We open with a condemned man, his features hidden behind a golden mask, heading for his just reward -- it’s kind of like the mask they nailed onto Barbara Steele in Black Sunday. While they lead him through seemingly endless corridors, the credits start to roll...

And I have to pause, already, to point out that even though this film may look Italian, and it may smell Italian, and it may be dubbed horribly like it was Italian, but this gothic creepfest is of German origins. And also that the soundtrack doesn’t fit the action very well at all: It sounds like the Magic Organ 8-Track my Grandma Shaw used to have -- and it's hard to be frightened to the tune of the "Beer Barrel Polka." Back to the film already in progress...

The executioner waves his axe, the horses are whipped, the ropes pull taught, and we quickly jump ahead in time as a singing minstrel tells of Regula’s horrible deeds -- complete with a slide show. (Sort of. He’s got paintings of the murders and the Count’s execution.) A small crowd has gathered to hear his macabre song, when he spots a man disembarking from a coach and enter a building. When night falls, the same man comes out of the building and the peg-legged minstrel follows him. They walk around for a while, giving the Foley-man some work, until the minstrel finally catches up. He asks if the man is the lawyer, Roger Mon Elise (Lex Barker). He is. Then the minstrel gives him a sealed envelope and promises that the answers to Roger’s past can be found inside. 

I find it odd that Barker, an American actor, is also dubbed, and so help me, it sounds like the voice of Leonard Nimoy!

Breaking the wax seal of the letter, Roger notices it bears a strong resemblance to his own family crest. Inside is an invitation to the Castle Andeline at the behest of Count Regula. (But isn’t he dead?) When Roger asks the man where it came from, he realizes the cripple has mysteriously vanished without a trace. Intrigued, he returns to his law offices and tells his partner that he’s leaving for a while. We jump to another town, and the minstrel is at it again, spreading the folktale of old evil Count Regula. Spotting a lovely young woman and her maid, watching him out of a window, he spies them a while longer and then pulls a similar envelope out of his breast pocket.

We cut again to Roger’s coach as it races across the countryside. They stop in the next town to feed the horses, and he asks directions to the Castle Andeline. The locals quickly shy away. (Uh-oh.) They call it an evil place and that the man who sent him the invitation has been dead for 35 years. A solemn religious procession marches past, led by a monk bearing a cross. Roger asks a local girl what it’s all about: She tells him it’s a ritual to help keep the evil spirits away, and only the lead monk knows the way to Adeline. Roger catches up and asks directions. The monk tells him the way, but warns the castle is in ruins. He also warns him to just stay away from the profane place as "A great danger awaits you there." Another priest, a Father Fabian (Vladimar Medar), pokes fun at the local religious practices. He asks Roger if he’s going to Andeline because that’s also where the Baroness Lillian von Brabaut (Karin Dor) and her maid, Babette (Christiane Rucker), are headed. We see them load up on their own coach and recognize them as the girls that the minstrel watched. (The plot thickens.)

Fabian asks if he might accompany Roger. Saying he has a baptism to perform up the road, but you get the feeling that this man is not what he appears to be. So together, they head off. Along the way, seven riders, dressed in black, pass them. Fabian refers to them as the Seven Deadly Sins and warns that they may be robbed. We also notice the slow deterioration of the countryside as they draw closer to Regula’s old haunts. Fabian prophesizes right, but the robbers weren’t after them, they were after the Baroness. Roger and Fabian manage to run them off, but they’ve killed the driver of the women’s coach. Since they’re all going to the same place, Roger invites them to continue the journey with them.

And here is where the movie starts to gets more interesting and real bizarre.

Night falls, and a fog rolls in. The road leads down a dark trail, surrounded by dead trees. The driver (Carl Lange) starts to see dismembered body parts littered about in the trees. As they pass a tree where three ravens call out, the rattled driver stops and jump off the coach. The others spill out, wanting to know why they’ve stopped. (Notice now all the body parts are now gone.) The coachman says they should turn back: The three ravens seen together on Good Friday are a bad omen. (Plot point!) But Roger orders him to continue on. So the poor guy climbs back on and the trip begins again. (And I mean "trip.")

The horses bolt, shaking the passengers violently. Roger pulls a nice Yakima Kanutt maneuver, manages to get outside, and stops the horses. He is revolted by what he sees -- the entire forest is filled with dead bodies, hanging from the trees and littering the road. Telling Fabian to get out, he tells the women to stay inside. One of the victims appears to be still alive, so Roger and Fabian rush to cut him down. Roger notices that several of the hanged are the men who tried to rob the baroness. But to his horror, they are nothing but skeletons. From out of the fog, a mysterious stranger slinks to the coach and steals it -- with the girls still inside. Whipping the horses on, they disappear into the fog, leaving the two men behind. They give chase on foot, but quickly lose their way until they hear a bell ringing. This leads them to a cemetery where all the gravestones read Regula. A metal gate creaks open, revealing the ruins of Castle Adeline. (Man, this is some genuinely creepy stuff.)

They enter through the gate and a cellar door opens up revealing a set of stairs. When the two men enter, the spiked door slams shut behind them -- the door looks like the teeth of some great beast, in a sense, devouring them. A few more phantom doors open and close, herding them into a chamber with strange murals of body-dismemberment painted on the wall. Another door opens, and our mysterious coach-thief joins them. He is Anathol (Deiter Eppler), the deceased Count’s trusted servant. Roger demands to know where the women are. Music suddenly fills the air, and Anathol opens another room where we see the Baroness, playing the organ. Anathol announces they have guests, and the Baroness doesn’t seem to remember them. Welcoming them to her castle, in her delusions, she mistakes a snake as a gift of jewelry. Roger demands to know what happened to her, while Fabian wants to know where Babette is.

