The story is extremely basic gothic fare with a bit of E.C. Comics nastiness thrown in, as the opening twenty minutes deftly outlines the final hours of the unhappy marriage between aristocratic scientist Stephen Arrowsmith (Jess Franco regular Paul Muller) and his bitchy, raven-haired wife, Muriel (Steele), who engages in secret trysts with the hunky handyman, David (peplum regular Rik Battaglia). Unfortunately hubby catches them in the act and, in a string of scenes that push the boundaries of nastiness and kinkiness about as far as '65 cinema would allow, chains them up to a wall, whips them, splashes some well-placed drops of acid, ties Muriel to a bed, electrocutes them both in mid-embrace, and slices out their hearts while burning the rest of them to potted plant ashes. Unfortunately Muriel tells him just before dying that she secretly changed her will and left all of her fortune to her "idiot" stepsister, Jenny. Undeterred, he ignores the attentions of his elderly, evil housekeeper, Solange (Eurosleaze favorite Helga Liné), whom he rejuvenates with some kind of blood experiments, and swiftly marries the nervous, blonde-haired Jenny (also Steele), whom he brings home in lieu of a honeymoon. (The fact that these "stepsisters" look exactly the same is never really addressed by the script, by the way.) Soon Jenny's having bizarre nightmares and wandering around the castle a lot, while the mad scientist's plot to drive her insane is complicated by what might be the ghosts of his recently dispatched victims.
Though shot in black and white and filmed on atmospheric castle locations, Nightmare Castle doesn't even try for the artistic heights of Steele's collaborations with directors like Mario Bava or Riccardo Freda. Instead director Mario Caiano (here using the name "Allen Grünewald") shoots everything in flat medium shots, with a pokey pace probably modeled after Roger Corman's Poe films. Steele's Jenny character is almost hilariously dull (and saddled with a really terrible wig), but thankfully the bad Barbara pops up enough at the beginning and end to keep her fans more than happy. Oddly enough, none other than Ennio Morricone provides the music score (just one year after his breakthrough work on A Fistful of Dollars) with organs and tinkling pianos flooding almost every scene, which manages to goose up several scenes in the film's midsection where essentially nothing happens. Old pros Muller and Liné do fine, sinister work all around (at least after the latter ditches her embarrassing "old age" make-up from the first couple of scenes), and the claustrophobic nature of the film (not to mention its incredibly small cast) does set it apart somewhat from its more flamboyant peers. Oddly, this proved to be Steele's last major Italian vehicle to get wide distribution (not counting the weird hybrid The She-Beast or the barely-seen An Angel for Satan), though at least in this case she gets to finally provide her own voice for Jenny's character.
The odds of an officially sanctioned, top-grade version of this film thus seemed ridiculously unlikely, but Severin has managed to surprise everyone with their release, taken straight from the original Italian negative and looking light years better than it ever has before. Bear in mind this film was never shot with the crystalline intensity of something like Black Sunday, but the presentation here is impressive indeed. The blacks are rich and deep, facial details are pin-sharp, and the landscaping around the castle is now clear and free of jittering and distortion. Some fleeting damaged splices appear at a couple of scene transitions (and one fleeting negative tear at the 58 minute mark), but that's extreme nitpicking in what is otherwise a superlative presentation. Thankfully this transfer was preserved in HD, which means we might even see a Blu-Ray of this someday if we're lucky. The audio also runs at the correct speed and sounds clearer than before, though frankly the dub track is still pretty lousy even if the actors were obviously speaking English on the set. That aural disconnect has often been cited by fans as part of its charm, however, so perhaps that's just as well. The original Italian credits are also preserved with the original title card.
