Jean Duprey (Pierre Brice), the hero of Night of the Damned, is a renowned sleuth who helps the police with particularly difficult cases - he's like a '70s Euro-Sherlock Holmes, except being Italian, he has a tasty wife, Danielle (Patrizia Viotti), instead of a loyal male companion.
When Jean receives a puzzling letter from his old friend Prince Guillaume de Saint Lambert (Mario Carra), the detective and his wife decide to pay a visit to Guillaume's castle, where they meet the prince's creepy wife Rita (Angela De Leo) and become embroiled in a centuries old mystery involving a witch's curse (no prizes for correctly connecting the dots).
The scene is set for lots of atmospheric gothic horror with cobwebby, candlelit corridors, dark, dank dungeons, and creaky, crumbly crypts, but sadly director Filippo Walter Ratti conjures up very little in the way of tension or scares, the majority of his film being a slow, uneventful, dreary mess that not even some gratuitous nudity and light lesbianism can make bearable. The film also features several murders (of naked women, of course) but there is no gore to speak of- just a few scratch marks on the victims' breasts.
2.5/10, rounded down to 2 for Danielle's annoying hysterical screaming.
