Jet setters are stranded in a "castle of bloody lust" in the sixties German sex horror film CASTLE OF THE CREEPING FLESH, on Blu-ray from Severin Films.

Growing bored of one party after another during the hunting season, Baron Stephen Brack (Michael Lemoine, SEVEN WOMEN FOR SATAN) tries to inveigle lusty Vera (Janine Reynaud, SUCCUBUS) to run off with him to his forest cottage for an assignation under the nose of his young fiancée Marion (Claudia Butenuth, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE?). Vera, however, decides to make the excursion into another party and invites her virginal sister Elena (Elvira Berndorff), Elena's fiancé Roger (Pier Caminecci, SUCCUBUS), and Marion's brother Roger (Jan Hendricks, THE MAN WITH THE GLASS EYE). Elena rides ahead with Brack who rapes her when she resists his aggressive overtures. Elena does not reveal what has happened to the others but flees the party on horseback only to get lost in the woods. Brack and Roger search for her and discover that she has been taken in at the castle of the Earl of Saxon (Howard Vernon, THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF) who is reluctant to extend his hospitality to the others who have followed; that is, until he sees the resemblance between Marion and Katharina, his daughter who was raped three days ago and has died that very evening. The guests are further unnerved to learn of origins of the Saxon family curse in the Earl's physician ancestor whose own daughter was raped and murdered by marauders during the Thirty Years War, and the Earl beheaded after murdering his jealous mistress and trying to use her blood to restore his daughter to life. In spite of the threat of a vicious bear the Earl let loose on his lands in response to his daughter's assault, Brack decides to brave the elements and go back to his estate for the car. When the others retire to bed, the Earl and a mysterious doctor decide to use Marion as a donor to restore Katharina to life.

Clumsily poetic, CASTLE OF THE CREEPING FLESH feels more like one of actor-turned-producer-director Adrian Hoven and Siemens heir playboy partner Pier Caminecci's earlier efforts with Jess Franco than Hoven's later MARK OF THE DEVIL; indeed, one wonders what Franco would have made of this sex-tinged clash of modern and gothic with its ORLOF-ian surgical goal and dreamy flashbacks of rape and murder (lensed with the same soft focus as the derams of SUCCUBUS by the same cinematographer Ernest W. Kalinke). The tone is rather lopsided, but there are some allusions to the preference of these bored jet setters for dream worlds and idealized visions of the past ("we're living in the wrong epoch," says Vera as she waxes about cassocks in her family's ancestral line), illustrated by the Earl's regal bearing, and his insistence that his guests dress in medieval clothing. There is a degree of ambiguity in the characters – particularly the Earl's henchman Alekos (Vladimir Medar, TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM) who is seen in flashback wielding the executioner's axe but in the climax seems both shocked and saddened at the particular twist on the family curse repeating itself. The scoring of Jerry Van Rooyen is generally jazzy, sometimes inappropriately so, and it may have been the touch of SUCCUBUS composer Friedrich Gulda when the score quotes Chopin's Prelude in E Minor (which Hoven would use again in MARK OF THE DEVIL and Hammer fans may recognize from SCREAM OF FEAR). The Austrian castle used in the film would turn up again in Mario Bava's BARON BLOOD as well as Caminecci's later sex comedy vehicle for then-wife Pia Degermark THE VAMPIRE HAPPENING (sadly to lesser visual effect).

Unreleased theatrically in the United States, CASTLE OF THE CREEPING FLESH popped up on video rental shelves in two editions: a garishly illustrated Magnum Entertainment edition and a more handsomely-designed clamshell from Canadian label International Video Productions featuring colorful but softish fullscreen transfers (the sole instance of optical fogging on the Japanese VHS release "revealed" an instance of frontal nudity that would otherwise have gone unnoticed). While much of Atlas International's catalogue was exploited on laserdisc and DVD starting with MARK OF THE DEVIL and TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD, CASTLE OF THE CREEPING FLESH did not make its digital bow until the year before last on an all-region Blu-ray/DVD combo from German boutique label Subkultur from a 4K restoration of the original camera negative. That master and much of the disc's extra content has been ported over to Severin's release which was first released in November as a Black Friday slipcover edition before this February standard edition.

Severin's Blu-ray represents a different cut of the film than the German edition, and even that was different from what German audiences saw upon release. The original camera negative was recut by distributor Constantin to censor violence, including the rape scene; fortunately, an interpositive was struck of the longer version before the recutting. The longer version had also been the basis for the English export version that had some pacing trims in the first fifteen minutes or so, some of which improved things like removing shots that showed Brack driving to the cottage with some wine before driving back to then ride there on horseback with Elena. The German Blu-ray was a composite of the negative and the interpositive to reconstruct the longer version. The Severin release is also the longer version, but it substitutes the German credits sequence for the English one – the German credits are now in the extras – and this was a good decision since the party montage under the export credits was more effective in visually introducing the main characters among the partygoers while the German sequence focused on extras to lesser effect. The Severin version retains the Constantin logo as well as the film's first shot which was blacked out on the export version although the soundtrack was retained.

The 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen transfer reveals more considered compositions and lighting than apparent in the older video transfers that looked alternately murky an overbright. The enhanced resolution reveals the nuances of the castle's stone and woodwork, the grisly open heart surgery stock footage, and even the Reynaud/Caminecci sex scene feels more graphic than it did before even though it shows nothing more. The flashbacks also look soft focus without being overly gauzy was they were on tape. There is some rare damage to the composite materials but it is a satisfying presentation on the whole. The German DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track is cleaner than the English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track – Vernon dubs himself on the latter, and Hoven dubs Hendricks – and there are English subtitles for the German track as well as English SDH subtitles for the English dub.

Also ported over from the German release is "Adrian in the Castle of Bloody Lust: Talking with the Hoven Family" (19:55), an interview with Hoven's widow Joyce and son Percy in which his widow recalls Hoven tiring of playing typical leading man roles and wanting to play villains and then later teaming up with playboy Caminecci, living it up with him until his pet tiger mauled one of his aunts. They discuss Hoven's friendships with Jess Franco, Vernon, Gulda, Lemoine, and Reynaud and also get to look at some pressbooks for the film which include a behind the scenes still of Hoven that interviewer Uwe Huber notes could have mistaken him as a character in the film. They also reveal that the later Caminecci film HOW SHORT IS THE TIME FOR LOVE had its basis in a script developed by Hoven who was a racing fan and amateur driver. There is also a Q&A with the Hovens conducted by Uwe Huber at the 2015 Australian Pulp Film Festival screening of MARK OF THE DEVIL (30:45) in which they focus mainly on that film – with Percy recalling the means that his father used to coerce him into acting in it – the family's friendship with actor Reggie Nalder, as well as their version of why Hoven took over direction from Michael Armstrong which differs from Armstrong's account. "The Return to the Castle of the Bloody Lust" (13:02) is a location tour that compares footage from the film with the locations as they are today, and it is fortunate that the castle still looks little changed.