If the tremendously improved transfer weren't enough of a carrot to get fans moving, the disc also packs in some excellent bonus features. The notoriously supplement-shy Steele has finally started appearing on some of her releases (including the aforementioned The She-Beast for an amusing commentary track), and here she devotes an entire featurette, "Barbara Steele in Conversation," to an encapsulation of her career from start to finish. It's a dream come true for Steele fans as she discusses her early modeling days, her libertine experiences in boarding school, her miserable experience working for 20th Century-Fox on the Elvis vehicle Flaming Star, her big break in Italian films (not just the horror ones), her memories of working with Fellini on 8 1/2 (including a hilarious anecdote about an Antonioni gag left on the cutting room floor), her segue into '70s exploitation immortality working on the first films of Jonathan Demme and David Cronenberg, and finally her unlikely ventures into producing with Dan Curtis and her frustrating recurring roles on the revamp of Dark Shadows. Perhaps most valuable of her is her account of shooting scenes as a sexual alchemist for Fellini's Casanova, only to have the original footage stolen and the film started over from scratch. The avalanche of rare, priceless Steele images is just icing on the cake, too. You really can't miss this one.
Next up is "Black, White and Red," with Caiano appearing in a newly-shot interview along with his very aggressive orange cat for a discussion mostly centered around Nightmare Castle, including the explanation behind his perplexing screen credit, his affinity for Poe which exploded throughout the script of this film, and his limited recollections of Steele. Never one of Italy's more distinguished directors, Caiano nevertheless remained busy working on everything from sword and sandal quickies to spaghetti westerns to oddities like Nazi Love Camp 27, The Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe and Nosferatu in Venice, so it's nice to finally get the story behind the career of someone who seems like a good-natured craftsman. Finally you get a pristine UK trailer (under the Night of the Doomed) title and a much fuzzier US trailer (as Nightmare Castle) which is essentially just a chopped-down version of the first one. In short, it's an obvious must for Euro horror fans and especially important for restoring one of the last mistreated titles in the Steele canon. Now if someone could just finally manage to release an uncut, pristine version of Terror-Creatures from the Grave...
Directed by Mario Caiano / Starring Barbara Steele, Paul Muller, Helga Liné, Lawrence Clift, Rik Battaglia
Severin (US R1 NTSC) / WS (1.66:1) (16:9)
Made at the height of Italy's golden age of gothic horror, Nightmare Castle has long been one of the most widely available titles on home video since the days of VHS, largely thanks to the public domain status of its much-abbreviated American version. Horror fans have long cherished it as perhaps the ultimate visual tribute to its leading lady and Italy's first real scream queen, Barbara Steele, who had already captivated viewers with her sinister, uncanny beauty in films like Black Sunday, The Horrible Dr. Hichcock and Castle of Blood. Add to that some heaping dollops of sadism and you've got an instant drive-in classic which has nevertheless fared very poorly in every version released on home video... with one huge exception.
It would take an insane amount of space to recount all of the video incarnations of Nightmare Castle over the years, but here's what you really need to know. The film was originally released in Italy as Amanti d'oltretomba) (or "Lovers from Beyond the Tomb") running 104 minutes, and a full English dub for this edition was created. However, the international distributors mostly went with a drastically shortened version (as Nightmare Castle), clocking in well under an hour and a half, which excised many of the film's pregnant pauses and castle wanderings, as well as a few quick seconds of sadism during the opening act. Some U.K. viewers did get to see the longer cut under the title of Night of the Doomed, but for the VHS era almost everyone was stuck with the short version with really, really hideous video and audio quality. Several PD companies rehashed this version again on DVD, often packed together with other vintage horror titles (like Madacy's double bill with Track of the Vampire). Retromedia improved things a bit with the first domestic release of the European version under the perplexing title of The Faceless Monster, a flat letterboxed version that would have been great if it weren't for some very distracting compression problems, a distorted running time due to dodgy PAL conversion, a soft and damaged transfer, loads of video crosstalk through the entire picture, and, to copyright it as a "special edition," layers of newly-added sound effects (crickets, wind, howling dogs, etc.) plastered through several scenes.
