I wonder what it is about eastern European countries that their more unusual fare tends to be very different from what most viewers in English-speaking territories are used to, while films from such a country also somehow manage to be similar to each other.
Such is the case with 1981 Czech picture The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians. I feel like I have seen this picture before, though I definitely have not. I was strongly reminded of the work of Karel Zeman, though the work of his I have seen feels more appropriate for a younger audience. Also, there isn’t much animation here, yet much is reminiscent of the work of Jan Svankmejer, who just happens to have worked on this production.
I’m not entirely sure which genre is most appropriate to put this in, but I think it is reasonable to call it a satire of gothic horror cinema. Some of the tropes skewered are easy targets, such as a town named West Werewolfston. Other elements feel spot-on but without a clear source being parodied, such as the village elder in a bar who is sleeping under an impossibly large pile of animal pelts (that is, until the scent of beer disrupts his slumber). In a moment that would have worked in a Mel Brooks film, a giant neon sign around an archway welcomes the main character by name to the secret lair of the villain.
Michal Docolomanský is our hero, a count who happens to also be an opera singer. That ability is demonstrated when he sings an ode to a porcelain chamber pot, an object which shatters from the purity of his voice. This moment is fairly representative of the level of humor here. The count and his manservant (Vlastimil Brodský) are on holiday in the forest when they find a nearly-deceased man in the woods. They take him to the closest town and away from a castle that I’d be shocked if it was never used for a Dracula movie.
One would think the nature of this intrigue at the old, dark castle would be vampiric, Satanic or something along the lines of Frankenstein. Instead, what transpires there is far stranger, as indicated by a moment where the oblivious count is talking to his valet as a huge rocket rises out of that fortress and into the night sky.
The baron of the castle (Milos Kopecký) is an inventor, and startlingly ahead of his time. Although this film takes place in 1897 (starting on October 27th of that year, as a calendar pointlessly informs us), he has a device which is how televisions would have been at the time if the components were brass, wood and steam. The screen is even in color. Another invention is my favorite thing in the picture, and that is a quadraphonic sound system which is four wax cylinders played simultaneously.
The count is intrigued by these and the baron’s other inventions, but is there primarily because he believes the inventor has imprisoned his missing lost love, a fellow opera star played by Evelyna Steimarová. Her character’s name is Salsa Verde, which is an example of how some jokes simply don’t land. The count will keep getting glimpses of her, or hearing her singing voice, but she never seems to respond to his efforts to get her attention. He also can never seem to get close enough to touch her. Hmmm…
I tired of the quirky nature of the inventions here rather quickly. I think I my attention started to drift when we got to the surveillance device baron has devised, which has two giant ears to pick up audio and a giant eye to return a visual signal. These are mounted on a giant staff the baron’s henchman (Augustin Kubán) wields out in the open. I get the joke is how conspicuous this eavesdropping device is, but it was another joke that didn’t click with me. Another device is a live camera on a kite, which weirdly foretells the drones that are so prevalent today.
Other moments of visual invention did impress me, such as when that henchman travels on a winding mountain road with no apparent apparatus moving him, and yet he is progressing while standing perfectly upright and stock still. The tailpipe protruding from the back of his cloak should have been the first clue as to the nature of his locomotion. At the end of the second such trip, he steps off of what is essentially a steampunk scooter, which he can also fold up for easy carrying. I assume it won’t be long until this is the latest public transportation fad to sweep the major cities, after all the e-bikes have finished destroying themselves with their exploding batteries.
By the film’s midway point, I found myself tiring of the inventiveness, which I realize might make one wonder why I even bothered to watch such a film. The problem is the picture is too front-loaded with such content, instead of spreading the wackiness more evenly across the runtime. Curiously, for a film that has so much steampunk content in it it…runs out steam in the second act and becomes a bit of a slog to get through.
It didn’t help that the humor is often rather lowbrow. For example, there’s the count telling of himself and another man sharing the same wet nurse, and how they have been bosom buddies ever since. Ba-dump-bump.
In a final regard, The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians is similar to other off-beat eastern European cinema I have seen in that it is deliberately stagy. The very first image is of an old, velvet stage curtain rising, and I think I would have been more surprised if the film hadn’t opened in that manner. Near the end, the film seems to destroy itself, though not by having the film seem to melt in the projector, ala Two-Lane Blacktop. Instead, we see the baron holding the shattered fragments of a wax cylinder whilebathed in the flickering light of a projector in which a film was burned up. Everything is chaos, the lives of both hero and villain more or less ruined at this point, a façade destroyed, when both would likely have been happier if the illusion had been maintained. Given the political climate in which this film was made, I suspect this is a metaphor and, if so, I wonder what it might mean.
Dir: Oldrich Lipský
Starring Michal Docolomanský, Evelyna Steimarová, Vlastimil Brodský
Watched on Deaf Crocodile blu-ray