Filmed at the same time as The Hand That Feeds the Dead, this was also directed and written by Sergio Garrone. It uses a similar cast and crew which is why so many confuse these films for each other. They also share some footage, so that is an easy mistake to make.
Anna (Katia Christine) is the heiress to the Rassimov fortune. The Ivan Rassmimov fortune? Well, if they built that crypt for The Hand That Feeds the Dead, they weren’t going to spend more money getting another last name put on it!
She brings her husband Alex (Klaus Kinski) to her family’s home, where he soon finds the diary of — yes! — Dr. Ivan Rassmimov, who learned how to reanimate the dead with electricity. Alex is impotent and despises his rival Dr. Walewsky (Ayhan Isik), who makes no secret of how he wants to cuck his rival. As he works on learning how to defeat death by attempting to bring his wife’s dead dog back, Alex is electrocuted and gets another personality because that’s how science works. He starts killing people, including his wife but he assaults her first because this is an Italian exploitation movie, and then has his conscience come back. A villager has been blamed for his crimes, so he runs to the city to stop an innocent man from being lynched. It’s too late — the man is already dead — and as Alex climbs the gallows, he is shot and killed.
Don’t believe the cast list you see online. Carla Mancini, Alessandro Perrella and Stella Calderoni aren’t in this movie. If you’re one of those people — I walk among you — that try to find Mancini in movies, well, save your time and energy for one of the other 240 movies that she may or may not be in.
This movie is an absolute mess, as production was halted and by the time shooting started again, Kisnki was gone. That’s why so much of it uses POV shots, stand-ins and murder scenes from The Hand That Feeds the Dead. You have to admire that kind of carny ingenuity, right?