YMMV / Castle Freak (1995)

• He Really Can Act: While they were never bad actors, per se, Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton showed here that they were capable of serious performances in a mostly serious movie compared to their previous campy efforts with Stuart Gordon.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • John is a recovering alcoholic, and got his son killed and daughter blinded in an accident, but is trying to make up for it despite being utterly self-centered and irresponsible.
  • Susan isn't a whole lot better, constantly rejecting John's attempts to make amends and even calling Rebecca "stupid" for wandering off on her own. Still, she's recovering from a horrible tragedy that cost her her son's life and her daughter's sight, and is all the fault of her husband.
  • Giorgio was a five year old kid locked up and tortured daily by his abhorrent mother for something he had no control over. Over forty years later, he's a broken monster of a man who can only interact with others through violence, and it takes little to set him off. Despite being a vicious killer, there's something fundamentally shattered in him, as seen when he steals an old picture of himself as a normal little boy and tries at one point to interact gently with Rebecca to show her the photo, despite having no idea how to be a functioning individual.
• Narm:
  • Surprisingly little of it, despite this being a Stuart Gordon adaptation of a H. P. Lovecraft story which are usually intentionally campy, but John's sudden realization when Susan uses the term "whipping boy" comes off as out of place here.
  • John's hammy Big "NO!" when he finds JJ dead is a minor example, because he's still obviously distraught.
  • There's also the use of stock sound effects, like when Giorgio slams Susan's head up against the wall, or during his fight with John.
• Once Original, Now Common: Giorgio's makeup has been cited as one of the first examples (if not the first) of a full-body prosthetic designed to seamlessly cover an actor from head to toe (a necessity, given that he spends most of the movie fully nude), and was considered fairly innovative at the time. But within a few years of the film's release, it was promptly overshadowed by examples in films like How the Grinch Stole Christmas and the Lord of the Rings trilogy (which used similar full-body prosthetics for the Orcs and the Uruk-hai). Given that Castle Freak was already pretty obscure at the time of its release, it gets very little attention for its ambitious makeup effects today.
• Tear Jerker:
  • John finding a photo of Giorgio that he thinks is JJ and breaking down into tears. It especially comes as a shock since this is the same actor who played the perpetually deadpan Herbert West. There's also shortly after when Susan verbally tears him apart for trying to make a move on her, finally telling him that he should have been the one who died in the crash. He then runs up to the roof of the castle, standing at the edge with the intent of jumping.
  • Giorgio gets a few moments of lucidity, and when he does, it's heartbreaking. When he finally gets his hands on Rebecca, he makes an attempt to interact with her peacefully by showing her the aforementioned photo of himself, and seems to realize that she's blind, after which he decides to just kill her. Later, he finds the whip in the Duchess' room, and recognizes it as the implement of torture that it was, and starts smashing everything in the room with it while screaming.
• The Woobie: Rebecca was blinded because her drunken father got in an accident with her in the car, and now she's being stalked by a hideously deformed man and can't do much about it.