CASTLE OF THE CREEPING FLESH
Directed by Adrian Hoven. 1968. West Germany.
Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t even know where to start with this one. A title like CASTLE OF THE CREEPING FLESH would indicate a Gothic, maybe even a period piece. Instead, the first thing we see in this clusterfuck is a room full of swanky socialites decked out in smoking jackets and evening gowns, sipping whiskey and puffing away on cigarettes. We meet Vera, a woman in desperate need of a hormone suppressant, and the object of her total attention, the wealthy Baron Brack. Janine Reynaud, well known for her skin-baring roles in endless Eurotrash quickies, plays the lovely Vera. Michel Lemoine, an actor who always looks two minutes away from a panic attack or seven minutes away from shitting his pants, plays the Baron. Oh yeah. We're in Jess Franco territory here, folks.
The Baron invites Vera back to his country home, an offer she accepts with extreme horniness. He leaves to get the horses ready, because why travel a short distance quickly in a fancy sports car when you can travel a short distance slowly on the back of a live animal? Vera invites her sister, Elena, to come along. The problem is, they are not alone at this party. So if Elena is tagging along, they need to bring her party-pooper husband, Roger. And we can't forget Baron Brack's fiancée, Marion, and her brother, Georg. As they say, the more the merrier.
Taking off on horseback, Elena and the Baron ride ahead, while the rest of the party trots along behind them. Reaching the house first, Elena flirts with the Baron, but turns down his more aggressive physical advances. Not one to be told no, the Baron rapes her. Later on, Elena runs off in the night, and the rest of the party gives chase, eventually coming to the estate of the Earl of Saxon, a recluse living in, well, not really much of a castle, but it will have to do. You cannot have a CASTLE OF THE CREEPING FLESH without a castle.
We meet the Earl in the basement of the castle. Just the other night, his young daughter was raped and murdered. In response to this horrible tragedy, the Earl unleashed a bear into the woods. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. A gaunt, creepy doctor arrives to look at the body. “She’s dead,” the Earl tells him. The doctor checks the body for a pulse, then holds a small mirror up to her nose to check for breath. “Yes,” the doctor says, answering a question no one asked.
Meanwhile, the housekeeper, Alecos (looking a bit like a fat Davos Seaworth), invites the visitors inside. The rest of the party arrives eventually, including Elena. The Earl is shocked to see that Vera looks like his old mistress. Even more startling, Marion is the spitting image of his recently deceased daughter. He gives the guests costumes to wear (?) and permits them to settle in for the night. He returns to the basement, consulting with the strange doctor. They decide to try it.
And what is it, you ask? Well, organ transplantation, of course, and we will get to see it in all of its gory glory thanks to stock footage of actual surgery. That’s right, folks, we’re going Mondo for this one!
During dinner, Vera and the Baron engage in some food-based flirting across a table. She slowly licks a chicken bone while he messily shoves a handful of food in his face, his chin covered in spit. The Earl eventually brings the mood down, monologuing about how “there is nothing as interesting as death… Life and death. They are alike. But there is also love. Love creates life. Love has the right to kill. But he who kills for revenge will be cursed.” No, he’s not drunk, just a character in a screenplay co-written by Jess Franco.
Alecos shows the guests a wax museum display recreating the gang rape and murder of the Earl’s ancient ancestor. What? You don't have one of those?! Of course, this turns Vera on because she is a fucking degenerate. Or maybe it has something to do with the curse the Earl believes his family is suffering from. Either way, I don’t care. The visitors all go to their rooms, and the Earl gets back to performing surgery on a corpse, even if the patient in the footage is very obviously alive. The Baron heads out on his horse while everyone else turns in for the night. Vera, shot down by both the Baron and her sister's husband, has a long, soft-focus dream about a woman being gang raped and murdered. Totally normal. As everyone sleeps, Alecos brings Marion to the basement.
For the few of you wanting to experience the back half of this utter disaster unspoiled, I will stop there. Although if I’m honest, there is not much else worth describing. I imagine the screenplay for CASTLE OF THE CREEPING FLESH was no more than a handful of paragraphs. Maybe a doodle or two. The word “rape” was probably scrawled into the margins and underlined a half dozen times. There isn’t really a story here, just an interconnected series of events about horny people consistently failing to get laid. There is a random shot of Michel Lemoine having the living shit beaten out of him by a man dressed as a bear. I guess that’s something.
Adrian Hoven was two years out from directing the proto-torture porn Video Nasty classic, MARK OF THE DEVIL, and two years prior, he had made his directorial debut with the nifty little Krimi, THE KILLER WITH THE SILK SCARF. It blows my mind that he made something this shoddy between those two films. It makes this film look like a massive step backward and MARK OF THE DEVIL look like a colossal leap forward. CASTLE OF THE CREEPING FLESH feels like a fat drunk, stumbling through the streets in piss-soaked pants, unable to remember where they are going or where they came from, drooling and shrieking at shadows. It is an interminable, clumsy mess of bad decisions.
Everything - absolutely EVERYTHING - about this movie is a clunker. The score is a schizophrenic assortment of library cues, horns, and strings. Because the actors either did not know how to ride horses or did not want to, entire conversations are dubbed over shots of galloping horse legs. There is an attempt at introducing a family curse that dooms the Earl to relive the past tragedies of his heritage. Unfortunately, the hows and whys of it all are vague and muddled, and I was too distracted by Reynaud eye-fucking every man in the room to pay much attention anyway. The hyper-sexualization of virtually everything and the endless preoccupation with rape, mixed with the very real footage of tumbling organs and oozing, bloody cuts, felt so desperate and lame. It felt like the movie was begging for my attention. It was stupid and aimless.
Worse, it was boring, and if there is one thing I cannot forgive a movie for, it’s being boring. There is no creeping flesh in this CASTLE OF THE CREEPING FLESH. Just horny losers, and a man and his friend, the angel of death, hanging out in the basement watching a Mondo movie. No thanks.