A melancholy aura hangs over this confused, weak-kneed Spanish production that's crammed full of classic gothic horror elements. The eerie photography is excellent and the dusty, scuffed-up, neglected looking castle interiors make for a glum and gloomy experience. It's too bad the story is so badly told and the long-awaited appearance of the monster is a joke, because other than those major shortcomings this movie has a lot going for it. A moody young man arrives at the family castle in Scotland and is told his wife died in childbirth. The castle is occupied by several very odd women (good luck keeping the familial relationships straight) and the details of the wife's demise don't add up. The local doctors are sour, unpleasant old coots, so the grieving husband doesn't get much help. None of the other characters are sympathetic either, and the presence of so many one-dimensionally hostile, antagonistic, sleazy scoundrels tends to limit viewer involvement. The determined hero digs up the grave and finds his wife's coffin empty. A lot of the other graves in the cemetery turn out to be vacant too. He learns that his missing scientist brother, the Earl of Binbrook, was working on some kind of bizarre, never-adequately-explained experiments with severed heads at the time of his disappearance. The audience knows long before the protagonist does that the Earl inadvertantly turned himself into a zombielike monster who has to be kept buried in the earth during the day, sustained with some kind of intraveneous monster serum. At night he crawls up out of his makeshift grave and eats corpses. An evil doctor and the shifty local gravedigger are in on the plot. The movie looks great but the meandering story is dumped into the film (and into bewildered viewers' laps) as a jumbled pile of lengthy flashbacks and memories in a manner that soon becomes more annoying than intriguing. The alleged hero disappears from the movie for about a third of its running time, and the audience knows perfectly well that he's not dead but the other characters discuss his sudden absence and sometimes see him (or think they do) wandering around the periphery. At the end he simply strolls back into the plot and we never do find where he was all that time. Just out for a long walk, it would seem. The worst problem in terms of believability is the monstrous flesh-eating ghoul's appearance. With green hair and a lumpy face with an oversized cartoonish mouth full of shark-like teeth, he looks more like an overaged trick-or-treater than a serious threat. I don't know what the goal of his experiments was, but he proves to be just as easy to kill as any ordinary mortal so I guess the results were something short of miraculous. As hinted at above, the editing is pretty terrible. In one scene the monster crawls up out of a grave in front of his next victim. The terrified meal-to-be is looking down at the rupture in the ground when all of a sudden the ghoul seems to be up above him, jumping down to attack from some kind of ledge! The same melancholy piece of music (it reminded me of "On Top Of Old Smoky") is heard throughout the film. When it isn't playing on the soundtrack, people either hum or whistle it or play it on a harmonica. One girl even does an up-tempo "tra-la-la" version of it. Other peculiarities include a dead cat in a suitcase (why?) and in one shot it looks like a large log is lying in someone's bed. (I've heard of sleeping like a log, but really.) The thing that salvages this movie from the dustbin, other than the memorably decrepit scenery, is the inclusion of a few extremely creepy sequences. When the ghoul wakes up in his grave, a loud heartbeat is heard, the ground throbs and heaves, and green hands with sharp claws thrust out of the earth (classic stuff). And the maddened bloodcurdling scream of rage the monster belts out every time he's about to attack is one of the scariest monster noises I've ever heard. It ought to be included on Halloween sound effect records. Haunted house attractions could scare their patrons half to death with it. The bottom line is that GRAVEYARD OF HORROR (which was made as NECROPHAGUS but given a traditionally dumbed-down title by its American distributors) is a good-looking misfire that will only appeal to diehard gothic Euro-horror fanatics. The English dub calls one character "Skaife" as an in-joke reference to the anglicized name of the director on English language prints.
