Director: Alberto De Martino
Writers: Giovanni Grimaldi and Bruno Corbucci
From: Chilling
Watch: archive.org
A young woman is hounded by a curse saying her ancestral home will fall if she lives to see her 21st birthday.
Title suggests Creeping Terror silliness, but this is instead a b&w gothic drawing from Poe for inspiration. Emilie, on the cusp of her 21st birthday, is returning to her ancestral castle with her fiancé John and her best friend (and John’s sister) Alice. At the castle, they meet Rodéric, Emilie’s brother and the last surviving man in the family after their father passed. All the servants are new and unrecognizable to Emilie. Even a new doctor, LaRouche, arrives.
The first night, Alice wakes up when she hears someone screaming. She goes exploring and finds the housekeeper injecting a severely burned man who’s bound in the tower. She flees and faints when she encounters Rodéric. Later, Rodéric tells everyone that the man was his father, not dead, but driven mad and convinced that a prophecy inscribed on the family tomb saying the family line will end once a daughter turns 21 will come true unless he takes action. The father is intent on killing Emilie.
Emilie is hypnotized and led into the cemetery to stare at her own grave several times and there appears to be a conspiracy between the staff and the doctor. Alice keeps investigating as Emilie’s condition deteriorates until she’s eventually found in a hypnotic state indistinguishable from death. She’s entombed alive and the doctor reveals what he knows to Alice.
And I’ll leave it there. The movie’s pretty all right, even though it doesn’t give you much of a chance to figure out the mystery, instead telling you all the details at the end. However, it’s nice seeing things develop and having your assumptions challenged throughout. The question of who’s working with whom is never explicitly laid out so the final twist doesn’t feel cheap, it only feels like the movie dragged its feet getting there.
Pacing does hamper the movie, as does having largely interchangeable actors. I kept getting Alice and Emilie confused until around the second act and the men, except for cut-rate Vincent Price, didn’t stand out much either.
The titular Blancheville monster doesn’t have much screentime, which is a disappointment, but since it’s just a person who’s supposed to be a burn victim (re: a mask made of dried oatmeal), it’s not much of a disappointment. The sound on my copy was a bit scratchy and fuzzed out, but it worked well enough. In the end, it’s a cheap gothic piece, not on the scale of a Paul Naschy or Hammer Horror flick, but satisfying enough. Since it’s in the public domain, I added my copy to archive.org here. It’s fine as a standalone recommend, moreso if you’re interested in riffing it. It’s perfectly watchable, but had enough breathing room for lots of joke.
1 comment:
Great reading tthis
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