Killers all must pay for their crimes, and Hell is where they burn.
The first six minutes of 1967's The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism -- during which the dastardly Count Regula (Christopher Lee), killer of twelve virgins and seeker of infernal eternal life, is paraded around by a shirtless, red-hooded executioner and his black-hooded helpers, has a gold mask with spikes on the inside hammered into his face, and is finally drawn and quartered by four black-hooded horses -- are terrific. The remainder is decidedly less so. Unfortunately, the remainder is where the entire plot is contained as Roger (Lex Barker), a lawyer who doesn't know he's the son of the judge who sentenced the count to death, and Lilian (Karin Dor), a baroness who doesn't know she's the daughter of the woman who led the authorities to him, are invited to Castle Andomai -- known as "The Bloody Castle" -- by the count's undead servant, Anatol (Carl Lange).
Along the way, Roger and Lilian are joined by the shifty-eyed Father Fabian (Vladimir Medar), a traveling priest who turns out to be an ungentlemanly thief. They're also beset by a half-dozen black-hooded highwaymen, but since they ride off about as quickly as they appear, never to return, I guess they were written in to pad out the film by a couple of minutes. Speaking of padding, director Harald Reinl does a hell of a lot of it once his protagonists reach the remains of Castle Andomai and shuttle back and forth between various subterranean chambers, some of which, yes, contain torture devices. When Lee's count is finally revived, 35 years after his execution, to take his revenge on Roger (by co-opting the climax of Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum") and use Lilian's blood to make himself immortal, the most pointed thing he says is "Time makes no difference to the dead." That's as may be, but the living can generally find better things to do with theirs than watch dreadfully dull films like this.
