - fall in love. In the meantime the Baron's research is into giving life to dead flesh. You see his brother - Igor - was burnt previously in a fire and his charred corpse is kept in a water tank in the hope that he will be restored to life. A load of nonsense, sure, but it makes for a good and grisly visual plot element.

Meanwhile, the blonde has repeated nightmares of being chained up (naked of course) and groped by a figure which is hideously mutilated - or burnt. At the same time a series of young girls are being murdered in the village, all by the same method. As one policeman says, "I saw lots of murders in the city but never one that made me vomit"! Eventually it transpires that the Baron's brother was never really killed in the fire, only hideously burnt, so he has to be kept locked up in a disused room (just like in THE OBLONG BOX). He harbours a jealous grudge against his brother which leads him to murder his brother's succession of lovers.

All rather average stuff, you may think, and you'd be right. There aren't many surprises or clever plot twists in this film, although it does mislead you at first into thinking the monster and the Baron are one and the same before going off on a tangent. In the end it turns into a predictable series of murderers punctuated by conversation. There are a couple of good scenes (like when the Baron is shot by an angry villager during his marriage!) and scares, such as the arm reaching up from the side of the bed to menace the blonde woman, but this is predictable stuff. The film isn't very gory, instead concentrating on displaying flesh rather than blood; just about every female member of the cast is required to go topless at some point.

It does without saying that the acting tends to be wooden, although the leading actor and actress are pretty good in their respective roles. The dubbing is quite funny, with a range of amusing regional British accents. There's a repeated theme on the music track which is quite effective too. Merino's direction is nothing to write home about, pretty static as it happens, and occasionally he seems to have some trouble with getting his actors in focus! However, the reason I enjoyed watching this film was the atmosphere. The Gothic village and castle sets are brilliant and expensive-looking, the costumes authentic too. The film is really brimming with atmosphere and suspense which make even the clichéd bits - a lightning storm, the action ending - exciting. To conclude, this is nothing that an experienced horror fan won't have seen before, but it's a more than adequate Spanish attempt at a Gothic horror which does the job well, and will be enjoyed by Euro-horror fans.

WARNING: SPOILERS I saw this film under the video title "Blood Castle"..this is a story about two brothers, one is real smart and knows a lot about chemistry, he is also a Count (whatever that means) and lives in a big castle in euro-horror-landia, or somewheres..unfortunately, he also has a problem - he was in a terrible accidental (?) fire and got horribly burned and disfigured, also (if you pay close attention towards the end he reveals that) apparently his tallyho was burnt off and, left without a smidgen, he is unable to, as the parlayance of the time went, "make it with the chicks". His brother, on the other hand, doesn't know much 'bout chemistry, however his tallyho is intact and functioning, and he is somewhat of a pretty-boy/ ladies' man/ lothario-type, at least compared to his crispy brother who is exiled to a supposedly "crumbling" section of the castle. Well, the two brothers come to a sort of arrangement: Ygor, the crispy chemist, will share with his brother the secrets of chemistry, in hopes that a formula can be found to restore him to a non-crispy state; Yanos, the pretty face, meanwhile, will use his good lucks and functioning johansen to go out and make it with all the local beauties. Problem is, all the local beauties keep turning up mutilated and dead just after being with Yanos, and of course he is prime suspect #1. Oh yeah, we're all supposed to think that Ygor is dead from the fire and Yanos is trying to reanimate his corpse, but since Ygor's crispy hands (and eventually face) keep showing up throughout, it's a little difficult to manage. Of course there is a beautiful young woman (Erna Schuerer) who comes to the castle as a chemist/ assistant and of course, falls for Count Yanos, as does every other female within 100 mile radius, apparently. There is some female nudity. I enjoyed this film even though it effectively removes all suspense as it goes along, rather than building it, still if you play along it is fairly entertaining, but I am surely more tolerant than some would be...

Blood Castle AKA Ivanna AKA Scream of the Demon Lover (easily the film's best title, in my opinion) is a Gothic Euro-horror that, being a product of the early 70s, is able to spice up the more traditional goings-on (creepy castle, prowling monster, creepy housekeeper, hidden torture chamber etc.) with female nudity and a touch of mild bondage whenever matters threaten to get a little dreary.

The film begins with the brutal murder of a young woman—the sixth girl to be butchered in the area in under a year—with the finger of suspicion pointing at ladies' man Baron Janos Dalmar (Carlos Quiney), who has had dalliances with all of the victims. Despite all the killings and the subsequent rumours, beautiful biochemist Ivanna Rakowsky (Erna Schurer) isn't deterred from assuming her position as the baron's assistant, helping with his experiments into regenerating burnt flesh: even when the baron tries to send her packing, having hired her unaware that she was a woman, Ivanna insists that her contract of employment is honoured.

During her stay in the castle, Ivanna suspects that her every move is being watched, and experiences terrifying night-time 'hallucinations' (or so she is led to believe) in which she is stripped naked, tied up and groped by a hideously scarred man; she also falls in love with Janos, but is still not completely convinced of his innocence, believing him to be suffering from a split personality—at least until she discovers that the baron's brother Igor, supposedly killed in a fire, is still alive and living in the castle…

Yup, you guessed it... it's Igor whose been slicing up the girls. With his manhood destroyed in the blaze and a face like a week old pizza, he's insanely jealous of his bro's success with women and is doing his best to spoil the fun.

Although José Luis Merino's direction isn't quite as stylish as many an European Gothic horror, his wise decision to show as much bare female flesh as possible goes a long way to compensate, with the lovely Schurer frequently getting naked for the camera and gorgeous brunette Agostina Belli, as Janos' infatuated maid, shedding her clothes for a roll in the hay with her master. Hell, even middle-aged house-keeper Olga (Cristiana Galloni) strips off for Janos in an effort to get some.

The hideously disfigured Igor is also a lot of fun when he finally shows his face (he's the one who has been abducting Ivanna at night and tying her up for a fondle, if you hadn't already guessed): in the thrilling finale, the twisted, emasculated freak (surprisingly decent make-up effects making for an effectively repugnant killer) tries to attack Ivanna, struggles with Janos, and ultimately goes up in flames for a second time.

6.5 out of 10, rounded up to 7 for IMDb.