You know, if you inherit something in a horror movie, you're pretty much doomed. I guess the trick is knowing you're in a horror movie. In Stuart Gordon's Castle Freak, his regular actors Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton are a married couple on the rocks, with a blind teenage daughter, and Combs inherits an Italian castle. Except... there's a rapey psychotic monster chained up in the basement. Vaguely inspired by Lovecraft's The Outsider, it's not really part of Gordon's Lovecraft work, and while at times sick and demented, doesn't reach the bizarre, gross-out heights of previous films in that cycle. It still makes great use of its location, and can lay claim to some depth. Given the back story of both the family and the monster, this horror tale is really about how trauma comes back to haunt you, and asks whether one can even be free of survivor's guilt, or exorcise its attendant demons. With that ridiculous title, it's easy to dismiss the film as direct-to-video hackery, but it's got stuff bubbling under the surface (or scrabbling in the basement, if you prefer) that gives it an edge over the usual DTV material.

not bad!

This movie goes a lot harder than expected