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The title refers to the blood-soaked iron maiden that comes with the honeymoon manor, "quite a poetic name to apply to what is after all a brutal instrument of torture." A castle on the Rhine, the heir (Georges Rivière) feels the weight of the past, his American wife (Rossana Podestà) duly wanders through shadowy chambers with candelabra in hand. The ancestral inquisitor is memorialized in effigy, "The Punisher" with black hood and crimson cape: "Was he a moralist or a maniac?" The resident Mrs. Danvers (Laura Nucci) pines for the return of ancient evils, the disfigured custodian (Christopher Lee) cries "Mein Herr?" in the cellar, the FBI agent (Jim Dolen) snoops on the margins. Left alone to stew in her dread, the heroine stabs the gloved hand creeping through the bedroom door. "It's not a ghost if it bleeds." German angst through the pane of Italian Gothic, Antonio Margheriti makes sure that the scars of war still ooze. A tormentor in the mausoleum, an appreciator of "the old ways" as demonstrated with a luckless beauty (Lucille Saint-Simon) and a hungry rodent in a 15th-century iron cage. "Believe me, they had an extremely diabolical imagination, our ancestors." There are assorted points of contact with Corman's Poe pictures, and a thoroughgoing overhaul of Clayton's The Innocents. Eastmancolor grisliness set to Riz Ortolani's lounge music, a garden pool prettily reflecting the moon until it's drained to flood dank catacombs. "You are interested in surgery, aren't you?" Julian's The Phantom of the Opera for the unveiling of the tragic fruit of the Nazi regime, "a living skull... their masterpiece," poisoned history sorted out in a mighty conflagration. Visconti takes a glossier tack in Sandra. With Leonardo Severini, Anny Degli Uberti, and Mirko Valentin.
--- Fernando F. Croce |