Scream of the Demon Lover (1970)

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Excellent, a Must See

The movie runs out of plot and jokes well before the end of a two-hour running time, long for a light comedy.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

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.

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?

Blood Castle (aka Scream of the Demon Lover, Altar of Blood, Ivanna--the best, but least exploitation cinema-sounding title, and so on) is a very traditional Gothic Romance film. That means that it has big, creepy castles, a headstrong young woman, a mysterious older man, hints of horror and the supernatural, and romance elements in the contemporary sense of that genre term. It also means that it is very deliberately paced, and that the film will work best for horror mavens who are big fans of understatement. If you love films like Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963), but you also have a taste for late 1960s/early 1970s Spanish and Italian horror, you may love Blood Castle, as well.Baron Janos Dalmar (Carlos Quiney) lives in a large castle on the outskirts of a traditional, unspecified European village. The locals fear him because legend has it that whenever he beds a woman, she soon after ends up dead--the consensus is that he sets his ferocious dogs on them. This is quite a problem because the Baron has a very healthy appetite for women. At the beginning of the film, yet another woman has turned up dead and mutilated.Meanwhile, Dr. Ivanna Rakowsky (Erna Schürer) has appeared in the center of the village, asking to be taken to Baron Dalmar's castle. She's an out-of-towner who has been hired by the Baron for her expertise in chemistry. Of course, no one wants to go near the castle. Finally, Ivanna finds a shady individual (who becomes even shadier) to take her. Once there, an odd woman who lives in the castle, Olga (Cristiana Galloni), rejects Ivanna and says that she shouldn't be there since she's a woman. Baron Dalmar vacillates over whether she should stay. She ends up staying, but somewhat reluctantly. The Baron has hired her to try to reverse the effects of severe burns, which the Baron's brother, Igor, is suffering from.Unfortunately, the Baron's brother appears to be just a lump of decomposing flesh in a vat of bizarre, blackish liquid. And furthermore, Ivanna is having bizarre, hallucinatory dreams. Just what is going on at the castle? Is the Baron responsible for the crimes? Is he insane? I wanted to like Blood Castle more than I did. As I mentioned, the film is very deliberate in its pacing, and most of it is very understated. I can go either way on material like that. I don't care for The Haunting (yes, I'm in a very small minority there), but I'm a big fan of 1960s and 1970s European horror. One of my favorite directors is Mario Bava. I also love Dario Argento's work from that period. But occasionally, Blood Castle moved a bit too slow for me at times. There are large chunks that amount to scenes of not very exciting talking alternated with scenes of Ivanna slowly walking the corridors of the castle.But the atmosphere of the film is decent. Director José Luis Merino managed more than passable sets and locations, and they're shot fairly well by Emanuele Di Cola. However, Blood Castle feels relatively low budget, and this is a Roger Corman-produced film, after all (which usually means a low-budget, though often surprisingly high quality "quickie"). So while there is a hint of the lushness of Bava's colors and complex set decoration, everything is much more minimalist. Of course, it doesn't help that the Retromedia print I watched looks like a 30-year old photograph that's been left out in the sun too long. It appears "washed out", with compromised contrast.Still, Merino and Di Cola occasionally set up fantastic visuals. For example, a scene of Ivanna walking in a darkened hallway that's shot from an exaggerated angle, and where an important plot element is revealed through shadows on a wall only. There are also a couple Ingmar Bergmanesque shots, where actors are exquisitely blocked to imply complex relationships, besides just being visually attractive and pulling your eye deep into the frame.The performances are fairly good, and the women--especially Schürer--are very attractive. Merino exploits this fact by incorporating a decent amount of nudity. Schürer went on to do a number of films that were as much soft corn porn as they were other genres, with English titles such as Sex Life in a Woman's Prison (1974), Naked and Lustful (1974), Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975) and Erotic Exploits of a Sexy Seducer (1977). Blood Castle is much tamer, but in addition to the nudity, there are still mild scenes suggesting rape and bondage, and of course the scenes mixing sex and death.The primary attraction here, though, is probably the story, which is much a slow-burning romance as anything else. The horror elements, the mystery elements, and a somewhat unexpected twist near the end are bonuses, but in the end, Blood Castle is a love story, about a couple overcoming various difficulties and antagonisms (often with physical threats or harms) to be together.

(aka: BLOOD CASTLE or SCREAM OF THE DEMON)*spoiler*This was a drive-in feature, co-billed with THE VELVET VAMPIRE. A Spanish-Italian co-production where a series of women in a village are being murdered around the same time a local count named Yanos Dalmar is seen on horseback, riding off with his 'man-eating' dog behind him.The townsfolk already suspect he is the one behind it all and want his castle burned down. The murders first began around the time Count Yanos' older brother, Count Igor Dalmar was horribly burned and killed in a lab accident.Then a woman Ivanna (Erna Schuer) that Igor hired before his death to assist him in his experiments shows up. Yanos agrees to hire her in place of his brother and together they seek the formulae for the regeneration of dead cells. Yanos wants to bring Igor's charred corpse back to life.But of course Igor is still alive (although horribly burned) and stalking and killing the women in the village. We see his char-broiled face appear at various points in the film, so we know he's still alive, making the whole thing seem a little bit too obvious.Igor meets another fiery end when he gets into a fight with Yanos over Ivanna, with the burning candles falling on to the same bed that Igor stumbles on to, meeting yet another, final char-broiled end.The Retromedia DVD is taken from a VHS source and looks quite grainy and bad. Other than an even scratchier trailer, no other extras are included. Although it has a nice, creepy Spanish castle and good atmospherics, I found it to be fairly boring and predictable, with no excitement or mystery, whatsoever. 3 out of 10.