Wealthy, sadistic, mad scientist, Stephen Arrowsmith (Paul Muller) is married to Muriel (Barbara Steele). When Stephen catches Muriel having sex with the gardener, David (Rik Battaglia), he hits them with his cane and incapacitates them. He then chains them up in his basement laboratory and tortures them. He then burns Muriel with acid making David watch. When he is done, he electrocutes them and burns their bodies in the furnace after taking out their hearts. He puts their ashes in an urn with a strange plant growing from it. The hearts he preserves with a spike through them.
While Muriel was chained and being tortured, she reminded Stephen that the estate all belonged to her and then she tells him that she changed her will to make her crazy half-sister Jenny (Barbara Steele), who is in an asylum, the beneficiary so he won’t get anything. Stephen needs to now find a way to keep the estate. He marries Jenny, who has been declared well, takes her from the asylum and brings her to the manor house.
Stephen has been working on experiments to rejuvenate people and bring back their youth. He uses his assistant, Solange (Helga Line), as his guinea pig. Using Muriel’s blood, he develops his youth serum and gives it to Solange restoring her youth and beauty. The effect, however, is temporary.
With Solange’s help Stephen begins a campaign to drive Jenny crazy so that she has to go back to the asylum, and he gets to keep everything, including Solange. Things are going rather well for Stephen. He then decides to ask Jenny’s physician Dr. Dereck Joyce (Marino Mase) to the estate to reinforce his claim that Jenny is once again crazy. Unfortunately for Stephen and Solange the house is being haunted by the ghosts of both Muriel and David. As Muriel begins to possess Jenny, Dr. Joyce begins to believe that something really bad happened to Muriel and David and is becoming very suspicious of Stephen.
“Nightmare Castle” AKA “Night of the Doomed” AKA “Amanti d’Oltretomba” or “Lovers Beyond the Grave” was released in 1965 in Italy and 1966 in America and was directed by Mario Caiano. It is an Italian gothic horror film. There are a lot of bad prints out there, especially by outlets such as Mill Creek and Alpha Video. Most of the copies in print have been whittled down to an hour and nineteen minutes or thereabouts. Also, the film itself is in bad shape with lots of jumps and fuzzy sound.
I managed to be able to find a copy that was pretty decent. At an hour and forty-four minutes it is an uncut dubbed version of “Amanti d’Oltretomba” that is in rather good shape. It is a much better film and a creepier film. That being said it is also a much longer film. There is a fair amount of torture in the beginning and some strange moments toward the end. In the middle, however, there is quite a bit of melodrama that just bogs things down. If you can stick with it the longer version is still much more entertaining and a lot more sinister.
This is another one of Barbara Steele’s duo role films. As Muriel she is frightening and as Jenny only a little less so. The film is riddled with erotic and sadistic influences and Barbara Steele fans will find quite a bit to love in her performance as both the actually tortured Muriel and the mentally tortured Jenny. There is also a dream-like sequence that adds some gothic elements to the film as well as firmly establishing Jenny as, if not insane, then extremely susceptible to paranormal influences.
Although the film has a lot of elements that are standard for Italian horror films and revisit some aspects of plots by Edgar Alan Poe stories and Mario Bava films it is still mostly an entertaining movie but a little longer than it needs to be. At least if you are watching the original uncut release.