It doesn’t take long for Jenny to wonder if she’s going mad: bleeding plants (potted in the very ashes of her dead step-sibling and her lover), hallucinations and dreams of unfamiliar stablemen being murdered, disembodied heartbeats and maniacal laughter tend to not make one comfortable. Meanwhile, Stephen has called for Jenny’s former physician Dr. Joyce (Laurence Clift) so that he can attest to her dwindling mental health. But Jenny’s plight into madness is not brought upon by her own unbalanced mind this time — because Muriel and David are on their way back from the land of the dead for some sweet revenge, Italian style.
Director/co-writer Mario Caiano’s Nightmare Castle is a gem to behold. The movie relies on its heavy gothic atmosphere to tell a rather simplistic story that is very much inspired by Edgar Allan Poe (the first name of Caiano’s directing pseudonym, Allen Grünewald, is an homage to Poe). Despite some pretty bad English dubbing (which many of us feel only adds to the fun), it all works extremely well considering the film’s low budget (there are only six actors in the whole of the movie).
Over the years, Nightmare Castle has been released on VHS and DVD a near-infinite amount of times by every distributor under the sun under an assortment of different titles (the original title is Amanti D’Oltretomba, or Lovers From Beyond The Tomb, and the title has also been released as The Faceless Monster, The Night Of The Doomed, and even Orgasmo in some parts of the world). Every previously released copy has been either washed out, cropped, scratchy, and, worst of all, edited.
But all of that has changed now, and the folks at Severin Films have given us a restored, remastered and completely uncut (104 minutes) presentation of Nightmare Castle made directly from the original Italian negative, recently discovered in Rome. The transfer here is unbelievable and (regardless of a few very minor scratches and specks) is nothing short of perfect. The film is presented in its original 1.66:1 widescreen ratio with anamorphic enhancement. Sound-wise, the mono stereo English dub has never sounded better, and all of the screaming comes through more than sufficiently.
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