Frissons diaboliques

This could very well have been a nightmare I had from watching way too much Eurotrash this month:

There's a castle chocked full of the twisted rich, an inheritance, a family curse, a dying matriarch, her young nurse, her greedy son, a mute servant, a sinister housekeeper and sundry other folk, all of whom have secrets. The old lady keeps her husband's corpse in a secret room, the mute's into blow-up sex dolls and tries to rape the nurse, and the son's screwing the housekeeper when he's not presiding over a band of devil worshippers (consisting of many "citizens above suspicion") who want to sacrifice the nurse and drink her blood. Oh, and he's got a step-brother (director George Martin) chained in a dungeon like THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK. It's lunatic sh!t for sure but the sex & savagery is kept to a PG-13 minimum, alas, and low budget aside, there's no excuse for not having blood on a knife when it's pulled from a victim. Another case of what could have been.

Hey - it's a rare Spanish Gothic horror! All the elements are in place: We have a huge creepy castle with appropriately creepy staff. Strange going on in the basement. And er...devil worshippers with machine guns?

Crazy Alex lives in a huge castle with his also crazy mother, who claims that her dead husband and dead stepson come to visit her every night. Alex just wants her to shut up and die and leave him the inheritance, but at least in the mean time he can try and hit it off with his dead brother's lover, who has come back to the castle for some closure (Now's not the time, Alex!). Alex actually tells this to his lover, who is also his maid. She's not chuffed, to say the least.

It's not just banging the maids and chasing tail that Alex does in his spare time. He also runs the local Satanic cult who are planning on sacrificing a young lady in the basement of the castle. Alex and the local doctor, Dr Batman (?) know that the satanic stuff is all a lot of crap, but they sure make a lot of money out of it. Dr Batman, by the way, has arranged for a young nurse to arrive at the castle under the pretence of looking after Alex's mother.

This is all your run of the mill Gothic horror stuff, but there's some weird editing going on throughout the film that drags the plot into the seventies. My favourite bit was the mute butler and his love for a mannequin he's got buried in a grave out the back. When the nurse spurs his advances, he murders the mannequin. If only the rest of the film was that stupid.

Things only really pick up near the end where all the satanic worshippers get together to murder the nurse and Patty (Alex doesn't like being knocked back). It is only then that the guns come out and things pick up a bit. This film spends too long on the drama and too little on the horror. I'm guessing that's why it's been left to obscurity!

Oh, and Patty Shepherd wears the biggest pair of glasses I've ever seen.