Abbigail Bush what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Calum Hutton It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Candida It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Woodyanders Vain and ruthless Marquise Eresebet Bathory (well played by Lucia Bose) bathes in the blood of young virgins in order to regain her youthful beauty. Her equally depraved husband Karl Ziemer (a deliciously wicked performance by Espartaco Santoni) and an evil old housekeeper (a superbly nasty portrayal by Ana Farra) help Bathory out. Director/co-writer Jorge Grau relates the compelling morbid story at a deliberate pace, maintains a grimly serious tone throughout, delivers a handy helping of grisly violence (the scenes with Bathory smearing blood on herself are truly gross and disgusting), and does an expert job of rendering a vivid and convincing evocation of a dismal period setting ruled by fear and superstition. The oppressively dark and bleak atmosphere and the spot-on stinging social commentary on the brutal excesses of the amoral and debauched upper class further add to this film's considerable unsettling impact. The credible acting by the capable cast rates as another significant asset. The lovely Ewa Aulin of "Candy" fame in particular makes for a fetching damsel in distress as feisty servant girl Marina Schneider. The polished cinematography by Fernando Arribas and Oberdan Troiani makes excellent use of smooth gliding pans and tracking shots. Carlo Savina's shivery score does the spine-tingling trick. The final image of this movie is truly chilling and memorable. Well worth seeing.

lazarillo Jorge Grau's "Blood Ceremony" is probably the best and most faithful adaptation of the story of Elizabeth Barthory, the real life Hungarian countess who bathed in the blood of virgins to keep herself young. (The "Barthory" section in Walerian Borozyx's "Immortal Tales" may be technically better, but Grau is more interested in actually re-telling than the legend here than in seeing how many naked, barely-legal French girls he can squeeze into the frame).Grau does make some interesting alterations to the legend. The countess is helped by her husband who fakes his own death and pretends to be a vampire to fool the superstitious villagers about the source of the exsanguinations. Barthory (Lucia Bose) is also a surprisingly sympathetic character who is only driven to her crimes by mortal despair and the beguilings of her old crone maid. Grau also doesn't make the same mistake as Hammer's "Countess Dracula" where Ingrid Pitt bathes in virgin blood and is instantly transformed from a withered, old hag into. . . well, Ingrid Pitt. It's left much more ambiguous here whether the treatment actually works--it only seems to transform Bose from an attractive older women to a perhaps slightly younger-looking older woman. This is much more effective and chilling than the Hammer histrionics.The highlight of any of these films is, of course, when the character actually takes a literal bloodbath. This scene perhaps isn't as "hot" here as Ingrid Pitt's in "Countess Dracula" or Rosalba Neri's in the non-sensical "Devil's Wedding Night", but it's much more effective cinemagraphically following a stream of blood from an unlucky virgin whose throat has just been slit through a drain in the floor to a shower where Bose is waiting naked below.Besides Bose, the cast also includes Swedish nymphet Ewa Aulin as the gold-digging daughter of the local innkeeper who shares her sexual favors with the count. It's not clear for awhile whether he's going to run off with her or make her another sacrifice to his wife's bloodthirsty vanity. Aulin is a little miscast here and personally I prefer her undubbed (and unclothed), but I guess her natural Swedish accent wouldn't have really worked in Medieval Hungary. The more unknown Spanish actors who play the rest of the villagers are good too. They turn out to be very vindictive and they take a terrible revenge on Barthory at the end (no doubt partially inspired by Edgar Allen Poe's "The Black Cat") that almost makes you feel sorry for her. This is a very good movie and one worthy of a resurrection on DVD.

Steve Nyland (Squonkamatic) This is a painful, cold, unpleasant but ultimately fascinating entry from the Spanish horror boon that is probably the definitive Elizabeth Bathory treatment, making Hammer's "Countess Dracula" look silly and trite in comparison; that film is a period costume romance compared to BLOOD CASTLE. This is a serious movie that lacks a single light hearted moment, and is a great example of the unbearably suffocating sort of period horror suggested by Michael Reeves' CONQUEROR WORM, which uses the conventions of period horror -- castles, nightgowned beauties, foggy wastes -- to con the viewer into thinking that they are going to get the push-up bras and lesbian nuzzling that these movies usually involve.What you get is actually anti-erotic, much like Reeves' film, unless the idea of watching people suffer is something that gives you a rise. I like this movies' lack of sensationalism, giving us a straightforward almost scientific explanation for the vampirism in question, and providing a sort of tragic Spanish soap opera element to give us the motivations for the murders. The film is indeed slow, but fans of this kind of stuff will be drinking it in, with Jorge Grau's astute eye for period detail, lighting and atmosphere easily putting this on the same plane with films like "Count Dracula's Great Love", "Count Dracula" and the Rollin efforts as amongst the most distinctive films from the Eurohorror boon. No other movie looks quite like LEGEND OF BLOOD CASTLE (or FEMALE BUTCHER, as it is known in it's uncut form), and few have such an unrelenting, claustrophobic air of dread and sheer decrepidness as LEGEND OF BLOOD CASTLE, which completes the CONQUEROR WORM comparison chart by culminating in a series of Inquisitional torture scenes that far surpass the vampire murders in terms of brutality and horror.So perhaps that is Grau's ultimate comment: yes, the Bathory legend speaks of just awful, depraved atrocities, but nothing is quite as atrocious & barbaric as Man's own inhumanity to their fellow Man, and especially with the hypocrisy of the Church feeding the fires of hate. HIGHLY recommended, but not for those with short attention spans or the squeamish alike. And word to the third: The cover shown here is NOT the same movie (that's BLOOD CASTLE, not LEGEND OF BLOOD CASTLE) and beware of a recent North American DVD pressing by a company called MYA: They used a nudity free print with a fullscreen transfer. I've got versions of this film in three languages from twice as many countries: You want the Finnish subtitled English language print called BLOODY CEREMONY. Trust me.7/10

HorrorJeur The director of the film, Jorge Grau, is less known than other Spanish "fear maker" of his generation like Jesus Franco or Paul Nashy. But with only three films (this one and the excellent Pena de Muerte and No Profanar el Sueño de los Muertos) he proves an incredible ability to create disturbing and compelling horror films. Ceremonia Sangrienta is for my not only their masterpiece, is also the best try to do horror cinema in Spain as good as in other countries with longer tradition like United States, United Kindom or Italy. The story is fascinating. It propose a new point of view of the classic myth of the vampire, more realist than used to be in the moment that was made the film, and really visionary. Later horror masters like George A. Romero with Martin, Abel Ferrarra with The Addiction or John Carpenter with Vampires made similar treatments of the myth but we can't forget that Jorge Grau was the first. Visually the film is equally splendid. The photography of Fernando Arribas, present in a lot of Spanish horror films like La Cruz del Diablo, Horror Express or the recent Memorias del Ángel Caído, is simply extraordinary giving the film the appropriate colour and light. The cast is perfect, specially the sensual actress Lucia Bosé, but is the work of Jorge Grau behind the camera that makes this film so interesting. The tempo have not ups and downs and progress with the force of a train in the night, the mise in scene is classical and styish at same time, and I have not any doubt that Grau had known how to capture the essence of the vampirism in images.