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The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - 88 Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (7th October 2023). |
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The Film
 An orphan with no knowledge of where he came from, attorney Roger Mont Elise (Winnetou's Lex Barker) receives a letter from the mysterious Count Regula (Horror of Dracula's Christopher Lee) inviting him to his castle in the Midlands with the offer of information about his origins. Stopping in a village, he finds no one willing to admit to even knowing about Count Regula and the Castle Andomai apart from a monk who tells him that the count was executed thirty-five years before in the town square and his castle is in ruins. In spite of this, he presses on accompanied by Monsignor Fabian (Castle of the Creeping Flesh's Vladimir Medar) who begs a ride to an inn on the way along with Baroness Lilian von Brabant (The Face of Fu Manchu's Karin Dor) and her maid Babette (Carmen, Baby's Christiane Rücker) whose carriage was run off the road by highwaymen. Lilian has also received a letter from Count Regula summoning her to collect the estate of her late mother. As night falls, the coachman (Slaughter of the Vampires' Dieter Eppler) becomes more frightened as they pass through a thick fog into a nightmare forest festooned with hanging corpses and human limbs intertwined with tree branches. When they finally reach Castle Andomai, they discover that it is indeed in ruins but that Count Regula's servant Anatol (The Creature with the Blue Hand's Carl Lange) has forgone death (despite being hanged) in order to restore the Count to life so that he may avenge himself on the descendant of his executioner and procure the blood of a thirteenth virgin for his elixir of immortality. The film's German title "Die Schlangengrube und das Pendel" translates as "The Snake Pit and the Pendulum" and those are two separate terrors awaiting the Count's guests. Better known in some territories as "Castle of the Walking Dead", The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism is not a vampire film and actually bares some vague similarities to another Lee vehicle Castle of the Living Dead – with its mysterious castle invitation, walking dead-looking aristocratic host, and use of suspended animation – more so than it does to the cited literary source of "Edgar Allan Poe's novel 'The Pit and the Pendulum'" but its odd combination of Gothic ambiance and serial-esque thrills left an indelible mark on those who caught it in various drive-in double bills or on videotape (with cover promising something more gruesome and/or kinky). Lee has little screen time – indeed he is actually billed third after Barker and Dor, his American and German co-stars being bigger in Germany where Lee himself was already a strong box office draw – and supporting players Medar, Rücker, and Lange might handle more of the action during the middle than the leads, but the film's true stars may actually be the set designs of Gabriel Pellon (The Invisible Dr. Mabuse) and Rolf Zehetbauer (Querelle) from the forest of corpses to the Boschian frescoes and sculptures, alchemic mechanisms, and mechanical death traps of Castle Andomai combined with the score by Edgar Wallace series regular Peter Thomas (The Hunchback of Soho), the diverse range of which includes stabbing horns, electronic sounds, a jaunty travelogue piece and a more mournful variation, as well as a romantic theme for both orchestra and solo piano. For this viewer, it was such a formative experience that it matters not that it is actually a pretty tame experience that feels more dark fairy tale than a Teutonic stab at the Italian Gothic. Despite director Harald Reinl working primarily in Karl May westerns, Edgar Wallace krimis, and the occasional Eurospy pic (FBI Operation Pakistan), The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism remains his only horror work – albeit at a time when you could count German horror pictures on one hand – but it is a memorable one. 
Video
Released theatrically in 1969 in the U.K. as "Blood Demon" (in a double bill with Nightmare Castle as "The Faceless Monster") and in the United States by Hemisphere Pictures as "The Blood Demon" with double billings and reissues in various degrees of completeness – and on television as "The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism" which was apparently a less objectionable title than one with "Blood" in it for Hemisphere TV bookings – the film became more widely known stateside as "Castle of the Walking Dead" as part of string of video retitlings distributed in the United States by Saturn Productions and Regal Home Video and in Canada by Interglobal Video. Although these three releases featured the same title, each of these versions was a different cut of the film running roughly five to ten minutes shorter than the eighty-three minute running time, with Saturn Productions losing the pre-credits sequence and a chunk of the carriage ride (including the discovery of the burnt-out inn that is still referenced in the dialogue) and Regal Home Video retaining the pre-credits sequence but losing two chunks of the carriage ride sequence. When Magnum Entertainment released the film on clamshell VHS as "The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism" with a misprinted running time of "120 minutes" (presumably meant to be one hour and twenty minutes), it turned out to come from a very different source: Constantin Film's PAL master of the English export version which featured the complete English-language title sequence (apart from the video-burn title) that unfolded with just the sound effects of the Count being marched to his execution – the German version featured music over the credits and the Hemisphere and various American video cuts also featured music over their abbreviated credits sequences – with all scenes intact and the only jarring element being the replacement of the romantic end card theme with the jaunty theme that accompanied the first part of the carriage journey.  