After watching a movie as thoroughly bewildering as German gothic horror Castle of the Creeping Flesh, I log onto IMDb to see if any of the reviews (all seven of them in this case) are able to satisfactorily sum up what I have seen; I can't say that anyone has successfully hit the nail on the head with this film (and I'm not about to change that).

Directed by Adrian Hoven (Mark of the Devil), the film is like some kind of fever dream: disjointed, occasionally trippy, with stilted dialogue, moments of eroticism, gore and outright craziness. The muddled plot involves an aristocrat, the Earl of Saxon (played by Euro-horror regular Howard Vernon), who is attempting to bring his daughter back to life, the poor girl having been raped and killed. A group of revellers arrive at the Earl's castle and stay the night, after which I became totally lost, suffice to say that the film attempts to compensate for the fact that it makes little sense by chucking in lots of female nudity and quite a few scenes of real open heart surgery (all of which comes as quite a surprise for a film made in 1968). There's also a savage attack by a wild bear (played by a man in an unconvincing bear costume).

Imagine a Mario Bava gothic horror as directed by Jess Franco on an off day, and you won't even come close to appreciating what an inept mess of a movie this is.