This rather cartoonish castle-of-terrors horror suffers from lacking original ideas, not to mention the style or atmosphere to distinguish its pastiche of familiar ones. Christopher Lee is in atypically dull form with amateurish corpse-like makeup as the aristocrat-cum-mad-scientist who lures a group of traveling players in order to experiment on them. The other performers are OK but hobbled by worse-than-usual dubbing in post. (Apparently that occurred somewhat late, when parts of the script had been lost, so some of the dubbed dialogue had to be ad-libbed. I'm still not convinced that's even Lee's voice.) There's the curiosity value of Donald Sutherland's screen debut, but his multiple roles (one in drag, as an old crone!) are all brief. The action moves along fast enough to prevent the film from being outright dull, but it has no tension, no visual flair, and no commitment to getting the most from its more macabre notions--so they come off as kind of half-heartedly tongue-in-cheek. In the end, it's just pretty silly film, though god knows we've all seen worse.
Review of The Castle of the Living Dead
