RETRO REVIEW: CASTLE FREAK (1995)

Author Lewis B. Smedes once remarked that the difference between guilt and shame is very clear. “We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are.” It is this intersection of guilt and shame that is at the heart of director STUART GORDON’S 1995 direct-to-video film, CASTLE FREAK. With a title like CASTLE FREAK, you wouldn’t think the film would explore such heady topics as loss, grief, self-destruction, and personal accountability, but it does, and it does so surprisingly well. Both monster and man are examined in parallels and contrasts to the other, as both martyr and villain, products of their own making as well as monstrous constructs created at the hands of others.

JONATHAN FULLER in Stuart Gordon’s CASTLE FREAK.

PLOT:

John Reilly (JEFFREY COMBS) has arrived in Italy with his wife Susan (BARBARA CRAMPTON) and daughter Rebecca (JESSICA DOLLARHIDE) to arrange the sale of his newly inherited castle. However, unbeknownst to the family, the duchess who willed the castle to Reilly kept her child, Giorgio, chained and shackled in the dungeon, beating him regularly with a gnarly-looking flogger. Though the duchess is dead, Giorgio (now the eponymous CASTLE FREAK) remains, fully grown and still locked in the bowels of the formidable fortress. As the family temporarily moves into the castle to await its sale, existing internal conflicts threaten to further fracture their already precarious family unit, and when the CASTLE FREAK finally escapes his prison, the family must face the consequences of the creature’s past abuse, as well as the fallout of their own transgressions.

The Castle Freak goes after the Reilly family when they move into a castle in the Italian countryside.

VISUALS:

The film was shot entirely in Italy at producer CHARLES BAND’S own castle, which he used frequently as a cost-effective film location. His production company, FULL MOON FEATURES, shot both MERIDIAN and PIT AND THE PENDULUM there, but it’s really CASTLE FREAK that makes the most out of the locale. The castle itself is enormous and foreboding, a cavernous relic that is a stark reflection of the purgatory both John and the CASTLE FREAK have both made for themselves. In fact, the castle is so huge, that when John calls the local police to tell them that someone had been in his daughter's room and that they need to search it, one of the cops laughs and says the castle has over 150 rooms and they simply cannot spare the manpower. The castle itself also becomes a visual manifestation of the emotional distance that plagues the family throughout the film: at every turn, they are pushed apart and separated by the sheer size of the place and by their own individual traumas.

JESSICA DOLLARHIDE as Rebecca and JONATHAN FULLER as The Castle Freak.

KILLS:

Perhaps the most significant death in the film is one that does not happen at the hands of the CASTLE FREAK himself. Early on in the film, we see John having a nightmare, flashing back to him driving drunk with his daughter Rebecca and son JJ, who was in the back seat. John is obviously inebriated, much to the concern of his daughter. JJ drops his hand-held video game on the floor and proceeds to unbuckle his seatbelt to retrieve it. When John turns to yell at JJ to get back in his seat, the car swerves to avoid an oncoming truck and they crash into a tree. JJ is killed when he is thrown from the car, and Rebecca’s eyes are permanently damaged, while John walks away without so much as a nick on him. It’s the event that puts into motion this family’s unmaking, as well as its tragic redemption.

It’s after this death that the blood and gore really start to kick in, and it should come to no surprise that director STUART GORDON would be up to the same twisted, grisly tricks that made his RE-ANIMATOR a body horror classic. Thumbs and nipples are bitten off, heads are bashed in, and in perhaps the most disturbing moment of the film, the concept of being “eaten out” is given a new, extremely violent context. That kill in particular is gruesome and upsetting, and is made more so by the fact that we know that the CASTLE FREAK is simply mimicking behavior he has seen John perform himself, albeit executed by John with far less savagery. The CASTLE FREAK is a child burning ants with a magnifying glass: it’s not as though he doesn’t realize the violence he is perpetrating, he just doesn’t care. He is all id - a mangled flesh bag of instinctive impulses and primary processes.

JONATHAN FULLER getting his Castle Freak make-up applied by the film’s SFX team.

SFX:

The full-body special effects work accomplished with the CASTLE FREAK creature himself is nothing less than stellar, and that’s all due to the work by SFX artists EVERETT BURRELL, MIKE MEASIMER, PIETRO TENOGLIO, and JOHN VULICH, who crafted one absolutely terrifying creature. The CASTLE FREAK is a twisted husk of a man - pale, bony, and gnarled. His face is a deformed and drooling mess, one side of his mouth permanently stretched open in a smiling grimace, unable to contain his overgrown and rotten teeth. Though he does his best to keep himself covered as he skulks around the castle grounds, when he is ultimately revealed in all his grotesque glory, it is unsettling to say the least.

BARBARA CRAMPTON, JESSICA DOLLARHIDE, and JEFFREY COMBS in Stuart Gordon’s CASTLE FREAK.

