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The humorously oneiric tone is established with the introduction of the callow Napoleonic lieutenant (Jack Nicholson) astride an exhausted horse on the beachfront, moments later he's trying to punch a swooping falcon while nearly drowning. (Boris Karloff's twinkly leer as he creaks open the castle's door clinches the knowing approach: "Surely I made enough noise to awaken the dead.") A mysterious maiden (Sandra Knight) beckons the lost soldier to the Baron's manse, it's a matter of betrayal and revenge, she's been dead for two decades. "For a ghost, she is a very active young woman." The story goes that Roger Corman had Karloff for a couple of extra days after wrapping The Raven, so he improvised a scenario with Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman and Jack Hill, each of whom took uncredited directorial turns over the course of the week-long production. Characters creep around the same torch-lit cardboard dungeon over and over for padding, but, scene by scene, it's a delightful patchwork. Bava color gels in the Murnau Schloß Vogelöd, "a noble heritage," the crone's mesmeric wheel of glass spinning for the camera. In the year of The Birds, Jonathan Haze with bloody eye-sockets on the edge of the precipice. Not the fire from the Poe adaptations, but the ocean itself for the flooded crypt to break the curse. "The will of God. To endow... and to deprive," such is the faith of low-budget auteurs. Bogdanovich's Targets samples this as just the brand of horror made obsolete by suburban psychopaths, Kubrick in The Shining virtually recreates the comely visage turned into a molten death mask by Nicholson's embrace. With Dick Miller and Dorothy Neumann.
--- Fernando F. Croce |