Theme Song: None.
Interesting Dated References: England being a source of movie entertainment. Castles being scary. Scary things in general being scary.
Best Line: None.
Social Context: This movie again attempts to analyze why the British suck at making horror movies.
Summary: So far the plot of this movie involves some old count being killed for killing women, then it flashes forward like 30 years and some rich pompous doofus gets invited to the castle the count lived in. Along the way he stumbles upon a woman who is also going to the castle. Then the music gets abnormally funky as they approach the castle. Then there are a bunch of choppy edits. This review is going to be as boring as And Now The Screaming Starts…. So the driver of the carriage starts to trip out as he goes through the forest, and he thinks he sees a bunch of people hanging in the woods. Then the driver dies and the dude and the chick and a few others are stranded. Then there’s a spooky graveyard followed by a spooky cave.
Everyone eventually arrives at the castle. The woman who was picked up is suddenly transformed into some type of heiress and she shows the British guy and his priest-friend around. There are gigantic Hieronymus Bosch paintings on the wall, and all types of old castle furniture as well. There are also snakes and stuff. Eventually the woman snaps out of her trance and the British guy and his priest-friend try to free her and the other girl who I guess was with them. Medieval torture stuff ensues, as well as walking around caves with torches. They stumble around these fucking caves and act all confused for like 30 minutes.
Then the servant guy (who sort of looks like Robert Blake) gets everyone in a room and starts to resurrect the count guy. I should mention his name was Count Regula. Once Regula is resurrected, he divulges his plan to kill the guy and the girl because they are relatives of the people who sentenced him to be killed.
Can you believe this makeup job? These old movies really didn’t try too hard. Apparently they thought ominous soundtracks would make you scared. The relatives are then tortured in some type of cave/lab.
The Brit guy is getting tortured by a pendulum. While the Brit guy waits and waits for the pendulum to kill him, the chick tries to save him by running through the caves and encounters the following scary things: vultures, tarantulas, rats, wind, a drawbridge, a scary door, more wind, snakes, wind with gusts of leaves, and finally a few more snakes. And all this time the pendulum is still swinging. And just when it’s about to hit, he somehow gets it to cut only his ropes! Don’t you think the pendulum engineers would have considered this and made it descend at a rate more than a sixteenth of an inch each pass?
So Brit guy escapes and Count Regula hangs out in his cave/lab. He declares he’s making acid, but not like the hey-I’m-in-art-school-lets-do-acid type of acid, but the acid that burns your face and stuff. Brit guy uses a cross medallion to defeat Count Regula. He gets all prolific and declares the cross “his own pendulum.” So all the bad guys die, and the good guys escape, and the priest gives this super expressionistic laugh:
This is actually pretty funny and somehow saved the movie for me. Not in the respect I’d watch it again though.
Poster and Box Art: This movie has terrible box art. In fact the Betamax box just has a barely colorized version of the photo displayed above. But instead of a bunch of German words it just says “Castle of The Walking Dead.” How exciting. I looked around for a bit trying to find other German posters for the 20 different movie titles this movie had but I couldn’t find a single one. I should also mention that I didn’t try very hard. The DVD cover is pretty brazen in its claim of the movie being an “original euroshocker.”
Availability: Like most shitty 1960’s British horror movies, this too is available on DVD from Amazon and Netflix.