Rent Track of the Vampire / Nightmare Castle (1966)

Two Interesting Obscurities Let Down By Substandard DVD Quality - Track of the Vampire / Nightmare Castle review by Count Otto Black

Firstly, an unfortunate technical note. I'd have awarded this disc another star if the quality of both sound and vision wasn't so lousy. Possibly it was the best available DVD of these extremely obscure movies, but given the couldn't-care-less attitude this rental company's buyer has when it comes to old but extremely well-known films of which numerous DVD releases exist, they probably went for the cheapest one without giving a thought to whether there might be a very good reason why it ended up in the bargain bin.

Anyway, leaving aside the fact that the DVD itself is fourth-rate (though better than some this company rents out!), the films on it are both terrible yet interesting in that odd way B-movies sometimes are. "The Track Of The Vampire" is the odder of the two by far. Although Roger Corman didn't direct or produce, it's one of his films in all but name - he even has a bit-part in it. Edited together by Corman from a horror film he didn't release because he simply didn't like it, another unrelated box-office flop, and footage shot later with some of the same actors in an attempt to tie up all the loose ends, it's a chaotically mismatched Frankenstein monster of a movie which tries desperately to pretend that the entire story happens in the same place, despite the actual location randomly switching between California and Yugoslavia!

The plot, insofar as it makes any sense at all, concerns a brilliant but tortured artist whose disturbingly realistic paintings of murdered women... well, you can guess the rest, can't you? It's all down to his mad medieval ancestor, who sometimes causes him to turn into a vampire for no apparent reason, though only sometimes because that didn't happen in the original cut of the film. The absurdly pretentious beatnik painters who seem to have escaped from Corman's earlier horror comedy "A Bucket Of Blood" are totally out of place, adding to the mismatched feel of the entire movie, but are much funnier than ill-advised comic relief characters tend to be. This is shameless exploitation cinema at its daftest, and deserves a reputation as one of the great bad movies. I just wish the DVD had been of good enough quality to make it pleasanter to watch and listen to.

"Nightmare Castle" is far more generic but considerably gorier, as Italian horror films from that era tend to be. The weirdly beautiful Barbara Steele basically goes through the same paces as she did a few years previously in Mario Bava's masterpiece "Black Sunday" for a lesser director, right down to playing the dual rôles of an imperilled innocent and her homicidal undead lookalike relative. Combining elements of Edgar Allan Poe, "Les Yeux Sans Visage", and every film you've ever seen in which the villain tries to drive his wife mad to gain control of her inheritance, the slow stretches in the middle, the flat direction, and the terrible acting (apart from the iconic Ms. Steele of course) are made bearable by regular dollops of torture, possession, mad science, and all the usual gothic loopiness you expect from this sort of movie. What a pity the grainy, murky, sometimes unfocused picture and terrible soundtrack, which has a slight but noticeable echo all the way through, of this poorly-produced don't-give-a-damn cheapo DVD make it less fun to watch than it should be.