Handsome, big, strong Lex Barker – my favourite Tarzan, for what it's worth – hadn't played Edgar Rice Burrough's tree-swinging hero for ten years, but he is still every inch the hero here. Not perhaps the most personable actor, he has a magnetic presence that dominates the screen (as a personal aside, I'm a big fan of comic artist Mike Ploog, who drew many horror strips for Marvel in the 1970s – Barker is like one of Ploog's drawn heroes come to life). The same may be said for Christopher Lee as the evil Count Regula, whom we first meet facing the prospect of being publicly quartered for his crimes. Karin Dor plays Baroness Lilian von Brabant, damsel in distress with the heaving bosom, who takes an instant liking to Barker's Roger Monte Elise.There are rumours, 35 years after his gruesome death, in which Regula still somehow lives. The search for him, with burning torches, through the impressively Gothic and labyrinthine passageways of the castle threaten to become a little tedious. Hand in hand with the Countess, Elise stoically isn't put off by gory entrails or threatening voices. It is here any tedium ends, with a wealth of pits, scorpions, snakes, leering faces and the like looming out of the shadows and the rank, dripping tunnels."The blood is the life," says Regula (echoes of Dracula) to those who have witnessed his resurrection, who are in fact ancestors of those who had him put to death. It is here at last Poe's 'Pit and the Pendulum', which had been credited as inspiration for this, makes a spectacular appearance, as Elise is tortured in a bid to fill Brabant with enough fear so that her blood may allow Regula eternal life … or something like that.Director Harald Reinl and composer Peter Thomas conspire to produce something highly enjoyable, very colourful, Gothic and dripping with wonderful horror atmosphere. Great fun.

Deriving its inspiration very loosely from Poe (specifically his classic short story 'The Pit and the Pendulum'), "The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism" stars Christopher Lee as Count Regula, a sadistic nobleman who is drawn and quartered after killing twelve virgins in his quest for eternal life. Thirty-five years later, the count's servant brings him back from the grave so that he can avenge himself on the descendants (Lex Barker, Karin Dor) of those responsible for his execution. Lee is suitably ghoulish as the resurrected count, and the dank, gloomy torture chamber of the title--in which Barker's character faces death by pendulum--is truly impressive with its fresco of the right panel of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights (which depicts Hell). It probably won't make anyone's list of top ten horror films, but "The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism" delivers the goods in terms of pure mood and atmosphere, if not subtlety. Six and a half stars.

Christopher Lee hams it up in blue-face in this odd little German horror film that tries to imitate the Hammer Films of the time and presents the audience with few saving graces. One of those is the photography, which is pretty interesting even in a public-domain over-saturated DVD print.An interesting aspect I noticed was that the effects shots in the forest, which are the most compelling visual aspect of the film, seem to have been done later and quite a bit more weird than the script must have implied. The guy who is the coachman (Dieter Eppler) stops the coach and complains about 3 crows, not seeming to notice all the disembodied hands and arms also sprouting quite clearly from the trees.As with many of Lee's horror films from this period, his appearances are brief. Most of the action goes to former Tarzan actor Lex Barker, a stunningly poor actor who wears every emotion the director gives him on his sleeve. Gorgeous Karin Dor does just what the film asks of her and nothing more. Vladimir Medar provides an ongoing irritating presence as the faux-priest who is obviously a highwayman (this gives Barker a chance to raise his eyebrows in doubt, which apparently is supposed to make him seem intelligent).There are many amusing bits that make this watchable in a "so bad it's good" kind of way. We were particularly amused by the inappropriate MOR music that would play whenever the group was traveling around in the carriage.The ending of the movie provides excuses for G-rated exploitation as half-dressed "virgins" are seen in various torture poses. The whole device with the cross is one of the most obvious and stupid endings in history, just a cliché. This film would barely hold the audience down in a double feature. All the "scare" elements are typical too -- "oh look, a rat!" "Oh look, a bunch of snakes! How gross!" -- designed perhaps to get girlfriends to make the perfunctory move into their boyfriends' arms at the drive-in. This is lazy storytelling (notice how Medar's character continually runs away for no reason and reappears also for no reason with whatever information the other characters need) and lazy film-making and I would have been angry if I had spent more than $1 for the film.

Just as the German krimi of the 60s proved to be a big inspiration for the Italian gialli, this film is in turn inspired by the 1960s Italian Gothic horrors (perhaps best exemplified by Mario Bava's Black Sunday). Like Black Sunday, this film concerns an executed practitioner of the black arts returning from the dead to get revenge on the descendants of those who executed them. In this case it is Christopher Lee rather than Barbara Steele, and thankfully he dubs himself.Like the films of Bava, this is filled with moody photography and baroque, Gothic visuals (such as a forest filled with corpses, a hallway lined with skulls, and walls painted with Boschean landscapes). It is difficult to judge how great the photography itself was in relation to Bava's, since the print was so poor, but the direction was definitely as competent. None of the characters were particularly interesting except for Fabian, a highwayman disguised as a priest suffering from major Falstaff syndrome. The man even resembles the Orson Welles incarnation of the character, so I can't help but wonder if it was intentional. The film is pretty entertaining for the most part, and doesn't suffer so horribly from its dubbing like many films from the period do. It is only during the pendulum sequence that I found myself getting bored. While it had not been at the time, the sequence has been done to death, and it always ends the same way: hero comes up with a clever plan and escapes just as the blade gets driven into the ground. Maybe they could've shaken things up by having the hero get sliced in two, and had the poor man's Falstaff save the day!So all in all not a particularly significant Euro-horror entry, but it benefits from some awesome visuals, one amazing character, and an occasionally effective score (though it sometimes lapses into some painfully inappropriate and thus hilarious "happy-go-lucky" music). Personally I'm just glad to have finally seen it after reading about it for all these years!