Reportedly, scenes from this film were incorporated into Lucio Fulci's CAT IN THE BRAIN (1990) - along with snippets from his own TOUCH OF DEATH (1988; which I watched only last week) and GHOSTS OF SODOM (1988; which I missed out on recently due to a power cut!); incidentally, Fulci himself was the 'Presenter' of BLOODY PSYCHO - as well as RED MONKS (1988), another title I should get to pretty soon. While certainly better than TOUCH OF DEATH, it's still a film that perfectly evokes the rut into which low-grade European horror had fallen by the late 1980s (having preceded this by a superior giallo from the "Euro-Cult" heyday - Duccio Tessari's THE BLOODSTAINED BUTTERFLY [1971] - the gap in quality is all the more evident!).
The plot is a mish-mash of tried-and-true elements: there's the doppelganger theme, a remote castle as the setting of an old crime (with all the mystery and secrecy that it entails) - and to which an innocent is invited by way of a ruse, but whose presence is necessary so that a prophecy could be fulfilled (he is himself a spiritualist but doesn't realize that the murderous vision he keeps having is of his own death - shades of both DON'T LOOK NOW [1973] and Fulci's own THE PSYCHIC [1977] - until it is too late, that is!), etc. The film's tone is rather campy, what with the presence of the young, long-haired priest (who eventually emerges to be the leader of a community of diabolists!) and especially that of an alcoholic doctor - whose over-the-top performance, resorting to unintelligible raspy-voiced ranting and face-twitching in close-up, has to be seen to be disbelieved!
Still, the hero is a blank-faced youth and the major female characters all look alarmingly alike (but only one of them actually doubles as the ancient murderess - now reduced to a pile of goo and bones riding a wheelchair!); from the latter, I'm sure one can deduce that the film is basically just an excuse for a parade of slimy (yet risible) effects. Apart from featuring Jess Franco favorite Paul Muller in a small but pivotal role, the film benefits - if so it can be said - from a tolerable electronic score (though its sudden shift to a honky-tonk sound during a stint in the country provokes unintentional hilarity)...and there's even an unusual element of sexual tension present: a lesbian relationship between the 'paralyzed' mistress of the castle and her sluttish maid (which, alas, is barely touched upon) and also some highly unlikely sexcapades (one of them being an unorthodox milk-drinking session) between the hero and the murderess' grand-daughter that would be more appropriate in something like 9½ WEEKS (1986) - and which are even more incongruous when pitted against the wave of violent deaths surrounding them!! The rushed attempt at a multiple-twist ending, then, is utter nonsense - effectively delivering the well-deserved death knell to an already tired genre outing.
