Nightmare Castle

Most commonly known in the US as "Nightmare Castle", this 1965 shocker starts off with cinematic guns ablazin!! Barbara Steele plays a wicked woman married to a lunatic doctor. He discovers her in a heated trist with their gardener. Both Steele and her lover are chained to a lab wall, and given a slow, grimy, painful death via horrible surgical instruments. These scenes, disturbing as hell, remind one of crime scene photos of Lizzie Borden or Jack The Ripper. But then, the film becomes a talky soap opera, centering around the bad woman's mousy twin sister (played by a blonde Steele) Somebody should have told the director audiences don't want to see their character a colorless, cheerless, unemotional, unimaginative nothing. The first reel rates an A+, the rest a C-.