When Dr. Stephen Arrowsmith (Paul Muller) discovers his wife Muriel (Barbara Steele) and her lover David (Rik Battaglia), he tortures and kills them, then removes their hearts and burns their bodies. Then, in order to inherit his wife’s money and estate, he marries her institutionalized step-sister Jenny (also played by Steele) with the intent of driving her even crazier and being the sole heir to the fortune. But his plan backfires and instead of the fake ghosts he’d meant to haunt her with, Jenny is possessed by the real--and vengeful--spirit of her sister.

NIGHTMARE CASTLE--also known as THE FACELESS MONSTER--is another tepid offering from Italy in the mid-60s (1965, in fact) that’s really more mood and pipe organ than anything else. The acting from Paul Muller and Barbara Steele is laughable, the dialogue is a joke, and the pace is almost coma-inducing. I’ve tried to sit through this 90-minute bore twice already and both times I’ve found myself dozing through a huge chunk of the middle and having to go back and watch again.

Arrowsmith brings in a doctor (Laurence Clift as Dereck Joyce) to determine if Jenny needs to be re-admitted, but the doctor finds more than he was meant to and realizes Stephen may have had, not only more to do with Muriel’s death than suspected, but most likely a hand in what’s happening to Jenny as well. Meanwhile, Arrowsmith’s lover/housekeeper Solange (Helga Line’), who was old at the beginning of the movie but somehow becomes young again, is trying to force Arrowsmith to speed Jenny’s breakdown along.

It’s all a very confusing and dull movie and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, least of all the horror fan. The climax is goofy as Muriel and David come back from the dead to kill Solange and Arrowsmith and while we don’t necessarily need an explanation as to how they’ve come back--as horror fans our suspension of disbelief extends this far; we know sometimes the dead simply come back--we do wonder why they decide to go after Jenny and Dr. Dereck afterward.

The edits in my DVD edition were very choppy and left the impression some key scenes had been cut out, but as boring as the 90-minute version was, I can’t imagine trying to hunt down an even longer version. The dubbing was also a big problem. I assumed, since this was an Italian movie, that the original language would be Italian, but in a lot of close-ups, you can see most of what the characters are saying would match the voices, if they weren’t a few seconds behind. So I don’t know if it was filmed in English, only the accents were so thick they got American actors to provide the soundtrack, or if Italian just looks a LOT like English.

When you talk about classic horror movies, a lot of things come to mind. PSYCHO, THE EXORCIST, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. These movies challenged audiences of their times. And they were scary as hell. NIGHTMARE CASTLE wants to scare you, but it goes about it in such an inept way, I’m surprised they didn’t end with “and it was only a dream”. NIGHTMARE CASTLE is not a horror movie, it’s someone’s immature idea of a horror movie, it’s a horror movie made by someone who watched a lot of bad movies and thought they were high art.

Maybe at one time, in another culture, audiences were impressed by how slowly NIGHTMARE CASTLE moved and how stiff the actors were, but almost half a century later, it’s just so much stuff and nonsense.


other Horror Classics
Carnival of Souls: http://www.epinions.com/content_403446140548
Atom Age Vampire: http://www.epinions.com/content_403512856196
Creature from the Haunted Sea: http://www.epinions.com/content_403596349060


Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age