We've had several of sci-fi, horror and Lovecraft director Stuart Gordon's films on this blog before - From Beyond, Dagon and (non-Cthulhu related) Dolls - and so I think we can safely say that he's one of the few directors who really "gets" Lovecraft's work and filming the so-called "unfilmable". So when he tackles another of Lovecraft's short stories, The Outsider, in the Full Moon film Castle Freak, you know you're in for something special.
Recovering alcoholic John Reilly, his wife and teenage daughter arrive in Italy to move into an old castle that John has inherited after Duchess D'Orsino, the previous resident and John's relation, dies. Things are very strained between John and his wife Susan, since when John was still drinking he caused a crash which blinded daughter Rebecca and killed their young son JJ. Also in the castle but unbeknownst to anyone else, there is a freakishly deformed man who was kept chained up in the castle's dungeons and tortured by the Duchess until she died. Now free from his chains, the "castle freak" searches for food and, after watching John having an encounter with the local prostitute, he starts kidnapping and killing people in an attempt to mimic what he saw. John is blamed for these disappearances and deaths, but can he clear his name and uncover the truth?
Castle Freak came about because of a poster. Director Stuart Gordon was in the office of Charles Band - the owner of Full Moon Pictures and of the castle that the movie was shot in - when he saw a poster titled "Castle Freak" that featured a deformed man chained up and being whipped by a woman. Gordon asked about it and was told, "Well, that's a castle and there's a freak." Gordon was then free to make whatever kind of film he could come up with from that poster, just as long as there were a castle and a freak in it. So there's an origin story for you. In the end, The Outsider ended up being more of a starting inspiration than a full-on adaptation, as the only thing that connects the short story and the movie is a scene where deformed Georgio sees himself in a mirror and realises how disfigured and horrifying he looks - after which he starts wearing a bedsheet to look like someone combined Mahatma Gandhi and Zorro.
Georgio, the titular Castle Freak, is actually quite a sympathetic monster. We see from the very start that he's been kept chained up, mutilated and tortured for nearly all of his life, and all of his human contact has been violent and hateful (and from someone who should have protected him at that). He has no idea how to be human, really, and the acts he commits are borne out of hunger, desperation and confusion - at first, at least. That being said, he does still kill and eat a cat (who was only trying to help him!) and his attack and murder of the prostitute are particularly graphic and unpleasant to watch (as they should be). Georgio also develops an obsession with blind daughter Rebecca, which results in her being menaced in just her bra - another rightfully uncomfortable scene to watch. Among the people who created the special makeup effects for Georgio was the late John Vulich, who also worked on TV shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Babylon 5 and the X-Files.
John, meanwhile, goes through several arcs during the course of the film. The biggest and most important one is his quest for redemption, of course, as he desperately seeks his wife's forgiveness for the drunken crash which killed their son and blinded Rebecca. As the film progresses and that arc becomes entwined with his quest to prove his innocence over the murders Georgio committed and save his family, you become aware that his story will probably not have the happiest ending, but things do get resolved by the end of the film. It's perhaps unfortunate that, since most of the film is from his perspective, that Susan, played by Barbara Crampton, is relegated somewhat to secondary character status - and something of a shrewish one at that. It should be perfectly understandable that she is still angry at her husband for what he did, and yet the audience is encouraged to feel sympathy for him when she pushes him away (another question would be why she came with him to Italy if their marriage is so bad, when surely it would have been easier for everyone concerned for her and Rebecca to stay in the States, but I guess we wouldn't have had our movie if they hadn't come).
Castle Freak has something for most horror tastes. It's got gore, it's got a monster, it's got a gothic atmosphere, it's got some Lovecraftian origins, it's got some vague giallo hints (an American arrives in Italy, gets involved in murder, has to uncover the truth himself), it's got some women in underwear - uncomfortable as those scenes may be - it's got some great genre stars in Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton and it's got a climactic fight on the roof of a castle in the middle of a thunderstorm. What more could you ask for? It's well worth a watch.
3.5 out of 5.