#2
Castle Freak (1995, dir. Stuart Gordon)

This is the 3rd of Stuart Gordon's four H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, and it's also the one with the least connection to Lovecraft. And it's least good. Very loosely based on "The Outsider", it's more "Castle Family Drama and Guiltripping" than "Castle Freak". I guess this was Stuart Gordon attempting to make a serious movie, but it has none of the charm and creativity of his better known films. Most of the first half of the movie is about John inheriting a castle from his family back in the old country and going on a vacation to look it over with his family, before preparing to sell it. John is a recovering alcoholic who's drinking cost him his job at The University and caused him to have a wreck that killed his son and blinded his daughter. His wife Susan doesn't let him forget it, and even though they're still together, they no longer share a bed.
As they explore the castle, the Castle Freak escapes from it's basement dungeon and starts roaming the halls. Only their daughter Rebecca notices it, but she's blind and they think she's just hearing things. After a fight with Susan, John falls off the wagon and gets drunk in a local bar and then brings home a prostitute and has sex with her in the wine cellar while the Castle Freak watches. John immediately regrets what he's done and sends the hooker away, but before she can leave the castle, she gets sexually assaulted and murdered by the Castle Freak. The police come knocking the next morning, forcing John to admit to his wife that he was with a hooker although he didn't kill her. Susan is a furious and starts to pack up to take her daughter back to America and leave John to the police, but the police ask her to stay at the castle until they've finished their investigation.
While being interrogated by the police, John puts the clues together and realizes that the Castle Freak is actually the duchesses' son (and his own half-brother) who she claimed had died, but she actually imprisoned in the dungeon as revenge on her husband for leaving her for another woman in America. So, to clarify, the monster in this movie is just a 45 year-old man who has been chained to a wall and beaten and mutilated and fed gruel and denied medical treatment for 40 years. So of course, he has the bestial superpowers needed to physically overwhelm and murder several adult men and woman, some of them armed. John escapes police custody and arrives just in time to save his family and kill the Castle Freak and himself by throwing them both off the castle parapet. The fucking end.
This movie was distasteful, joyless, and unscary. It was obviously shot on a very limited budget, as evidenced by the majority of the film consisting of people moping around the castle that Charles Band owned (you save a lot of money on location scouting that way). Not even the presence of Jeffery Combs and Barbara Crampton can save this movie. I give it 1 bit-off hooker boob out of 5.