The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism

1967 "UNBELIEVABLE! Until You See It With Your Own Eyes!"
5.8| 1h25m| en
Details

In the Olden Tymes, Count Regula is drawn and quartered for killing twelve virgins in his dungeon torture chamber. Thirty-five years later, he comes back to seek revenge on the daughter of his intended thirteenth victim and the son of his prosecutor in order to attain immortal life.

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Constantin Film

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StunnaKrypto Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.
Inclubabu Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.
Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.
Iseerphia All that we are seeing on the screen is happening with real people, real action sequences in the background, forcing the eye to watch as if we were there.
jadavix The ridiculously named "Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism" has everything you need to be a classic of b-grade Gothic horror. It's got fantastic locations, brilliant sets, beautiful ladies, capable actors, and Christopher Lee.The film begins with Lee, who plays a male version of Countess Bathory, being drawn and quartered for his crimes against young women.The film jumps forward a few hundred years or so with a group of people who are travelling through the European countryside in search of the evil Count Regula (no, he's not called Dr Sadism) and his castle. We get that staple of Euro-horror: everyone the band of adventurers ask for information refuses to give any. No one will speak Regula's name. The movie stops short of the whole "travellers enter a bustling pub or restaurant and when they mention the name of the castle/bad guy everyone stops talking immediately", but it gets its point across.When the people finally arrive at the castle - it seems to take longer than it should - they encounter the count's creepy servant, and realise his plans for them.The castle is probably the best set I have ever seen in a gothic horror flick. They should all look that good. It has everything you expect - medieval decor, torture devices, weird paintings, and even a mad scientist set-up with bubbling beakers and lots of tubes.The count himself, of course, is Christopher Lee, a brilliant choice who unfortunately feels a bit under utilised here.The movie is also just so much better photographed than perhaps any other movie of its kind. Jess Franco made a bunch of movies like this in the '60s, but none of them looked this good. The scenery on the way to the castle, particularly, is breath taking.However the movie is not perfect. The only real problem I had with it was its structure. It takes too long to get to the castle, and then too long for the evil Count to appear.I can easily imagine that this might not be a problem for many viewers, however, and regardless, I feel confident in recommending "The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism" as a must-see for anyone interested in Gothic horror on the big screen.
ferbs54 I have written elsewhere about my longtime love for redheaded Italian actress Lucianna Paluzzi, who captivated this viewer back in 1965 by dint of her portrayal of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. agent Fiona Volpe in the James Bond outing "Thunderball." Two years later, another redheaded S.P.E.C.T.R.E. agent also caught my fancy: Helga Brandt, Agent No. 11, in the Bond blowout "You Only Live Twice." Brought to indelible life by German actress Karin Dor, she remains, 45 years later, one of the sexiest of the Bond "bad girls," and her death in archvillain Blofeld's piranha pool is a 007 classic. Well, despite admiring Dor's performance in this film dozens of times over the years, I have been hard pressed to see her in anything else, other than Alfred Hitchcock's 1969 film "Topaz," in which she plays Juanita de Cordoba, the widow of a Cuban revolutionary...and a brunette, to boot. A happy day for me, then, when I found a DVD containing Dor's next film after "You Only Live Twice," 1967's "Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism."This German production opens with a scene strongly reminiscent of one to be found in Mario Bava's 1960 classic "Black Sunday," with the Count Regula (played by Mr. Tall, Dark and Gruesome himself, Christopher Lee) getting a spike-studded demon mask impaled into his face, prior to being drawn and quartered. (Barbara Steele, in the Bava film, had had a similar mask sledgehammered into her face before being burned at the stake.) Regula, it seems, had been convicted of slaying 12 virginal girls for their blood, with which he'd hoped to concoct an immortality potion, and before his sentence is carried out, he swears to take vengeance on his accusers. Flash forward 35 years, and hunky dude Roger Mont Elise (Rex Barker) and the Baroness Lilian von Brabant (our Karin, 29 years old here), strangers to one another, meet on the road en route to the Count's castle, to which they have both been mysteriously summoned...."Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism" originally appeared under the title "Die Schlangengrube und das Pendel," or "The Snake Pit and the Pendulum," and as the film's credits DO reveal, it was (very) loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe's 1842 story "The Pit and the Pendulum." It is a remarkable film in many ways, but perhaps most especially for its incredible art direction and set design. The 19th century villages in the film's opening sequences look absolutely authentic, and Regula's castle is a thing of ghastly and dreary beauty. Frescoes from Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights" decorate its walls, weird sculptures are placed everywhere, a corridor of skulls adds an aura of even greater menace, while vultures, scorpions and tarantulas flap and scurry about in abundance. It is all a total triumph for set decorator Gabriel Pellon. Even more remarkable, perhaps, is the dreamlike, surreal carriage ride through a nighttime forest before the castle is even reached. Arms and torsos of naked mannequins sprout from the surrounding trees, while hundreds of figures hang in effigy from