My review of The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism(**contains spoilers**)This movie went by so many different names. I think I like the title that most people know this movie by "The Castle of the Walking Dead" best. The title "The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism" is very misleading and off-putting. It evokes images of Eli Roth-style torture-porn movies and this movie is nothing like that.This movie is a delight to watch. The movie was very well shot by director, Harald Reinl. The color palette of this film was rich with blood red sky's and marine blue spooky dungeon walls. The lead actress, Karin Dor wore a dazzling purple dress. Count Regula's laboratory had bubbling viols of every color of the rainbow. Visually, this film has an artistic quality to it, from the elaborate murals painted on the dungeon walls to the surreal colors of the cave walls.In a nutshell, this movie is great example of West German "krimi" cinema of the late 1960's, spooky but not bloody. It is clear that no expense was spared to make sure that this movie looked great. The costumes and settings and props and lighting were all top-notch. I thought that the casting was also fantastic. Christopher Lee played a perfectly creepy Count Regula. The leading man, Lex Barker, managed to portray a rugged masculine confidence in his role as Roger Mont Elise. Lex Barker is used to the strong silent physically imposing roles as he played Tarzan in a number of movies earlier in his career. German actor Carl Lange brought a wonderfully spooky presence to his role of Anatol, henchman to the evil Count Regula.Brian Bly in his review wondered if this movie actually qualifies as Horror. Maybe not. But it does seem like an appropriate movie to watch during the Halloween season. In fact, doesn't this movie seem like something that might have been shown at 6:00pm on Halloween night in the late 1970's-early 1980's? This movie certainly has a safe but spooky feel to it that seems like it was made for a younger audience. While young movie goers of the late 1960's might have been creeped-out by the spiders, snakes, skulls, skeletons and death traps, ultimately no major character dies. In fact the "monsters" are dispelled by a simple crucifix. This movie might better be described as thrilling rather than horror.Rather than market this movie as a Horror movie, I think this movie works better as a buddy adventure movie. If this movie had been filmed in the 1980's I imagine Danny Devito in the role of Father Fabian (the thief). This movie fits in perfectly with more familiar 1980's adventure movies like "Romancing the Stone" or "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom". In fact, the movie might not have been to different had it cast Dean Martin as Roger Mont Elise and Jerry Lewis as Father Fabian. The script of this movie seems to contemplate two swinging guys hooking up with two hot chicks while a whole bunch of spooky stuff happens around them. For sure, the musical score evokes a kooky, happy, 1960's "we are all going to get laid" tone.

Christopher Lee hams it up in blue-face in this odd little German horror film that tries to imitate the Hammer Films of the time and presents the audience with few saving graces. One of those is the photography, which is pretty interesting even in a public-domain over-saturated DVD print.An interesting aspect I noticed was that the effects shots in the forest, which are the most compelling visual aspect of the film, seem to have been done later and quite a bit more weird than the script must have implied. The guy who is the coachman (Dieter Eppler) stops the coach and complains about 3 crows, not seeming to notice all the disembodied hands and arms also sprouting quite clearly from the trees.As with many of Lee's horror films from this period, his appearances are brief. Most of the action goes to former Tarzan actor Lex Barker, a stunningly poor actor who wears every emotion the director gives him on his sleeve. Gorgeous Karin Dor does just what the film asks of her and nothing more. Vladimir Medar provides an ongoing irritating presence as the faux-priest who is obviously a highwayman (this gives Barker a chance to raise his eyebrows in doubt, which apparently is supposed to make him seem intelligent).There are many amusing bits that make this watchable in a "so bad it's good" kind of way. We were particularly amused by the inappropriate MOR music that would play whenever the group was traveling around in the carriage.The ending of the movie provides excuses for G-rated exploitation as half-dressed "virgins" are seen in various torture poses. The whole device with the cross is one of the most obvious and stupid endings in history, just a cliché. This film would barely hold the audience down in a double feature. All the "scare" elements are typical too -- "oh look, a rat!" "Oh look, a bunch of snakes! How gross!" -- designed perhaps to get girlfriends to make the perfunctory move into their boyfriends' arms at the drive-in. This is lazy storytelling (notice how Medar's character continually runs away for no reason and reappears also for no reason with whatever information the other characters need) and lazy film-making and I would have been angry if I had spent more than $1 for the film.

Just as the German krimi of the 60s proved to be a big inspiration for the Italian gialli, this film is in turn inspired by the 1960s Italian Gothic horrors (perhaps best exemplified by Mario Bava's Black Sunday). Like Black Sunday, this film concerns an executed practitioner of the black arts returning from the dead to get revenge on the descendants of those who executed them. In this case it is Christopher Lee rather than Barbara Steele, and thankfully he dubs himself.Like the films of Bava, this is filled with moody photography and baroque, Gothic visuals (such as a forest filled with corpses, a hallway lined with skulls, and walls painted with Boschean landscapes). It is difficult to judge how great the photography itself was in relation to Bava's, since the print was so poor, but the direction was definitely as competent. None of the characters were particularly interesting except for Fabian, a highwayman disguised as a priest suffering from major Falstaff syndrome. The man even resembles the Orson Welles incarnation of the character, so I can't help but wonder if it was intentional. The film is pretty entertaining for the most part, and doesn't suffer so horribly from its dubbing like many films from the period do. It is only during the pendulum sequence that I found myself getting bored. While it had not been at the time, the sequence has been done to death, and it always ends the same way: hero comes up with a clever plan and escapes just as the blade gets driven into the ground. Maybe they could've shaken things up by having the hero get sliced in two, and had the poor man's Falstaff save the day!So all in all not a particularly significant Euro-horror entry, but it benefits from some awesome visuals, one amazing character, and an occasionally effective score (though it sometimes lapses into some painfully inappropriate and thus hilarious "happy-go-lucky" music). Personally I'm just glad to have finally seen it after reading about it for all these years!

Does anybody remember that some of the best Wild West and Indians films were made in Germany in the 60s, inspired by novels of Karl May? The director of these series was Harald Reinl, and here we have a try of his in another genre, which was to become very popular and mainstream in the coming decades. Inspired by a story by Edgar Allan Poe, this film is visibly aged, with some very conventional dialogs and avoidance of any explicit violence on screen. Yet it succeeds to suggest much of the atmosphere that in later movies of the genre required a lot of ketchup by using a strong visual language and very elaborated and sometimes sophisticated settings. Watch the scenes in the castle of count Regula and remember that they were filmed more than ten years before H.R.Giger borrowed his talent for the start of the Alien series. See the exquisite use of light and colors in the scene where the coach approaches the castle and you get some of the best use of color processing in the pre-computerized film era. All these make the film interesting to watch despite of its aging and not so original story line.