Considering the oeuvre of Stuart Gordon, “restraint” is rarely a word that comes to mind. From the bloody extremes of Re-Animator to the farcical comedy of Stuck, Gordon was the master of, as Roger Ebert put it when reviewing Dolls, “glorious exercises in bad taste, wretched excess, and blood-soaked horrors.”
If Ebert was unconvinced by the “more elegant, civilized, artistic and clever” Dolls, it did lay the groundwork for a movie that gels Gordon’s bloody best with his unerring desire to understand who we are, deep down, which pervades all his films—even if often obscured by buckets of blood. That film, which turns 30 this month, is the direct-to-video classic Castle Freak.