The butler says the Baroness was hysterical, so he gave her a drug to calm her down. Roger doesn’t like this, and when Babette arrives with drinks for everyone, she silently warns Roger not to drink it. She then "accidentally" spills Fabian’s glass, and the liquid burns a hole in the table. Startled, Fabian rips off the preacher’s tunic and claims he’s no man of the cloth, but a highwayman. (I knew it!) He meant to rob them all before the butler got involved. Pulling his two pistols, he tries to bargain with Anathol but gets nowhere. Anathol takes the cup with the deadly liquid and shot-guns the rest of it. He laughs and then herds Babette out of the room, and the door slams shut behind them. 

And we, as an audience, say, "Okay. What the hell’s going on?"

Roger and Lillian turn another corner and find some vultures doing a number on some fetid corpse. (Man this place is better than Disneyland.) When Fabian catches up with them, a voice calls them into another chamber: It's the torture chamber where Regula did his dirty deeds -- and the strange thing is, the dead virgins are still there, and the corpses are looking mighty pristine for being dead for 35 years. Anathol is there, waiting for them, and reveals a glass sarcophagus. Inside are the severed parts of the late Count Regula. Regula left his servant orders to resurrect him on Good Friday, so Anathol slits his wrist and bleeds on the glass. But something isn’t quite right: He senses something holy in the room, so somebody probably has a crucifix. Lillian had one, but it’s gone. That’s because Fabian stole it. Anathol orders him to leave or face the consequences. On cue, another door opens and the robber amscrays, only to find himself trapped in a small cell. He isn't alone: The body of the minstrel is in there with him.

With the crucifix gone, Anathol continues bleeding on the glass and Regula slowly snaps back together. Rising from the coffin, he removes the mask and we finally get a look Count Frederick Regula (Christopher Lee). Turns out the Count is an alchemist who discovered the secret of immortality. It has to do with a blood concentrate extracted from the bodies of virgin women. The trick is, though, the women must be in a highly frightened state before the blood will work. (That’s why he tortured them first.) He needed the blood of 13 virgins to gain complete immortality, but the 13th victim escaped, and he was caught and put to death. Before he was killed, however, he managed to take some of the incomplete formula that allows him to be resurrected for this short while. Anathol reveals an hourglass and flips it over. Regula has that much time to find a 13th virgin and gain immortality. As we've already guessed, he then reveals that the judge who sentenced him to death was Roger’s father, and the 13th victim that escaped was Lillian's mother. Regula vowed vengeance on everyone involved with his trial and execution (including their families.) Anathol saw to that and informs the Count that everyone is dead -- except for these two.

I believe this explains the multitude of dead bodies scattered around the castle, and all those back in the forest. Anathol must have been busy. He got sloppy, though, and was caught killing someone and hanged for it. But he took some of Count’s elixir, which explains his zombie-like state and the neck brace he wears.

Meanwhile, back under the pendulum, Roger manages to free himself by knocking the blade off course by throwing a rock at it. (Yeah, I called "No way!" too.) Fabian has also managed to escape his cell, and they both head back to the main torture chamber to rescue Lillian. Regula’s chemistry set is all a bubble, and Lillian is finally ready. He orders Anathol to slit her jugular, so they can get the blood they need. Roger breaks in and orders them to stop. Regula throws a switch and a portcullis* drops between them.

Regula is about to gloat, but Anathol points out that his chemicals have petered out. Why? Because Roger has Lillian’s crucifix and it has rendered the evil equipment powerless. The hourglass almost empty, Regula and Anathol writhe in pain at the sight of the cross. Regula pleads with Roger to get rid of it. He gladly obliges and tosses it onto the chemistry set, which causes it to explode! The hourglass empties, and with his time up, both Regula and Anathol keel over and disintegrate. (The twelve virgin bodies also turn into skeletons.) Roger manages to get to Lillian, but the Castle is coming apart at the seams, and they barely manage to get outside before it completely collapses.

This has got to be one of the creepiest movies I’ve ever seen. In fact, it’s downright disturbing. The plot is pretty generic, and the acting is modestly adequate, but what sets this film apart are the incredible set pieces and the eerie atmosphere it creates. And Dieter Eppler's Anathol was one of the vilest screen heavies I've seen in a good long while.

Roger Corman’s Poe pictures heavily influenced director Harold Reinl, most famous for starting the Euro-Western trend. I hesitate to call it brilliant, but it took me a while to shake this film the first time I saw it. A lot of the credit for the lasting impression must go to the film’s cinematographer, Ernst Kalinke, and the art and set direction of Will Achtman and Gabrielle Pellon. I’ve never scene a spookier gothic castle than Andeline. Then again, the Germans were always good with gothic horrors. I’d love to see this thing in letterbox to get the full effect.

What I find fascinating when I watch one of these foreign jobs is that thinking about the film logically seldom works. Especially when they lose something in the translation. If it can’t be translated, the distributor usually lets it slide, allowing the horror to become even more illogical.  What this does is mess up the logical progression of what transpires. Or what we believe to be a logical chain of events if we got trapped in a gothic castle with a homicidal madman. And if we can't explain it, to me, the scarier the movie becomes. If nothing else, it helps keep the audience off balance.

The film is a brief 75 minutes, but not one of them is wasted. Once the plot is laid out, the dread builds until the climax. Which is why I highly recommend Castle of the Walking Dead, or whatever they're calling nowadays. So track down a copy and prepare to be entertained, but also brace yourselves to be really and truly creeped out.

Posted: 02/28/01. Copy and paste at your own legal risk.

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