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CASTLE FREAK
Rating: 
USA. 1995.
Director – Stuart Gordon, Screenplay – Dennis Paoli, Story – Stuart Gordon & Dennis Paoli, Producer – Maurizio Maggi, Photography – Mario Vulpiani, Music – Richard Band, Makeup Effects – Optic Nerve, Art Direction – Franco Vanorio. Production Company – Full Moon Entertainment.
Cast:
Jeffrey Combs (John Reilly), Barbara Crampton (Susan Reilly), Jonathan Fuller (Giorgio D’Orsino), Jessica Dollarhide (Rebecca Reilly), Elizabeth Kaza (Agnese), Luca Zingaretti (Forte), Raffaella Offidani (Sylvana Luca), Massimo Sarchielli (Rinaldo Giannetti), Helen Stirling (Duchess D’Orsino)
Plot: John Reilly learns that he has inherited a castle in Italy. He, his wife Susan and their blind daughter Rebecca travel there to claim the inheritance. John and Susan’s marriage is troubled, she unable to forgive him for an accident that happened when John was driving that killed their son. But their arrival at the castle disturbs a deformed creature that is chained up in the dungeon. John hears the creature and insists that there is something there, although nobody else can find any evidence. John then realizes that the creature is another son that his father bore. It has been kept in the dungeon and brutally tortured by his father’s first wife after his father abandoned her. But as the creature escapes and begins killing people, Susan dismisses John’s insistence that it is real as just another of John’s excuses to cover his behaviour. But then the police come to arrest John for the creature’s murders.
Stuart Gordon first emerged onto the genre scene with the cult classic Re-Animator (1985), which was adapted from an H.P. Lovecraft short story. This patented Gordon’s gore-heavy black humour style. Alas all of Stuart Gordon’s films made since Re-Animator, which include the likes of From Beyond (1986), Dolls (1987), The Pit and the Pendulum (1991) and Dagon (2001), or his various ventures into science-fiction – Robot Jox (1990), Fortress (1993) and Space Truckers (1997) – have never quite struck either with the same effect and certainly not the public resonance that Re-Animator did. In many of these cases, at least up until Gordon’s quite amazing adapation of David Mamet’s Edmond (2005), it feels that Gordon is searching around trying to find and replicate the same elements that made Re-Animator a success again, but without quite succeeding – with From Beyond, Gordon reunited most of the cast and production personnel of Re-Animator in another splatter-heavy H.P. Lovecraft adaptation; and with Dagon he and the same writing/producing team united on another Lovecraft adaptation. And it feels like Gordon is trying the same here on Castle Freak, which reunites Gordon with his Re-Animator principals Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton, as well as scripter Dennis Paoli, producers Albert and Charles Band and musician Richard Band. There is nothing on the credits of Castle Freak that acknowledges H.P. Lovecraft as source, although many have taken the film to be based on the Lovecraft short story The Outsider (1921), to which Castle Freak has nominal similarities.
Castle Freak feels like Stuart Gordon is trying to revisit one of the Italian Gothic films of the 1960s – The Blancheville Monster (1962), The Terror of Dr Hichcock (1962), Castle of Blood (1963), Nightmare Castle (1963), The Spectre (1963), The Long Hair of Death (1964), Night is the Phantom (1965), Terror Creatures from the Grave (1965), The Bloody Pit of Horror (1969), Baron Blood (1972). These would usually feature Barbara Steele and a plot about people inheriting a castle that had family secrets buried in the dungeons. Castle Freak fairly much rehashes the basic plot elements of these Italian films, albeit with a whole lot more in the way of modern gore effects.
Alas, Castle Freak is thoroughly routine in all respects. Stuart Gordon has shot the film in a real castle in the small village of Giove in Umbria, Italy – one that is in fact owned by the film’s Executive Producer Albert Band. Alas despite an impressive location, Castle Freak really consists of nothing more than people skulking around the castle, with little in the way of plot development. This video version seen here also gives the impression that much of the gore has been trimmed – although Optic Nerve’s deformed figure in the dungeon still looks quite nasty. Alas, with all of the gore trimmed, gone is the reason to watch much of Castle Freak. Occasionally Stuart Gordon’s sense of black humour emerges – like the scenes with daughter Jessica Dollarhide talking about how her true love will come for her as the creature creeps up and starts fondling her – but Gordon never pushes any of this as far as he did in Re-Animator. Jeffrey Combs’s lead character is written with a self-loathing that is really quite unappealing. Even the title, Castle Freak, seems silly and unserious.
Copyright Richard Scheib 2004
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