Le Manoir maudit

This is a one hundred percent cheese fest that's delivered straight to your eyeballs by a guy on a moped.

It all begins when two women think they can just stroll into their local castle just because the front gate is opened and then somehow act surprised when a crazy guy with a really wonky looking face captures and kills both of them.

For some reason the local policeman thinks they died of exposure when their bodies are found dumped later, but a Doctor who has just returned to town with his daughter thinks differently, as does a guy who seems to have spent the last twenty years looking for his missing girlfriend.

His missing girlfriend looks exactly like the doctor's daughter, who of course has been dreaming that she is the missing countess. Her dad brought her back to the town and the castle to rid her of the dreams somehow for reasons I couldn't quite figure out. And obviously someone is out to kill her.

That's enough plot! The first twenty minutes or so of this one are rather good (including the trippy credits), but then you have a bit of a slog through the comedic romance bits between the daughter and some reporter guy, although things pick up again when old wonky face gets involved.

No creepy housekeeper in this one though, although it does throw all sorts of 'haunted house' shenanigans at you which is always most welcome, for me anyway. It's not hard to guess what's going on though! There's a person that keeps turning up dressed as a knight, and they don't even bother disguising their voice.

Complaining that an Italian genre film doesn't have much of a plot is kind of like complaining that an opera doesn't have a lot of subtle, naturalistic acting or that a hardcore porn movie doesn't have great dialogue--that's just not the point. Still even by Italian standards the plot of this movie is pretty lame. The best part is the opening scene where two of the oldest-looking schoolgirls in film history are exploring a mysterious old castle (for reasons that completely eluded me). They are warned away by the old crone maid who still runs the place, but they don't heed her warning and end up captured, tied-up, and tortured to death in the basement by a sadistic monstrous hunch-back! Although the torture takes place mostly offscreen, it is nevertheless surprisingly graphic for the time.

As the girls' bodies are being carried away a scientist shows up who is planning to stay at the castle. He is surprisingly blase about the double torture-murders even though he is accompanied by his young adult daughter who is about the same age as the two victims. He remains unperturbed even after the old maid tells them that the daughter is the spitting image of the former lady of the castle who mysterious disappeared years earlier. There is then a dumb subplot where the daughter falls in love with a local reporter, who kind of looks like a middle-aged version of "Tin Tin". It's not long though before this damsel-in-distress waiting-to-happen becomes a bonafide damsel in distress with her father and "Tin Tin" rushing to her rescue.

It's not to hard to figure out who the villains are--one we've already seen at the beginning and the other is his only plausible accomplice. The climax is hardly very surprising therefore, or very climactic. And that's the real problem here. This has a good opening scene, but the rest of the movie goes strictly downhill from there.

At the start of this otherwise dreary Italian gothic, two teenagers sneak into a familial castle and encounter its owner, the "nasty old witch" Countess Elizabeth. The Countess' moronic servant Hugo captures the girls, tortures, and kills them.

This impressively strong opening is tacked onto a seemingly unrelated, absurd and slow-moving story about an heiress who visits the castle and is haunted by a ghost. Her entourage -- including a comic-relief doctor, an Indian, and a bumbling journalist -- talk a lot about who-killed-who and a treasure buried on the estate.

I wanted to see more scenes of Hugo, the token thing-in-the-cellar who has one eyeball down around his cheekbone, drools, and cackles a lot. The mad Countess dresses up in knight's armor and orders Hugo around, cracking a whip. There's also a laughing skeleton and a bizarre enema joke.

In U. S. theaters, this movie occupied the lower half of a double bill with the campy German-made vampire flick, CAVE OF THE LIVING DEAD. TOMB OF TORTURE was Boccacci's only film.

TOMB OF TORTURE opens with a wordless tour through a creepy castle. Then, we see a skull with an eyeball in one socket.

Great stuff!

The rest involves two young women being tortured to death by a disfigured madman; a woman named Anna (Annie Alberti) who dreams about the torture chamber; and a reporter who investigates the deaths.

TOMB is a macabre, somewhat silly film loaded with lugubrious atmosphere and gothic sets. It's biggest problem is that it has several spots that just drag on.

BEST SCENE: The nightmare sequence, which includes a murderous figure in full plate armor and a giant crossbow!...

One of the reasons I am a fan of Italian horror is for films like this; though this particular example is not one of the better ones. The film is directed by Antonio Boccaci and also doubles up as his only directing credit; which isn't really surprising as despite having a recipe for success to work with, he doesn't implement much style or suspense into the proceedings and the result is sadly underwhelming. It's also really slow, and the bulk of the film consists of not a lot of interesting things happening. Tomb of Torture takes place mostly in and around an old Gothic castle. The film gets off to a fairly good start as we get treated to a macabre sequence that sees two girls tortured to death. The plot then takes a familiar turn as we fast forward some years into the future, but the focus still remains on the eerie castle from the beginning. We find out that the Countess went missing years ago and the new female lead is a young girl who happens to look just like the missing countess and who goes to the castle on the advice of her doctor...

The black and white cinematography is undoubtedly one of the best things about this film and helps it immensely when it comes to the atmosphere. This bodes well with the eerie castle, as well as the shots of the torture; which is expected considering the title. However, these two elements actually don't mix as well as they should as the director doesn't direct with much verve and this isn't helped by the slow plotting. The main antagonist is a weird looking deformed hunchback who wanders around the castle grounds unseen. Like the main plot, this one is also derivative and it's also not made good use of as nothing really comes of it and the hunchback itself looks more silly than foreboding (looks kind of like the poor man's Wolf Man). The acting is passable but nothing to write home about with all the leads doing their job and not much more. It takes a long time (or at least it seems to) before the ending is finally upon us, and while it does offer up a suitable climax to the film; it doesn't really justify the eighty minutes that came before it. Overall, this is actually quite a boring movie and I certainly would not recommend anyone goes out of their way to see it.