"Considering the oeuvre of Stuart Gordon, "restraint" is rarely a word that comes to mind. From the bloody extremes of Re-Animator to the farcical comedy of Stuck, Gordon was the master of, as Roger Ebert put it when reviewing Dolls, "glorious exercises in bad taste, wretched excess, and blood-soaked horrors." If Ebert was unconvinced by the "more elegant, civilized, artistic and clever" Dolls, it did lay the groundwork for a movie that gels Gordon's bloody best with his unerring desire to understand who we are, deep down, which pervades all his films-even if often obscured by buckets of blood."
"It will be that. Thumbs will be chewed off, women's shirts torn asunder, and bodies mutilated. "But it's a different movie with a different tone," Jeffrey Combs tells me over a call in September. "It's a very serious, melancholy, dark movie." That contrast solidifies when we're introduced to the Reilly family soon after. John (Combs) discovers he's related to the duchess upon her demise and is the sole inheritor of what appears from their approaching car to be a fairytale palace."
Stuart Gordon's Castle Freak adapts H.P. Lovecraft's 1926 short story The Outsider into a deceptive, melancholic creature-horror. The film reunites Re-Animator collaborators Dennis Paoli, Jeffrey Combs, and Barbara Crampton. Early scenes depict the Duchess d'Orsino's imprisonment and abuse of her son Giorgio, setting expectations of visceral violence and mutilation. The narrative then shifts to a darker, more serious tone as John Reilly inherits the duchess's castle and brings his wife Susan and daughter Rebecca from the United States to liquidate the property and attempt a fresh start. The film combines gore with psychological exploration of identity and familial trauma.
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