It is fitting that a box set that opens with CASTLE OF THE LIVING DEAD should end with THE TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM or, to offer a proper translation of its original title, THE SNAKE PIT AND THE PENDULUM. Both of these Christopher Lee pictures emphasize natural European scenery and macabre art direction while telling stories - fables, actually - about picaresque characters who wander astray into haunted woods, have close scrapes with death, and emerge with their goodness intact. While CASTLE OF THE LIVING DEAD is essentially an American film made with Italian resources, THE TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM (a TV title imposed on a surprisingly mild and fanciful picture) is a German film that takes a lot of visual inspiration not just from the Italian Gothics (especially Mario Bava's BLACK SUNDAY and KILL, BABY... KILL!) but also Roger Corman's Poe movies, Bavarian architecture, and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Marry all this to one of Peter Thomas' most unusual scores (I can imagine him, pen in hand, asking himself "Okay, what mood and instrumentation would be least appropriate for a period piece, for horror scenes, romantic scenes... oh yes, and the grand finale?"), and you've got a film whose pride in its own strangeness simply cannot be denied.
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| Lex Barker looks on as Christopher Lee prepares to wear the mask of punishment. |
THE TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM - which, once upon a time, played in American theaters, mostly drive-ins, under the title BLOOD DEMON along with another "green blood" picture, MAD DOCTOR OF BLOOD ISLAND - was Constantin Film's bid at competing with other world markets in horror film production in the sputtering wake of various other one-shot German attempts like THE HEAD (Die Nackte und der Satan, 1959) and CAVE OF THE LIVING DEAD (Der flüch der grünen Augen, 1964). It was also the first such German production made in color, if we discount the more fantastic examples of the Edgar Wallace krimis. Though brazenly derivative, it is never so without its own special flair. I find myself hard-pressed to nominate another tropes-in-a-blender horror film that does the job better, and this is largely because it also introduces its own personal and distinctly national signature touches. Though (despite the title hung on it) it's not at all a graphically violent film, its Bavarian scenery, period costumery, characterizations, and emphasis on antique torture devices strongly anticipate the MARK OF THE DEVIL films made a few years further down the trail.
The director here is Harald Reinl, who had done extensive work in the crime genre, including outstanding work in the Dr. Mabuse sequels and Edgar Wallace and Bryan Edgar Wallace krimis (THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE FROG, THE SINISTER MONK, THE STRANGLER OF BLACKMOOR CASTLE), the Karl May Westerns (TREASURE OF SILVER LAKE, etc), and a lavish, two-feature remake of Fritz Lang's DIE NIEBELUNGEN. Reinl was married to actress Karin Dor (29 years his junior), an adornment to most of his features who came to be known as "Miss Krimi", and he was very much a disciple of Fritz Lang with a marvelous eye for action, mood, and atmosphere. However, it took Alfred Vohrer to take the krimis to the next level - into horror, into color, into all sorts of baroque insanity. Reinl obviously grabbed hold of this horror project to show what he could do within Vohrer's ballpark, and his competitive drive is one of its many pleasures.
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| Christopher Lee, Carl Lange, and Lex Barker. |
Manfred R. Kohler's script opens "in Olden Tymes" (to quote the film's publicity) as Count Frederic Regula (Christopher Lee) is sentenced by Judge Reinhold von Marienberg (Lex Barker) to be drawn and quartered for torturing and killing people at his castle. Before his main punishment, he has a bronze spiked mask forced onto his face by a hooded executioner - in obvious shades of BLACK SUNDAY. There is something extremely unnerving about the mask itself, which bears the metallic likeness of a smiling scarecrow; under floridly Gothic opening credits, the camera precedes the characters as the prisoner is marched through a maze of stone corridors to his place of execution, intermittent tricks of light causing Regula's eyes to glow and flash behind the mask's apertures. In one of the stranger narrative details, instead of picking up the story 100 or 200 years later, it picks up only 35 years later, when Roger Mont Elis (Barker, handsome and fit but clearly older than 35) - raised without knowledge of his family or true family name - comes to this same Bavarian village in search of answers about his origins. He has been brought here by a letter allegedly from the supposedly dead Count Regula, inviting him to learn all at his castle on Good Friday. Looking for directions to a castle that all the locals deny exists, he finally appeals to a Christ-like "saint" seen carrying a cross through town at the head of a large commemorative procession. Once the crowd disperses, Roger appeals to the elderly bearded man for information - and is told that Count Regula is long dead and that only great danger can await him at the castle. Of course, he has come to far to be discouraged.
