Terror-Creatures From The Grave (1965)

What a sleeper this thing is. The director of (the sometimes) great Bloody Pit Of Horror is responsible for this one and now you should know what I mean by sleeper. The difference is that Bloody Pit Of Horror's level of camp is high enough to keep the average cult-freak going. Terror-Creatures From The Grave on the other hand is just plain boring.

Surprisingly there is a bit of gore in this one. Its your typical haunted castle movie, where the former owner of the castle is dead (or is he) and in his will requests a bunch of uninteresting losers to came stay for some stupid reason or other. Of course there is a curse on the castle and the family members but this time around the ghosts or zombies or whatever you want to call them were victims of the plague. So we have some people with their flesh rotting away in some fairly gruesome detail for 1965. The film also opens up with a man being killed by a horse. Yes you read it right... A man has his face stomped by a horse and his eyeball pops out. Considering this is the 60's and its not a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie its pretty nice to have some Fulci-esque eye-violence. After all this is an Italian film.

Aside from the few gore scenes which are way to spread out, we have the Gothic beauty Barbara Steele as the widow of the castle owner. Steele looks pretty much exactly the same as she does in the far superior Nightmare Castle and that's because the two films were shot in the same year but where Nightmare Castle is creepy, suspenseful and fast paced Terror-Creatures is the exact opposite. Steele also has herself a bath in this one but unlike Nightmare Castle we don't get any boobage this time around. Terror-Creatures also offers up some twitching zombie hands, graves that open on their own, an annoying reoccurring song about water, a man who commits suicide with the help of a wheelchair and a sword and a Barbara Steele sex scene. Apparently the uncut version of this movie offers a bit of tit (not Steele) but I'm sure it doesn't help this thing move along any less painfully.

Don't waste your time with this one. Watch Bloody Pit Of Horror instead. At least we have some mindless torture in that one and a handsome oiled up executioner.