Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks (1974)

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Blistering performances.

When I was 11 or 12, I remember liking these kind of films late at night on TV, but time has moved on and so has film-making tastes.I find it very hard to watch these poorly directed poorly dubbed movies any longer.Brazzi plays mad Dr. Frankenstein, Dunn is an evil dwarf and Lugosi (no relation to Bela) is a Neanderthal man. Add a monster named Hulk, and some nude women for sexploitation value, and you have the plot.In other words, there IS no plot!The film is typical 70's shlock Italian horror. Old dark castle, lot's of zooming to eliminate the need for an actual production crew with multiple camera set ups, and really bad dubbing that over shadows the bad acting!This mix makes for one smelly cocktail. Unless you're 10 or 11, then you may very well love it.

*Spoiler/plot- Frankenstien's Castle of Freaks (Ill Castello Della Paura), 1974. Count or Baron Frankenstein has a daughter that is getting married. She travels with her personal young attractive lady assistant. The kids come home to the castle to visit with dear old dad even while he is still desecrating graves and experimenting with body part transplants. With this combination of Gothic characters, a shallow plot develops.*Special Stars- Michael Dunn, Rossano Brazzi. *Theme- Death is part of life.*Trivia/location/goofs- Color. Italian. Elvira, Mistress of the Dark did a 'smash-up' of this film on her Movie Macabre. Didn't the villagers bash the giant in the head several times to kill him and then a new brain was introduced. Michael Dunn's dialog is dubbed and wears a disguise-like mustache.*Emotion- I was very surprised to see such huge successful film and TV stars like Rossano Brazzi(South Pacific) and Michael Dunn(Wild Wild Wild West's- Dr. Loveless) appearing in this B-Movie. There is a small amount of female nude milk & hot spring bathing and young lover's sex to spice-up the sagging and pedestrian plot. It is a shame the stars in this film were wasted and sleep walked through their roles, especially Brazzi. Dunn's sympathetic dwarf role while textbook, did show some creativity and pathos to make his scenes very watchable. The film was balanced into the positive aspects with the gimmicks of nudity, sex, and star power in the film's cast.

Terror! Il Castello delle donne Maledette, or Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks, Frankenstein's Castle, Monsters of Frankenstein or The House of Freaks as it's also known under amongst other deceptively lurid titles, starts as Maria Frankenstien (Simonetta Vitelli), her fiancé Eric (Eric Mann) & her friend Krista (Christiane Rucker) arrive at her childhood home the Frankenstein Castle. There they are greeted by Maria's father Count Frankenstein (Rossano Brazzi) who has been conducting experiments on local Neanderthal cavemen, throw in some grave robbing, some mild nudity, a hunchback & a dwarf & you have a mess of a film with virtually no plot...This Italian production was directed by Robert Oliver & is total crap. The script by Mario Francini, William Rose, Mark Smith & Roberto Spano (it took four people to write a film this bad?) is a mess, there's no recognisable coherent storyline in it & it just seems a loosely connected series of incidents & character's which makes for a very tedious 90 odd minutes. The Frankenstein character is present in this film in name only as he doesn't stitch any body parts together, he doesn't play about with any brains or 'create' a creature. I have no idea what the thinking behind the Neanderthal cavemen are all about, it's just plain odd & throw in stupid annoying dwarf into the mix & one has to wonder what the makers of this nonsense were thinking. Was this meant to be a comedy? If it was it isn't funny apart from the hilarious English dubbed dialogue. Is it meant to be scary? Well, it's not scary at all & has virtually no horror elements that I see. Other than either horror or comedy I can't see what else the makers were trying to do with this film & since it fails miserably at both I wasn't impressed.Terror! Il Castello delle donne Maledette is a mess of underdeveloped ideas that go nowhere & awful character's. Despite it's many lurid & exploitative English titles this is very tame stuff, there's some brief nudity but no blood or gore to speak of. The most exploitative it gets is when it is implied a dwarf rapes a woman, it is not shown on screen though so don't get too excited. Also, what happened to the body Frankenstein stole from the graveyard? It gets mentioned quite a few times but it's never revealed why Frankenstein stole it or what he did with it. Another problem with this film is that it is just so boring, virtually nothing happens & the photography is so bland & dull it's just a chore to sit through.Technically the film is basic with shaky & jerky camera pans & zooms, rubbish special effects & lowly production values where an entire village is represented by about seven people. Some of the interior castle scenes look quite good & are quite atmospheric but that's down to where it was shot rather than any great effort on the filmmakers part. It's hard to tell about the acting since all the cast are dubbed into English but the English voice actors are terrible & the dialogue just sounds ridiculous & fragmented.Terror! Il Castello delle donne Maledette is awful apart from some unintentionally funny moments, a decent castle setting & a few naked bodies, overall I thought it was tedious & pointless in the extreme.

"Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks" is rancid 70's euro-exploitation at its absolute finest! Not a single line in the screenplay makes any sense, the females look hot & willing, the males are all sick perverts and the supposedly horrific make-up effects are so cheesy they cause you to laugh instead of to cringe. The residents at Count Frankenstein's castle are not only freaks, they're crazed sexual deviants! He has an army of lunatics surrounding him, all assisting in his macabre scientific research, and each of them is worthy of his/her own horror spin-off! There's the horny caveman lying on Frankenstein's operating table, the hunchback who has aggressive sex with the main butler's wife and – of course - the depraved midget Genz, who fondles dead girls' bodies and has peepholes all around the castle to stare at people having sex! Count Frankenstein is a bit of a sleaze-bag himself. When his gorgeous daughter returns home, he immediately falls in love with her sexy friend and even involves her in his demented experiments. Genz the dwarf gets banned from the castle, but he teams up with a roaming Neanderthaler in the woods and teaches him the 'art' of raping innocent women. Everything comes neatly together in the end, when the townspeople no longer tolerate the abnormalities going on at the castle and form an angry mob. As you can tell, there's a whole lot going on in this crazy flick, but it's unbelievably incoherent. This wacky production features none of the tense Gothic atmosphere of all the previous Frankenstein tales and I don't think director Robert Oliver ever intended to focus on suspense. This film is all about shlock, sleaze and the ravishing naked bodies of Simonetta Vitelli (as Frankenstein's daughter) and Christiane Rücker (as Frankenstein's mistress). The cameras follow them each time they take a bath or go swimming, preferably with Genz the sniveling dwarf spying on them. The horror-sequences are scarce, short and actually quite irrelevant. The photography and use of music are horrendous, but they acting performances are surprisingly tolerable. Rossano Brazzi doesn't seem to be very interested in playing the titular character, but the freaks and particularly the girls do a fine job. Utter trash, but vastly entertaining cult material.