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Film Details:
Directed by Stuart Gordon (From Beyond, Re-Animator) Written by H.P. Lovecraft (short story), Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) and Dennis Paoli (Dagon, Re-Animator) Starring Review: by Melissa (e-mail your faithful reviewer) You know, I always get a little uncomfortable around Stuart Gordon flicks. He's the only director to really crank out a lot of Lovecraft-based films (hooray!), but they always seem to wander a very long ways from their source material (boo!). Sometimes this works, like in the gruesomely fun Re-Animator (hooray!). Sometimes you just get to see Barbara Crampton and Ken Foree in their underwear (hooray!), but only in a lackluster film like From Beyond. Gordon seems to like to produce very non-Lovecraftian Lovecraft movies. There is a certain sense to this that I understand. If you can't really do justice to Lovecraft's atmosphere or original vision, you might as well let the movie adaptation take the ball and run in its own direction. I think I'd rather see a decent yet different adaptation than a lousy yet devout adaptation. Castle Freak follows much in the same vein as Gordon's previous Lovecraftian efforts. It is barely recognizable as Lovecraft's The Outsider, but it is certainly a stronger film than most short film efforts at portraying the same story. Unfortunately, that's not saying much. Castle Freak isn't very good as a whole. The plot involves a fractured American family who inherits an Italian castle. As they move in and start to catalogue the goods, they discover that the previous owner had left behind a family legacy of sorts: the battered, sad, and murderous lurker in the basement. The film gets slogged down in a lot of melodrama and never seems to really get going. The characters never really behave like intelligent human beings, whole plot tangents and characters are introduced for the sole intent of giving the critter more people to murder, and the film is generally unremarkable and not very scary. Even Jeffrey Combs, who is one of my favorite character actors, seems a little disinterested in this material. This film is just hard to sit through. However, there is one really good thing going for this movie, and that is The Monster. Not only are the make-up effects incredible (Jonathan Fuller is covered head-to-toe in them), but Jonathan Fuller and Stuart Gordon do a marvelous job at bringing to life a creature that is both terrifying and sympathetic. Unlike all of the other characters in the movie, the creature acts with very clear motivations. I wish I could cut this guy out and put him in a good movie. Don't go out of your way to see Castle Freak, but if you see it playing on a movie channel some night, you could certainly do worse. DVD Details: Pan & scan I would bitch about the pan & scan transfer, but I found this movie for something like $2.99 on DVD, so I can't really complain. It was a cheap date. The Videozone documentary is pretty interesting. I actually enjoyed it more than the film. The DVD box says that the film has an R rating, which isn't true. The film on the DVD is actually the unrated director's cut. Further Information: |
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