the limbs in the fog-shrouded moonlight. Kudos to Austrian director Harald Reinl for bringing this sequence home in such an effective manner. (Reinl, it might be added, had been married to Karin since 1954 despite being 30 years her senior, and would divorce Karin the following year. As it turns out, he should have stuck with her, as he was ultimately stabbed to death by his later wife in 1986!) The picture, true to its title, features several sequences of startling torture; nothing like what is to be found today in films such as "Saw," but rather torture that is, uh, fun to watch. In one scene, Lilian's maid, Babette, is suspended over a bed of knives; in another, Mont Elise is strapped under a razor-edged, swinging pendulum in a rat-infested dungeon; and in still another, Lilian stands on a slowly retracting ledge above the titular snake pit (and a high fall into a nest of vipers would certainly be as bad as being dunked into a piranha pool!). Great, ghoulish fun! Barker and Dor, it must be said, play their parts absolutely straight, and make for a very handsome couple, ultimately. As for Lee, well, he is absent, after that grisly opening scene, for the next hour or so, but his resurrection and gray-visaged, corpselike appearance should certainly linger in the viewer's memory. Some other items to enjoy in this truly outrageous film: the sometimes jazzy, sometimes outre, sometimes goofy/non sequitur music provided by Peter Thomas; the deliciously evil performance by Carl Lange as Regula's assistant, Anatol; and still another tasty performance, that of Vladimir Medar, as the jovial "Father" Fabian. For this viewer, however, seeing Karin Dor in one of her difficult-to-see film appearances was worth the price of admission alone. And even more good news for me: I have just learned that a 1963 Dor picture, "The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle" (also directed by Harald Reinl), has finally made it to DVD. Guess I'll be heading in that direction soon....
funkyfry Christopher Lee hams it up in blue-face in this odd little German horror film that tries to imitate the Hammer Films of the time and presents the audience with few saving graces. One of those is the photography, which is pretty interesting even in a public-domain over-saturated DVD print.An interesting aspect I noticed was that the effects shots in the forest, which are the most compelling visual aspect of the film, seem to have been done later and quite a bit more weird than the script must have implied. The guy who is the coachman (Dieter Eppler) stops the coach and complains about 3 crows, not seeming to notice all the disembodied hands and arms also sprouting quite clearly from the trees.As with many of Lee's horror films from this period, his appearances are brief. Most of the action goes to former Tarzan actor Lex Barker, a stunningly poor actor who wears every emotion the director gives him on his sleeve. Gorgeous Karin Dor does just what the film asks of her and nothing more. Vladimir Medar provides an ongoing irritating presence as the faux-priest who is obviously a highwayman (this gives Barker a chance to raise his eyebrows in doubt, which apparently is supposed to make him seem intelligent).There are many amusing bits that make this watchable in a "so bad it's good" kind of way. We were particularly amused by the inappropriate MOR music that would play whenever the group was traveling around in the carriage.The ending of the movie provides excuses for G-rated exploitation as half-dressed "virgins" are seen in various torture poses. The whole device with the cross is one of the most obvious and stupid endings in history, just a cliché. This film would barely hold the audience down in a double feature. All the "scare" elements are typical too -- "oh look, a rat!" "Oh look, a bunch of snakes! How gross!" -- designed perhaps to get girlfriends to make the perfunctory move into their boyfriends' arms at the drive-in. This is lazy storytelling (notice how Medar's character continually runs away for no reason and reappears also for no reason with whatever information the other characters need) and lazy film-making and I would have been angry if I had spent more than $1 for the film.
lonchaney20 Just as the German krimi of the 60s proved to be a big inspiration for the Italian gialli, this film is in turn inspired by the 1960s Italian Gothic horrors (perhaps best exemplified by Mario Bava's Black Sunday). Like Black Sunday, this film concerns an executed practitioner of the black arts returning from the dead to get revenge on the descendants of those who executed them. In this case it is Christopher Lee rather than Barbara Steele, and thankfully he dubs himself.Like the films of Bava, this is filled with moody photography and baroque, Gothic visuals (such as a forest filled with corpses, a hallway lined with skulls, and walls painted with Boschean landscapes). It is difficult to judge how great the photography itself was in relation to Bava's, since the print was so poor, but the direction was definitely as competent. None of the characters were particularly interesting except for Fabian, a highwayman disguised as a priest suffering from major Falstaff syndrome. The man even resembles the Orson Welles incarnation of the character, so I can't help but wonder if it was intentional. The film is pretty entertaining for the most part, and doesn't suffer so horribly from its dubbing like many films from the period do. It is only during the pendulum sequence that I found myself getting bored. While it had not been at the time, the sequence has been done to death, and it always ends the same way: hero comes up with a clever plan and escapes just as the blade gets driven into the ground. Maybe they could've shaken things up by having the hero get sliced in two, and had the poor man's Falstaff save the day!So all in all not a particularly significant Euro-horror entry, but it benefits from some awesome visuals, one amazing character, and an occasionally effective score (though it sometimes lapses into some painfully inappropriate and thus hilarious "happy-go-lucky" music). Personally I'm just glad to have finally seen it after reading about it for all these years!