Bloody Pit of Horror (1965)

What do movie-makers do with a van full of pretty models on their way to a photo shoot? For the Italians, that was a set-up for a tongue-in-cheek horror film more than once. The girls always stop at an old manor where some evil threat resides that kills off some of them, but not before they’ve stopped to strip down to their underwear. In this movie, it’s the ghost of a condemned murderer from a few hundred years ago (or is it?) now returned and eager to continue his legacy of slaughter. He wears purple tights and a domino mask and has a fondness for wrist restraints and the elaborate torture traps of a true fetish fiend. He’s got a top flight S&M dungeon going on behind the castle’s hidden doors. There are people today who’d pay good money to go there for a little sweet mistreatment. His devices are designed to humiliate as much as they are to kill, with blades that sometimes cut off a person’s clothes before it slices into their flesh. The most memorable set-piece though is the girl bound to a giant, fake, ridiculous spider web. Most of the cast ends up in bondage at some point. This is a film so campy and unevenly paced that it’s not scary at all today, if it ever was. $5 says though that there’s almost always someone somewhere in the world who’s jerking off to it.