Scream of the Demon Lover (1970)

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Best movie ever!

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

"Il castello dalle porte di fuoco", also known as "Scream of the Demon Lover", is a tedious horror flick with a plot that would have better suited a half-hour length blown up to an endless hour-and-a-half.The story is about an allegedly young and beautiful woman who goes to stay with a mad scientist in Victorian times. While there she is repeatedly menaced by a flaky hand while trying to sleep and apparently dreams or hallucinates herself stretched out topless on a rack.We end up getting the idea that this is a Jekyll-and-Hyde type story. Or is it? Who cares? I didn't. You probably won't either.For fans of sleazy Euro-horror, the nudity in the film is fairly negligible, either glimpsed from a distance or shot with something in the way so you don't get a good look. There is also really no violence.

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.

This is the second José Luis Merino film I've seen this week and comparing the two, SCREAM OF THE DEMON LOVER is much more sexual in nature than TERROR OF THE LIVING DEAD due, no doubt, to the Italians being involved. DEMON LOVER is also set in the nineteenth century and stars Erna Schürer as a kittenish chemist who's come to Baron Dalmar's medieval estate to assist him in trying to bring his dead brother back to life. The villagers warn her that the Baron is killing women and ripping them to shreds after consensual sex but she stays on anyway, even after being drugged nightly and put on a rack in the dungeon (?!).Although it's nowhere near as atmospheric or entertaining, the movie owes something of a debt to Mario Bava's THE WHIP AND THE BODY and it's fascination with sadomasochistic mise-en-scène. The Baron and his hounds cut a dashing figure atop the grand staircase and sexy Schürer shows her globes a lot but she's outshone by the exquisite Agostina Belli, who also bares her boobs in the secondary role of a castle servant.Erna Schürer was born Emma Costantino in Naples, Italy and modeled for "Vogue" and "Harper's Bazaar"before appearing in the popular "fumetti" foto-comic "Satanik" in the mid-60s. Placed under contract by movie producer Alberto Grimaldi, Erna spent most of the '70s cranking out "classics" like EROTIC CONFESSIONS FROM A WOMEN'S PRISON, YOUR HANDS ON MY BODY, STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER, MY PLEASURE IS YOUR PLEASURE, and DEPORTED WOMEN OF THE SS SPECIAL SECTION before more-or-less disappearing from the cinema scene. There's no birth or death dates given for Erna on IMDb and there's precious little about her on the worldwide web, either, for that matter. Today, Schürer's sure as sh!t a GILF somewhere (unless she's split the scene, if you know what I mean).

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?