Castle of the Creeping Flesh (1968)

Another late sixties sleazy Euro horror pot-boiler - a sub-genre I have a particular affection for.  It has to be said that Castle of the Creeping Flesh really isn't a very good film, but its fevered mix of disparate elements - gory surgery, Gothic castles, reincarnation, doppelgangers, rape, bare breasts, jazz music, bears and mad scientists - makes it a bizarrely entertaining diversion.  Indeed, there are times while watching it that these elements seem to be a random assemblage, as it rapidly lurches from one scenario to another, not to mention one historical era to another, but a plot, of sorts, gradually emerges from the madness.  Opening with one of those 'swinging' parties that the decadent but beautiful rich always seem to be attending in sixties Euro-schlock movies, dancing on tables and carrying on with wild abandon, we quickly learn that the host, Baron Brack, is a pretty sleazy character.  While most of his guests go out riding in the forest - the part is taking place at Brack's hunting lodge - the Baron takes the opportunity to rape the girl who has stayed behind.  When the others return, she remains silent, but after hearing that the daughter of a local landowner has been attacked and brutally raped in the forest, she rides off, eventually coming to grief near the castle of Earl Saxon, where she is taken by one of the Earl's servants.  Her friends go searching for her and all, eventually, end up at Saxon's castle, which Brack is wary of entering as Saxon is, apparently, a very strange man.  As indeed he would be, as he is played by Jesus Franco regular Howard Vernon, who made a career out of playing these sorts of roles in Eurotrash movies.

It transpires that it is Saxon's daughter who has been attacked and has now died.  It also becomes obvious, from his reactions, that the Baron was responsible.  To compound matters, her ordeal and death mirrors that of one of the Earl's ancestor's daughters during the thirty years war.  Of course, not only did that girl look just like the present day victim, but the culprit was one of the Baron's ancestors.  Oh, and Vera, one of the Baron's guests (whose sister he raped earlier on) is the spitting image of the Earl's ancestor's mistress, who arranged the girl's rape and murder, motivated by jealously.  In fact, it turns out that all of the guests resemble those involved in the historic atrocity.  (Somewhat bizarrely, the Earl has a waxwork tableau - complete with sound effects - of the incident, which his bearded, burly and cackling manservant delights in showing the guests).  The group is invited to stay the night - it is dangerous to go into the woods at night because of a killer bear roaming about - on the proviso that they don costumes appropriate to the era when the original rape and murder took place.  All the while, the Earl, with the aid of a doctor associate, is trying to revive his dead daughter down in his underground lab, with little success.  But wait, one of the female guests is her doppelganger!  So, after everyone retires for the night - except the Baron, who insists on going for help - the doppelganger girl is abducted.  

We are then treated to footage of an apparently real operation, intercut with goings on in the bedrooms.  Vera, slips into a dream where she sees the historical events re-enacted, which seems to sexually arouse her, the daughter's double's boyfriend finds she is missing and starts searching for her, while the other male guest, hearing Vera cry out as she wakes from her dream, runs to her room.  There follows an utterly bizarre sequence where Vera and her male friend go hammer and tongs at it in her bed, inter cut with gory operation scenes, all underscored by a jazz piano track.  At one point the boyfriend bursts in, trying to enlist their help in his search, but they are too absorbed in testing the bed springs that they ignore him.  One can't help but feel that the director might have been trying to make some point here, probably connected to the Earl's assertion at dinner that 'there is nothing as interesting as death', which receives the riposte of  'yes there is - life'.  Hence the contrasts between the bloody surgery in the basement and the wild shagging in the bedroom.  Things then career toward a hurried climax (the cut English language version runs just over seventy five minutes), with the Baron stumbling back in after an encounter with the bear, the missing girl turning up and then revealed to be the Earl's revived daughter, the Baron's sex crimes revealed followed by tragedy and bloody retribution.  In the final shot, we see the doctor who assisted Saxon riding across the drawbridge, his face revealed as the skull-like visage of death.

The thing about Castle of the Creeping Flesh is that its central conceit, that this group of souls are condemned to forever repeat this cycle of depravity, violence and death, with the characters' current incarnations drawn into re-enacting ancient events, isn't a bad one.  Unfortunately, it is poorly executed, with the film feeling more like a random series of events than a preordained tragedy unfolding with grim inevitability.  The script is confused, the narrative tangled, with many of the elements never properly gelling together and dialogue (in the English version, at least, atrocious).  So poor is the dubbing that it is difficult to judge the quality of the performances.  But even in their original German, one suspects that they were variable, to say the least.  Howard Vernon, of course, could play this sort of role in his sleep and gives a pretty standard, by his measure, performance as Saxon.  Michel Lemoine as the Baron, playing his part wild eyed, comes over as an obvious sex offender from the start, rather than the smoothly seductive bastard I suspect that we're meant to see him as.  Vladimir Medar as the manservant overacts like crazy and the female characters are all very beautiful and bare their breasts a lot, while the other two male characters are entirely forgettable.  Actually, it has to be said that Janine Reynaud as Vera gives a very 'spirited' performance in her bedroom scenes.  Not to forget the bear - or rather man in a tatty looking bear suit - not the least convincing movie bear I've ever seen, (that accolade goes to the 'Cave Bear' in Creatures the World Forgot), but pretty risible nonetheless.

The casual viewer might suspect that, hiding behind the obviously pseudonymous director's credit of 'Percy G Parker' was none other than Jesus Franco himself.  After all, it has many of his hallmarks - Howard Vernon, a rickety plot that veers all over the place, a heady mix of sex and horror and plenty of female nudity.  In reality, however, the film is the work of German actor-turned-director Adrian Hoven, who, a few years later, would gain a certain notoriety with his two Euro sex and torture witchfinder films, Mark of the Devil and Mark of the Devil Part Two.  While Castle of the Creeping Flesh is somewhat lighter affair than the two later films, Hoven's apparent preoccupation with sexual violence against women (although largely off screen here) is still evident.  But despite all of its shortcomings in terms of script, narrative and characters, the film is, physically, very well produced.  The sets. lighting and photography are all excellent and the whole thing surprisingly atmospheric.  Furthermore, there is just something about its deluded mix and matching of various horror and sleaze tropes in freewheeling 'plot' which makes the film incredibly entertaining.  Sleazy entertainment, to be sure, but nevertheless entertaining in that 'what the fuck' way which characterises the best Euro sleaze-horror movies.