Terror! Il Castello delle Donne Maledette |
  • Italy • 1974 • 89m •   • Directed by: Dick Randall. • Starring: Rossano Brazzi, Michael Dunn, Edmund Purdom, Gordon Mitchell, Loren Ewing, Luciano Pigozzi, Xiro Papas, Salvatore Baccaro, Simonetta Vitelli, Eric Mann, Laura De Benedittis, Robert Marx, Christiane Rücker. • Music by: Marcello Gigante.    Brazzi plays mad Dr.Frankenstein, Dunn is an evil dwarf and Lugosi (no relation to Bela) is a Neanderthal man. Add a monster named Hulk, and some nude women for sexploitation value.
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Review:
This Italian production was directed by Robert Oliver & is total crap. The script by Mario Francini, William Rose, Mark Smith & Roberto Spano (it took four people to write a film this bad?) is a mess, there's no recognisable coherent storyline in it & it just seems a loosely connected series of incidents & character's which makes for a very tedious 90 odd minutes. The Frankenstein character is present in this film in name only as he doesn't stitch any body parts together, he doesn't play about with any brains or 'create' a creature. I have no idea what the thinking behind the Neanderthal cavemen are all about, it's just plain odd & throw in stupid annoying dwarf into the mix & one has to wonder what the makers of this nonsense were thinking. Was this meant to be a comedy? If it was it isn't funny apart from the hilarious English dubbed dialogue. Is it meant to be scary? Well, it's not scary at all & has virtually no horror elements that I see. Other than either horror or comedy I can't see what else the makers were trying to do with this film & since it fails miserably at both I wasn't impressed.
Terror! Il Castello delle donne Maledette is a mess of underdeveloped ideas that go nowhere & awful character's. Despite it's many lurid & exploitative English titles this is very tame stuff, there's some brief nudity but no blood or gore to speak of. The most exploitative it gets is when it is implied a dwarf rapes a woman, it is not shown on screen though so don't get too excited. Also, what happened to the body Frankenstein stole from the graveyard? It gets mentioned quite a few times but it's never revealed why Frankenstein stole it or what he did with it. Another problem with this film is that it is just so boring, virtually nothing happens & the photography is so bland & dull it's just a chore to sit through.
Technically the film is basic with shaky & jerky camera pans & zooms, rubbish special effects & lowly production values where an entire village is represented by about seven people. Some of the interior castle scenes look quite good & are quite atmospheric but that's down to where it was shot rather than any great effort on the filmmakers part. It's hard to tell about the acting since all the cast are dubbed into English but the English voice actors are terrible & the dialogue just sounds ridiculous & fragmented.
Terror! Il Castello delle donne Maledette is awful apart from some unintentionally funny moments, a decent castle setting & a few naked bodies, overall I thought it was tedious & pointless in the extreme.
Review by Paul Andrews from the Internet Movie Database.
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