Ten Days of Terror!: Castle of Blood

Films: Castle of Blood (Danza Macabra)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine.

You never really know what you’re going to get into with an older horror movie, and for me, that’s especially true when it’s an Italian horror movie. I don’t always love Italian horror movies, finding them to be much more about the spectacle and very often short on plot and coherence. Castle of Blood (or Danza Macabra in the original Italian) comes from before the era of the giallo, though, and also features Barbara Steele in a prominent role. Steele is always a net positive.

The plot is straight out of the mid-‘60s horror playbook. A journalist named Alan Foster (Georges Riviere) confronts Edgar Allan Poe (Silvano Tranquilli) about the authenticity of his stories. In the world of this film, Poe’s stories are viewed not as fictions, but as eyewitness accounts of the supernatural. Confident that there is no supernatural, Foster takes a bet with Lord Thomas Blackwood (Umberto Raho) to spend a night in the man’s castle. Specifically, he is to spend All Souls’ Eve (otherwise known as All Saints’ Day) in the castle. According to Lord Blackwood, no one has done this successfully; everyone who has attempted it has died.

Ten Days of Terror!: Flesh for Frankenstein

Film: Flesh for Frankenstein
Format: Internet video on laptop.

It was not without trepidation that I came to Flesh for Frankenstein. There’s a single reason for this: it’s sometimes known as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein. I get why Warhol was important in the art world even if I’m not generally a fan of his work. That said, Andy Warhol’s Vinyl is the single worst movie I have ever seen. There are certainly movies that I’d want to watch again less than Vinyl, but I genuinely can’t think of a film that I’ve seen that was worse. That stays with you. It’s hard to trust again after one has been that badly burned.

Knowing that I had a mindset going in to dislike the film, I prepared myself for the worst. And, well, it’s not the worst film I’ve seen and not even the worst horror film I’ve seen. It’s not even the worst horror film I’ve seen this month. That doesn’t make it any good, though. It might well be that it was impossible for me to actually like Flesh for Frankenstein with as much of a negative set against it as I had. But I tried. I really did try.