The film was long in coming to the DVD format with one of the "Castle of the Walking Dead" video masters getting an unauthorized release along with the Magnum VHS master. In Germany, E-M-S put out a DVD in 2005 featuring a 16:9 upscaling of a 4:3 letterboxed digital master that was nevertheless the superior option for fans. This master turned up stateside in another unauthorized edition, but hopes for an official release rose when Severin Films announced that "The Blood Demon" would be included in the Hemisphere Horrors Blu-ray boxed set in 2019; however it was a bonus feature on the set's boxed set exclusive disc of The Black Cat and it turned out to be a purple-tinged 16mm print scan that was at least uncut. The following year, however, a new English-friendly 4K scan turned up in Germany on Blu-ray in a deluxe mediabook featuring a Blu-ray, a DVD copy, a DVD of extras, and a CD, as well as a limited mediabook of just the Blu-ray and DVD copy, and a standard edition in 2021 featuring just the Blu-ray disc. Fortunately, Severin made amends by including the 4K master with the DVD extras and a new commentary as part of the first volume of The Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee Collection. The same master has been utilized for 88 Films' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.57:1 widescreen Blu-ray which was struck from the original 35mm internegative complete with the "Constantin Film bringt" logo (oddly stretched as if it came from a video source) and it is a massive improvement over what some of us have seen before be it the budget discs of the American cuts, the once-definitive-if-imperfect German DVD, or Severin's 16mm-sourced first stab at the title. The image is gorgeous with the grading seemingly correcting for fading without radically altering the color scheme familiar from earlier editions. Blacks are deep and stronger textures now give the wardrobe and sound stage sets a sense of production value where where one expects cardboard trickery along with detail once swallowed up in solid swatches of gold and purple in the wardrobe and décor. The few stop motion and lap dissolve optical effects still look coarser with fine scratches which have thankfully not been sandblasted with any digital cleanup algorithms. 
Audio
Like the German and American editions, 88 Films offers English and German LPCM 2.0 mono tracks; however, in addition to an SDH track for the English dub, 88 Films alone offers up an English subtitle track for the German audio. While Barker and Lee dubbed themselves on the English track, it is interesting to hear the differences on the German track which has a few darkly wry quips from Anatol and overall a bit more character than the more expository English dialogue script. Both tracks sound relatively clean, but the English track seems to have been mastered from the Magnum VHS as it had been on the German DVD in which the more romantic closing theme is abruptly replaced with the jaunty travelogue music from earlier on in the film (the other U.S. video cuts of the shorter version featured the German theme over the end card). 
Extras
Extras start off with an audio commentary by film critics Kim Newman and Barry Forshaw who describe Reinl as a great "pasticheurs" and the film as not simply a "Bava ripoff" but a melding of the main then-influential Gothic horrors Black Sunday from Italy, The Pit and the Pendulum from America, and Dracula: Prince of Darkness from Britain crossed with an Eastern European fairy tale film, noting its effective atmosphere and art direction – in which the move from natural to artificial and surreal settings is calculated with a roller background replacing the landscape outside the carriage as night falls – and its its lack of true threat in spite of the death traps which recall not only old serials but some of the outlandish gadgets in sixties spy and actions shows. They note that the film is actually a Barker vehicle with a guest appearance from Lee, discussing aristocratic American Barker's star status in Germany as well as the careers of Reinl and his then-wife Dor (Reinl would be stabbed to death by his next wife at age seventy-eight), as well as Lee's stint of working a few days on a film requiring a secondary villain to fill in for some of the dirty work (noting again the similarities to the Hammer film with Anatol as the equivalent to that film's Klove). The disc also ports over the "Film Locations 1967 VS 2020" (7:40) piece from the German editions as well as two German Super 8 digest versions of the film – "Das Todespendel Burg des Grauens" (16:42) which is a well-done condensation of the entire narrative, and "Die Schlangengrube des Grafen Dracula" (16:01) which bewilderingly pushes the first third of the film as an adventure featuring Barker and Medar with Dor not introduced until they arrive at the castle (even though they appear to know each other) – as well as the original German theatrical trailer (3:13) and a modern trailer (1:08) for the 4K restoration. 
Packaging
The disc is housed in a keepcase with a reversible sleeve featuring alternate art, while the first pressing of 2,000 copies also includes a reverse-board matt finish O-ring slipcover featuring new artwork by Thomas Walker and a 16-page booklet with notes by Andrew Graves which gives an overview of the scarcity of German horror cinema up to the Reinl film – among them Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, and The Horrors of Spider Island – and the krimis made before and after and a mention of the type of considerably graphic, less stylistic SOV gore films to come.
Overall
Although The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism never quite lives up to that title in thrills (nor the other English release title "The Blood Demon"), its odd melding of influences and atmosphere left its mark (or brand) on viewers who caught it theatrically or on one of the many different cuts on home video.
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