Director: Miguel Madrid (as Michael Skaife)
Year: 1971
Country: Spain
Alternate Titles: El descuartizador de Binbrook; Graveyard of Horror; Necromaniac; The Butcher of Binbrook
Genre: Creature Feature
Plot:
Desperate to understand what happened, a man visits the physicians who tended to the intended birth of his son, only to find that the baby and his wife died in childbirth, sending him on a quest to understand what happened and revealing a deadly secret about the mad doctor who lives at the castle.
Review:
Overall, this was a really fun Gothic horror effort. One of the better elements within here is the incredibly intriguing and highly effective storyline that brings a lot of likable factors. The central premise of the man on the mission to find out what happened to his wife and visiting the medical team responsible for caring for her during childbirth, only to learn that she was killed when her stillborn child required a special operation to remove it from her, and that she’s since disappeared with no willing explanation for anything, serves to get the film going rather nicely. With the mysterious circumstances of the situation only providing an account of what happened, but not revealing anything about the bodies, even after looking into the graveyard itself to see who’s buried in their chosen plots, sets the tone for this one quite nicely from the start, as it leads into the revelations about the doctor operating in the castle grounds.
From there, the film turns into a solid Gothic-tinged mystery, with the characters trying to make sense of a series of strange incidents around the castle. With the man mysteriously vanishing after exhuming her body and subsequent abduction by the masked figures emerging from the castle, the series of interactions following that paint each sister as a potential eyewitness to his whereabouts, only to be completely wrong about the whole thing, keeps it intriguing. As each of these specific interactions is based on the idea of the sister trying to use that as proof of his interest in them before returning to the present day, everything comes together to set up the full reveal in the finale as the various figures running around the castle are brought into contact with the deformed creature living in the soil creating some solid, standout moments here. With this also providing scores of Gothic imagery through the decaying castle grounds and adjacent cemetery, there’s a lot to like here.
There are some issues holding it back. The main drawback with this one is the general lack of action, which leaves the general pace quite underwhelming and sluggish for long stretches. This one spends a lot of time focusing on the incidents with the sisters trying to make sense of the different encounters they each believe they’ve had with the ghostly spirit wandering around the castle grounds, as they all try to keep the secret of the wife’s death, and deal with the different elements of their secret plan that it just feels all the more sluggish here with very little happening. These scenes offer up a lot of intriguing elements, but with the main guy removed from the story due to the focus on these other storylines, the tempo here feels immensely tired and slow. Combined with some rather unfortunate effects, work hidden away in the monster's creation, and the general lack of violence or nudity present, despite ample opportunities to do so, these all lower this one overall.
Overview: ***/5
A solid enough if somewhat flawed Gothic horror effort, there’s enough to like here that it’s able to overcome some of the flaws present here that do keep this one down overall. Those with an appreciation for this style of genre fare, who appreciate Eurohorror from this time period, or who are curious about it, will have the most to like here, while most others should heed caution.
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