Castle Freak Review (2020) Worth Watching?

It's about a girl who inherits an old castle that happens to house a mutant freak and a weird satanic cult.

Castle Freak was directed by Tate Steinsiek and stars Clair Catherine, Jake Horowitz and Kika Magalhaes (from The Eyes Of My Mother).

Fear he who lives within.

Castle Freak is a reboot of the original Castle Freak from 1995. The original took place in Italy while this reboot takes place in neighboring Albania. Both feature a blind girl stumbling around a sprawling castle while a mutant freak chases her around. This along with a substance abusing boyfriend are where the similarities end.

Castle Freak starts off in the states where Rebecca, our protagonist, is blinded after her drunk driving boyfriend drives off the road. Cut to Albania and you see her and her boyfriend walking around a massive castle that she inherited. She's pissed because he blinded her of course, but still happy that she scored a castle and that she can learn more about her mom who lived there. They plan to gut it and sell everything off, but nobody in town wants anything to do with them or their cursed castle. They claim it's evil. And its not long before Rebecca, her boyfriend and all of their friends (who they flew over to help with the fire sale) learn the hard way that it actually IS evil.

There's a lot more going on in this Castle Freak than there was in the original. The story is a lot more fleshed-out as are the characters. I mean, the characters here aren't deep in any way, but in the original they were paper thin. There's also an entirely new sub plot going on that involves a satanic cult that was a cool touch. This Castle Freak even delves into the Lovecraftian universe with mentions of Cthulhu and the discovery of a necronomicon (book of the dead from The Evil Dead).

One thing that made Castle Freak stand out was the "gross out" factor (as old horror movies like the original were sometimes referred to). The gore was on point in this one. There's some especially gross things that get thrown at you near the end.

Overall, I kinda liked this new Castle Freak. I wasn't a big fan of the original so I didn't expect much from this reboot. But it was surprisingly watchable. I don't think it's a great horror movie in any way and the ending was over the top weird, but it could be a good choice for when you don't know what else to watch.