Roger Corman is said to be the director (and producer) but according to different sources, parts of this film were shot by Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill and Jack Nicholson.
Corman also uses material earlier used in other AIP productions, one of them being 'The Haunted Palace'. This is very Corman indeed.
The story is set in 1806 and we get to meet a 'French' soldier Andre Duvalier (I didn't know that Jack Nicholson was French).
Weary after the war during Napoléon, he loses his consciousness, falling of his horse but is saved by a mysterious young woman by the mane of Helene (Sandra Knight).
He is brought to a house where another, rather strange elderly woman - Katrina (Dorothy Neumann) - takes care of him.
When trying to reach Helene, our 'hero' Duvalier gets the impression that she is a woman that sometimes transforms herself into a hawklike bird. Is it a dream or reality?
Duvalier starts to ask the elderly woman questions about the castle he has seen but she is reluctant to say anything about it. After a while she tells him about the Baron - Victor Frederick Von Leppe (Boris Karloff) - living alone in the castle but she advice against going there.Duvalier does the opposite and encounter the Baron who initially doesn't want to let him in but Duvalier threatens to come back with his troops and then the Baron bid him entré.
Inside the castle Duvalier discovers paintings of a woman that looks like Helene and when he asks the baron who she is, the latter answers that the paintings depict his - since long - dead wife, Ilsa.
Duvalier insists that he has met her and that she bears an exact ressemblence of the woman in the paintings.
After some 'interrogation' from Duvalier's side, the Baron tells him that he had found his wife in the arms of another man and killed them both. Duvalier is not totally convinced though.
At the same time we get to know that the elderly lady who took care of Duvalier is actually a witch and she seems to control both the young woman Helene and the bird and perhaps the Baron's wife Ilse, if this is not the same person as Helene.
The man who was killed - if he was killed - together with the Baron's wife Ilse, was the son of the witch, according to her. Is this true or who is her son?
Ilse haunts the Baron - or is it just his imagination or the influence from the witch - and urges him to kill himself so that they can be united in death.
A bewildering experience is what the young soldier Duvalier is going to live through - if he lives through it?
There are some interesting parts in this film, making you searching for answers. The enigma around who is who and what once actually happened and what is happening in the very moment when we get to meet all this characters, are of course created to confuse the viewer.Nicholson's character is almost like a brave little tin soldier, a man with a noble heart, as noble as one can be when being a soldier, that is to say murderer.
Karloff's Baron is not at all particularly scary and not at all as 'mad' as he could have become, if the director had wanted to.
The witch is in fact the most intriguing person as we don't get to know much about this woman, who she really is, what her objectives are etc.
Stefan (Dick Miller), the valet of the Baron is a man who struggles with his conscience and his past, not knowing if his loyalty against the Baron really is the right path to follow.
At a whole a rather harmless story where the frightening effects are not as frightening as they should be in a 'horror movie' like this but the film had its charm though.
(Photo Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson copied from: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0588241/)
(Photo Sandra Knight and Jack Nicholson copied from: http://www.grindhousedatabase.com/images/Jack-nicholson-the-terror.jpg)
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