My take: A lot of elements were utterly cheesy, but it came together somehow to make a movie worth watching.
Rating: 3 out of 4 stars
At times while watching The Castle of the Living Dead, I imagined the writers drawing horror tropes and characters out of a hat to see how they could fit them into the story. The movie seemed to have a lot of things all mixed together:
- The story is about a group of performers who look like a cross between a band of gypsies and a freak show
- The evil villain is a count played by Christopher Lee
- He also happens to be a bit of a mad scientist
- The count has an eerie castle that the band of performers are paid to visit
- There a creepy, hunch-backed henchman
- The castle is filled with taxidermied animals
- There’s a witch who lives in a hut in the woods
I’ve seen all of these elements before. There were gypsies in the Wolf Man. Christopher Lee has played the most evil count of all time in Dracula. Taxidermied animals abound in the Most Dangerous Game.
On paper, I would have called this entire plot derivative and a hodgepodge. However, it somehow all ties together. Maybe it is because there is so much packed into the film. Maybe it is Christopher Lee’s superb ability to play the villain.
There was also a surprising bonus: Donald Sutherland plays a range of strange parts in the film. He’s a police Sargent who investigates when people start dying at the castle.
On the left is Donald Sutherland as the Sargent. On the right is Christopher Lee as Count Drago.
He also plays the old witch who lives in the woods as well as an old man.
Donald Sutherland as the witch in Castle of the Living Dead.
Seeing him pop up occasionally added a lot of fun to the movie.
This is the type of movie I would put in a horror marathon with friends, simply for the hodgepodge of horror themes. I would also recommend it to fans of classic horror and fans of Christopher Lee.
I found the movie on Daily Motion, though it was quite blurry. Here’s the trailer in YouTube:
Leave a Reply