Product Description

In the 19th Century, a sadistic nobleman terrorizes the members of his own family. He is found dead but his ghost soon returns to haunt the residents of his former castle.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83687 in DVD
• Brand: Miracle Pictures Presentation
• Released on: 2002-02-02
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Format: NTSC
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 83 minutes

Customer Reviews

Pleasure, pain
One of Christopher Lee's darker films -- and Mario Bava's more gothic ones -- is "The Whip and the Body," a sort of ghostly-mystery with a perverse twist. It suffers from a slack midsection, but it's still loaded with wonderful direction and tons of atmosphere.

Kurt (Christopher Lee) has just returned after years in disgraced exile, and immediately grates on his sickly father and mild brother Christian (Tony Kendall). Also it turns out that Kurt's ex-girlfriend Nevenka (Daliah Lavi) has married Kurt, but she can't deny her feelings after a Kurt whips and seduces her.

Then Kurt is found dead. Everyone -- from Christian to the servants -- has a reason to want Kurt dead, but no one knows who did it. And Nevenka is acting strangely, as she is visited and whipped by Kurt when no one is around. Is she the victim of a ghost, or something far more terrible?

Mario Bava knew how to make creepy gothic movies (a la "Kill Baby Kill"), but he gives it a perverse twist here. "Thhe Whip and the Body" is gleefully split between ghost story, murder mystery, and dark erotic story of S&M and personal obsession. This is not cheerful, family-oriented fare.

As with his other gothic movies, this one is set in a creepy, crumbling estate, full of dark corners, grimy walls, torches and weird coloured lights. It does suffer from an uninspired middle section, between Kurt's death and the coffin's unearthing, which is mostly Nevenka wandering around hallucinatng.

And the direction is very solid -- disturbed, stormy, slightly off-kilter, and peppered with perversely erotic love scenes. The sight of Lee whipping the clothes off a moaning Lavi borders on campy, but it just stays on this side, and remains darkly intense right to the creepy finale.

Lee seems to relish his juicy, devilish role as a whip-wielding nasty who doesn't care that he drove a girl to suicide. Even dead, he's the most powerful presence in here. And Lavi does a solid enough job as his ex-lover, who can't cope with her obsessive, unhealthy adoration for him and thinks that he's risen from the grave to torment her.

The only problem would be Miracle Pictures' edition of this great thriller, which you could probably guess by the odd photoshop composite cover (including Lee looking at least twenty years older than he does in the film). The sharpness and colour are kind of sketchy, and I get the impression that some film edges have been trimmed.

"The Whip and the Body" lives up to its name, taking the sexual edge of gothic horror and running with it. Not Bava's best, but an excellent movie nonetheless