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| Karin Dor in the undead arms of Carl Lange. |
Shortly thereafter, he meets Father Fabian (Vladimir Medar - a dead ringer for Howard Kaylan), a lusty sort of priest - not unlike Andrew Kier's Father Sandor in DRACULA PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1965) - who is en route to the same general vicinity as the castle to baptize a child and agrees to share his coach. On the way, a coach preceding them carrying the Baroness Lilian von Brabant (Karin Dor) and her assistant Babette (Christiane Rücker) is accosted by seven masked highwaymen known as The Seven Deadly Sins. They steal the entire coach but leave the women to be saved by Roger and Fabian. Continuing on, they come to a burnt-out shell of a house where a silent vagrant seems to appear in a puff of black smoke. He says nothing, but as the coach continues on, he strips away the pieces of his disguise to reveal himself as the man we will soon identify as Anatol (Carl Lange), the zombie henchman of Count Regula, formerly hung in a public square before his reanimation. The film doesn't make the connection too emphatic, but in addition to these two characters, Lange also plays the cross-carrying "Saint" from the town behind a long white beard and can be seen in retrospect as a malevolent master of disguise who ensures Roger's arrival at the castle - perhaps even the Devil Himself. Incredibly, the film spends very nearly its first half just getting to the castle, which allowed Reinl to make half of his film on natural locations and inside a simple rocking coach "set," while reserving the greater share of his budget toward the often stunning art direction awaiting us inside the castle. It should be sheer agony but it's not, especially once night falls and art director/set decorator Gabriel Pellon gives us a haunted forest for the ages, full of bare trees strewn with gallows and dead bodies - a grand tribute not only to contemporary atmospherists like Mario Bava but to the great artisans of the German silent expressionist cinema. Once our heroes reach the castle, they are greeted by Anatol who resurrects the still-quartered remains of Count Regula and demands the audience avert their gaze from a moment too sacred to be seen by unbelievers - the moment played out in the shadows they see on a gorgeous honey-colored wall, in a scene that appears to have been swiped directly for that heart-stopping moment of shadowplay in Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA (1977) when the mysterious and sonorous Elena Markus is put to bed among the students after the maggot attack. After that, the film is a non-stop procession of snakes, buzzards, ossuaries, dungeons, bubbling laboratories, ancient death traps (including a not-bad pendulum rig), and acid cocktails, with Christopher Lee - hole-faced à la Barbara Steele and painted blue-gray - just one virgin shy of the thirteenth who will guarantee his immortality. Why he goes after Karin Dor rather than her younger, more-likely-innocent companion is beyond me.
Naturally, both Barker and Dor turn out to be descendants of characters from the not-too-distant past, but during their travails at the castle, the robust Father Fabian is revealed to be someone other than who he pretends to be, which is also left for the eagle-eyed among us to discover in regard to the aforementioned "saint." In this way, Reinl appears to cast a suspicious eye at those who represent the Church, but he does so without denying the virtues of religion itself. The power of the Cross still prevails at the end of the story.
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| That old crucifix trick again! |
This film has long suffered from inadequate, even much butchered presentations - there was a particularly poor rendering included on the bonus disc in Severin's HEMISPHERE OF HORRORS box set (OOP) - so this 1.66:1 presentation, scanned in 4K from the original camera negative, is definitely the one to have. Both the German and English soundtracks are included, the latter featuring Barker's and Lee's own voices, and there are some quite striking musical variations between the two in the scoring of the main titles and ending. The extras are also quite generous: a candid 25m audio interview with Karin Dor (in German with English subtitles, in which says a little about all of her movies EXCEPT the one at hand - headlines include identification of Hugo Fregonese as the true director of ASSIGNMENT: TERROR, and how Manfred Kohler's TARGET FOR KILLING was directed by its lead actors after he fell ill), an interesting locations featurette that finds many spots virtually unchanged, two different German Super 8mm digest shorts, German theatrical and teaser trailers, a short and quite incomplete poster gallery, a restoration sideshow, and a gallery of behind-the-scenes photos (behind the scenes of the restoration, not the movie). There is also an audio commentary by Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson, both keen enthusiasts of the film, who offer an effusive chat, a lot of trivia and, for some reason, an obsessive amount of time spent on identifying scenes not included in Interglobal's particularly egregious old VHS release under the title CASTLE OF THE WALKING DEAD.
(c) 2021 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
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