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The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Deaf Crocodile Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (11th June 2025). |
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The Film
 International Fantasy Film Award (Best Screenplay): Oldrich Lipský and Jirí Brdecka (winner) and Best Screenplay: Oldrich Lipský (nominee) - Fantasporto, 1984 Traveling in the Carpathians to rest his voice, aristocratic tenor Count Felix Teleke of Tölökö (Dialogue 20-40-60's Michal Docolomanský) and his valet Ignác (Closely Watched Trains' Vlastimil Brodský) are struck by the splendor of a ruined mountaintop castle when they come across assistant forester Vilja Dézi (The Golet in the Valley's Jan Hartl) who appears to be suffering from some kind of shock. Taking him to the inn at nearby village West Werewolfstein, they learn from his fiancee (Little Otik's Jaroslava Kretschmerová) and her innkeeper father (I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen's Oldrich Velen) that Vilja has been snooping around the Devil's Castle purported to be haunted by the damned ghosts of its thieving bandit knights of the Gorcena order; whereupon Felix realizes that the castle must be the lair of his enemy the Baron Gorc (The Fabulous Baron Munchausen's Milos Kopecký) who spirited away his soprano fiancee Signorina Salsa Verde (Uncle Cyril's Evelyna Steimarová), who the Baron had been stalking, after an apparent fatal heart attack. When Vilja reveals that he scaled the castle walls in search of the source of a beautiful singing voice, Felix believes that his lost love must still be alive and prisoner of the dastardly Baron. Sending Ignác to bring back the police prefect and corps with him to storm the castle should they not return, Felix takes Vilja as his guide to infiltrate the castle to rescue the primadonna. What they do not realize is that the Baron is already aware of their impending arrival through high-tech mobile surveillance devices invented by mad professor Orfaniak (The Cremator's Rudolf Hrusínský) and piloted by local "harmless" deaf-mute Tom Deaf-n-Dumb who is actually the Baron's henchman Zutro (Shadows of a Hot Summer's Augustín Kubán), and the duo walk right into an elegantly-appointed trap. Loosely based on a minor work by Jules Verne that purportedly inspired Bram Stoker to set his "Dracula" in the Carpathian Mountains, The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians is part of a comedic trilogy of collaborations between director Oldrich Lipský (Happy End) and writer/animator Jirí Brdecka (The Cassandra Cat) that started with the hugely successful western Lemonade Joe pre-Prague Spring and Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet – based on and sending up the nineteenth century American dime store detecive Nick Carter novels – a decade later. The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians reunites the Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet's leads Docolomanský and Kopecký again as hero and villain along with Hrusínský while Kubán seemingly made up as a substitute for the latter film's Václav Lohniský (The Ninth Heart) in a similar henchman role. Also similar are the high-tech devices, with Orfaniak creating wireless video surveillance cameras and listening devices, video-enlarging binoculars, nuclear explosives, the professor's multipurpose robotic prosthetic hand, and even sound film – albeit just as flammable as nitrate film – some of which are "automated" with stop motion animation while the art nouveau touches to the otherwise Gothic setting along with some of the Baron's uses for Orfaniak's innovations brings to mind Robert Feust's The Abominable Dr. Phibes. While the earlier Lipský film used animation for the plot's backstory, this one uses silent film aesthetics for sequences involving Signorina Salsa Verde hinting that she is more of a memory and a fantasy than a physical being and even her "soul" is a projection. Performances are farcical but knowingly so, winking at the viewer and even breaking the fourth wall. While Lipský continued writing and directing up to his death in 1986, this would be Brdecka's last feature before his death in 1982, although he did write the story for Vera Chytilová's The Very Late Afternoon of a Faun (the screenplay finished by Chytilová and her frequent collaborator Ester Krumbachová). 
