Crampton Hallo-Watch: Castle Freak (1995)

One poster shows the villain, which is a spoiler, and one is a teenager in a bra, so you get Crampton

Watched:  10/24/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Stuart Gordon

I am not always in-line with all of the thinking that goes into being a hard-core horror film fan, but I love how much they celebrate the work of their favorite actors - and keep them employed for decades.  One such fave I've been aware of for some time has been Barbara Crampton, and I'm on board.  Sign me up for the Crampton fan club.  

So, we'll be digging a bit more into the Crampton-filmography over time.

When I saw that Castle Freak (1995) re-teamed director Stuart Gordon with actor Jeffrey Combs and Crampton, and I saw some notes about "this is a horror movie with a kind of grown-up storyline" I was curious.  I like a good "whoops, the robots have flipped out at the shopping mall" movie as much as the next guy, but I wanted to know what this team looked like doing a bit more drama and little less in the way of re-animated corpses running about.  

Combs and Crampton play a couple on the rocks following the blinding of their daughter (Jessica Dollarhide) and death of their young son after Combs drove them off the road, drunk.  Clearly Crampton can't forgive and forget, and Combs is maybe too much of an egoist to really accept what he did.  But a mysterious relative has just passed, and when that occurs, Combs learns that he's inherited a castle in Italy.  Apparently he was Italian nobility.

Well, wouldn't you know it - there's a freak living chained up in the basement of the castle.  And by freak, we mean a hideously deformed, savage human, that for some reason, someone decided it was best they keep in a cage in the basement.  

The arrival of the fractured family leads to the "freak" flipping out and escaping, where he hides in the many hidey-holes of the castle and occasionally popping out to harass and then murder.  There is a housekeeper, who is aware of the freak (who is named Giorgio, so I can stop calling a fictional disabled person a "freak") but has been complicit in Giorgio's horrible life.

The family fractures all the more, and Combs goes out where he picks up a bottle again and accidentally picks up a hooker.  Things go sideways as the hooker leaves - and it brings things to a head, as police want to look into the castle.

As a stand-alone story about a family trying to move past trauma, you do get the idea that Combs and Crampton would have been interesting in a straight drama about loss.  The Crossing Guard, which is @#$%ing great but depressing, comes to mind.  We're nowhere near that - after all, we have a dude running around murdering people with his bare hands to contend with - but we do get to use that as a sort of investigation of the secrets families keep, our own weaknesses and what we can do to make amends.  

There's a 2020 version of this film for reasons I cannot fathom, which sounds like it's much more Lovecraftian in nature and changes all the major details that make this one different and/ or interesting.  What it does do is say "maybe we shouldn't make a wretched human an actual monster" which plays very oddly now, as I know it probably did in 1995 - but which arrived in a period full of serial killer movies, so who knows?

I find it interesting that this was poster-girl Jessica Dollarhide's last movie.  Maybe she went to college and was done.  I can't say.  She's certainly not bad in the movie.

Anyway, I don't want to oversell it, but it *is* different.  The same sort of lived-in, real-world problems, like, say, in The Shining, are an interesting refraction against the part that makes the film "horror".