PERFORMANCES:

CASTLE FREAK sees both JEFFREY COMBS and BARBARA CRAMPTON reunited with their RE-ANIMATOR director STUART GORDON, and it is that magical formula that elevates both the film and the performances above your standard direct-to-video material. JEFFREY COMBS is terrific as the family’s emotionally crumbling patriarch who struggles daily with the guilt and shame of being responsible not only for his young son’s death, but also his daughter’s blindness. He is a deeply flawed man, a prisoner of his addictions to booze and sex and Jeffrey Combs captures the crushing lows of his sorrow as well as the destructive highs of his drunkeness, in perfect, manic style. He is a man still thoroughly in the throes of his grief, believing that the sobs he hears in the castle during the night are the cries of his dead son.

When he goes down to the crypts to investigate the sightings of the CASTLE FREAK, he finds a tomb for a little boy named Giorgio who died when he was five (whom we find out later is actually the CASTLE FREAK). When he sees the picture on the crypt of the boy (who resembles his own son), he’s convinced that it’s JJ’s ghost that is causing all the strange goings-on at the castle. Unable to get out from under the own weight of his parental guilt, the constant resentment felt at the hands of his wife, and the local police’s refusal to believe his assertion that there is an intruder in the castle, he proceeds to fall apart in spectacular fashion. He not only falls off the wagon with his drinking, he jumps that wagon off a cliff, getting shit-faced in a local bar and bringing a local prostitute back to the castle. He figures, in for a penny in for a pound - after all, the police don’t believe him, his wife hates him, he might as well wallow in self-destruction. But, he quickly learns that his actions have consequences that will irrevocably change his family forever.

BARBARA CRAMPTON, often too quickly dismissed as simply as a cheesy horror scream queen, absolutely knocks her performance as the wife Susan out of the park. In one particularly painful scene, husband and wife are finally hashing out the issues with Combs’ John and his lack of accountability for his actions, whether it was being drunk while driving his kids or his infidelity during their marriage. Crampton’s Susan is rightfully bitter and resentful towards her husband, trying to deal with her own anger about his negligence and selfishness. She keeps him at arms-length emotionally and physically, not even allowing him to sleep in the same room as her. During their argument John asks if she is trying to punish him. “Yes,” she says. “Because God didn’t. Because he just let you walk away without a scratch.” It’s an absolutely brutal and gut-wrenching scene and you feel every ounce of pain and anger both husband and wife hold towards not only towards each other but towards themselves. Crampton’s Susan is a woman barely holding it together, her face a constant furrow of anxiety and barely contained tears. Crampton is given fertile material here and she makes the most of it.

But it’s perhaps JONATHAN FULLER’S performance as the titular CASTLE FREAK that’s the most surprising in its depth. An accomplished theatre actor and graduate of the Alabama School of Fine Arts, Fuller is all but unrecognizable, donning full-body prosthetic makeup for the film. But despite all of that makeup, or perhaps because of it, Fuller gives a performance that balances child-like innocence and primal ferocity in a way that I haven’t seen since BORIS KARLOFF’S legendary turn as the monster in FRANKENSTEIN. We have flashes of sympathy for his creature: he is the product of years of systematic abuse and torture (his genitals were even partially removed), his emotional development forever stunted and twisted as a result. However, unlike Karloff’s monster, he is an innately cruel entity. Denied any sort of love or affection through his adolescence, the creature almost immediately seeks out the women in the house as the focus of his stunted sexual psyche. At times, it can be difficult to discern exactly how sexual the creatures' impulses are. In perhaps the film’s most shocking scene, the creature sexually assaults and kills the prostitute that John brought back to the castle in a twisted attempt to mimic an act he had just seen. But because the creature is so hobbled developmentally and emotionally, he doesn’t really have any understanding or context of the act that he just witnessed. He is very much still a child, but with a far more savage pathology.

JESSICA DOLLARHIDE and BARBARA CRAMPTON in a scene from CASTLE FREAK.

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS:

Monster movies are innately satisfying for audiences as we love to see a terrifying and murderous creature struck down by our pure-hearted heroes. It’s the triumph of good over evil that makes it so rewarding and comforting to watch. We want to believe that good can defeat evil so much that we grasp at it in order to keep us going in a world where so much evil goes unpunished every day. Author Sherry L. Hoppe wrote, “Between the radiant white of a clear conscience and the coal black of a conscience sullied by sin lie many shades of gray - where most of us live our lives. Not perfect, but not beyond redemption.” It’s a thought that so many of us who do live our lives in those shades of gray cling to: that even though we have made mistakes in our past, we will eventually find absolution for them.

CASTLE FREAK is ultimately a story of redemption, but perhaps not the kind we are hoping for. In the end, John ultimately finds his redemption with himself and with his wife and daughter, but this family is so defined by their tragedy and heartache that his atonement could only come through an ultimate sacrifice. John feels guilty for what he has done to his family, but even more so, he feels ashamed of what he is: a self-centered, self-hating, self-destructive man. Though the end of CASTLE FREAK is tragic, and John himself is far from the perfect, pure-hearted hero we so often see in monster movies, he is not beyond redemption, and it is that promise of redemption that gives hope to those of us who also live in that area between the radiant white of a pure conscience and the coal black of our sins.