Video
Released theatrically by International Film Exchange (IFEX) who releaesed a number of contemporary art house films in the eighties along with reissuing some older titles, The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians has thus far only been available on German DVD was part of two box sets of Jules Verne adaptations – one of them with a dubbed German soundtrack only – making its debut here in an immaculate-looking 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.37:1 fullscreen transfer that reveals starts off with muted, naturalistic colors in the locations, sets, and wardrobe with more vibrant primaries "deployed" by the villain starting with an anachronistic but funny neon welcoming sign for the hero, various set dressings in the castle that give a touch of lushness to the villains lair, and the film's climactic bloodshed. 
Audio
The sole audio track is a Czech LPCM 2.0 mono one in which everyone is post-dubbed – we do not know if the cast dubbed themselves although Docolomanský's singing is dubbed by I Served the King of England's Ladislav Zupanic – and while the singing sounds like a recording being lip-synched, spoken dialogue is cleanly delivered as the lush scoring of Lubos Fiser (Valerie and Her Week of Wonders). Optional English subtitles are free of errors and reveal a gentle jab at the source novel's author. 
Extras
The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by Jiří Brdečka's filmmaker daughter Tereza Brdečková and Czech film expert Irena Kovarova of Comeback Company in which she discusses the careers of her father and Lipský, both of whom preceded the founding of Czech and Slovak film schools and whose brand of humor and "cultivated stupidity" was influenced by western filmmakers as the laughter necessary to soldier through bad times in the east. Brdečková also discusses the hit that was Lemonade Joe and how Adela Has Not Had Her Supper Yet came about from her father's love of the Nick Carter novels while The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians was unplanned until a slot opened up in Barrandov's production schedule when another film fell through and Lipský pitched the Verne novel. She also reveals that her father found the book impossible to adapt until he started researching Slavic languages and "invented" an entire dialect and a more comic approach to the story. She also reveals that the film was not well-received by critics or audiences – possibly because it was making fun of Czechs (the Count Felix is revealed to come from a Hungarian province with a large Slavic population) while the earlier two films in the trilogy got greenlit under the guise of "criticizing" American culture; however, she also reveals that she was pleasantly surprised by the large audience when she was asked to present the film at a film school's summer programme and to learn that it was a cult hit with younger audiences via bootleg tape and DVD.  There is also an interview with Czech film critic and screenwriter Tereza Brdečková (37:38) by Deaf Crocodile's Dennis Bartok in which Brdečková discusses the influences on the coedies of her father and Lipský including Monty Python and Mel Brooks and how her father fell in love with American culture as a child through a family who had returned from America and whose children were taught Czech by his parents. Bartok also asks about Brdečka's collaborations with Karel Zeman of which Brdečková reveals that her father did not work on the original screenplay but narration after the film was shot and they found that the film as scripted did not cut together. Also included are a pair of animated short films by Jiří Brdečka from either end of his career "Vzducholoď a láska" (Love and the Zeppelin) (8:45) from 1948 and "Třináctá komnata prince Měděnce" (Prince Copperslick aka Prince Měděnec’s Thirteenth Chamber) (9:39) from 1980, the latter of which is more interesting with its Gothic elements including a tragicomic twist on the Bluebeard story. Lastly, there is "Universum Brdečka" (88:19), a 2017 feature-length documentary by filmmaker Miroslav Janek on Brdečka featuring Brdečková with a more involved overview of his career - including his works with Karel Zeman - and works in different media from writing, directing, and animation as well as some more detail on his childhood in Moravia by way of his schoolteacher father Otakar Brdecka wrote books under the pen name "Alfa" including a memoir about his children in which Brdečka as a child was already a movie buff. 
Packaging
Housed with the disc is a booklet featuring a short an essay by film historian and expert on Central & Eastern European cinema Jonathan Owen.
Overall
Although not well-received upon release, The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians is a fitting companion to the "cultivated stupidity" of the Oldrich Lipský's and Jiří Brdečka's affectionate comic send-ups of Western literary adventures.
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