Panic

Pretty good mid 60's Italian-made, English-dubbed horror film. A new bride is terrorized by a mysterious hooded individual at her husband's ancestral castle in West Germany. It doesn't help that she sees tortured dead women, there is a torture chamber museum with a scarred curator, the stone-faced housekeeper makes sinister references, the young female servants disappear, her husband acts mysteriously, and EVERYONE tells her it's all in her imagination. The hooded torturer is truly creepy and scary when unmasked. The title refers to an ancient torture device. Though the story is based in Germany, the locations were clearly filmed in southern Italy. Beautiful gardens. I don't know if the castle is real or just a set, it certainly is realistic. The film has been re-mastered and the color is vividly rich. I personally like the jazzy score. Highly recommended.

The Virgin of Nuremberg aka The Iron Maiden was a medieval torture device used by The Red Torturer in Antonio Margheriti's visually beautiful Gothic horror "La Vergine di Norimberga".Max and Mary Hunter are staying at a castle in Germany Max has inherited.Unfortunately Mary is having ghastly nightmares.She sees a mysterious figure in a red cloak who kills poor maid.It seems that the madman is on the loose in the castle of horror...Vastly entertaining and genuinely creepy Gothic tale with small role of future British horror icon Christopher Lee.The location sets are truly atmospheric and the torture room looks very eerie.A cage with a hungry rat inside which is placed over a living woman's head is a nice touch.8 torture devices out of 10.

This takes place in post WWII Germany. A man brings his new wife home to a beautiful and large castle he owns. It also has a torture museum overseen by a disfigured man (Christopher Lee slumming). The wife starts seeing a masked torturer walking around and dead bodies...but nobody else does. Is she going mad? You won't really care. The story is predictable--I knew exactly how it was going to end. Also it's very dull---there are countless sequences of the wife wandering down hallways. The film is also in Italian and HORRIBLY dubbed--worse than any Godzilla film I've ever seen. It has a laughably inappropriate jazz score and has a burst of LOUD music every few minutes to accentuate a word or phase...and wake us up. Lousy acting too...only Lee is any good Dreary, dull, predictable. A must miss. Skip it.

An early film by director Antonio Margheriti under his alias 'Anthony Dawson' with echoes of 'Bluebeard's Castle'; the tone of which after he's spent nearly seventy minutes prowling about a spooky castle in pursuit of heroine Rossana Podesta is summed up by the exchange "What is that!? It's only an instrument of torture".

This thriller boasts an excellent story, some masterful lighting and cinematography, effective use of color, not to mention a distinguished old castle, as beautiful without as it is within. The musical score, while big band and jazz oriented, actually works very well, inasmuch as it's quite unusual and unexpected for this type of story. Christopher Lee has one of his most distinctive roles from the 1960's, and perhaps most important of all--the film is scary! Note that many of the props, including Rossanna Podesta's bedstead, were also used in Bava's "Black Sabbath," as well as in Freda's "Terror of Dr. Hichcock." Really a sumptuous looking film.

I collect horror dvds from the 60s and 70s. There are those that are classics because they are well made films artistically speaking. This is one of those films. Before I watched this film I had read that there was a jazz score that didn't seem to match the subject matter. At first, it did seem out of place, but once I got into the film I didn't even notice. The music actually plays a big part in building suspense. Christopher Lee plays a nice mystery man role. Has a bit of a "who done it" kind of story. Over all a good film, especially for fans of Gothic kind of horror or Hammer films.

Max Hunter, (Georges Riviere) gets married and takes his wife, Mary Hunter (Rossana Podesta) to his ancestral castle which contains a large collection of torture devices used in Medieval times. Max is away from his wife on business and Mary finds herself in a house where she finds dead people being killed under her own roof and a servant named Erich, (Christopher Lee) who has a deformed face and acts very strangely towards her. There is a scene where a young girl gets her nose chewed off by a rat and a man finds himself drowning in a basement room filling up with water. This film is full of surprises and we also see pictures of Adolph Hitler which takes the film into another direction. Nice entertainment film for Halloween night.