The Mysterious Castle In The Carpathians Blu-ray delivers one of the strangest and most delightful cult films to emerge from Czechoslovakia’s late Cold War cinema. A delirious blend of gothic romance, steampunk science, slapstick comedy, and operatic melodrama, Oldřich Lipský’s wildly inventive adaptation of Jules Verne’s The Carpathian Castle is unlike anything else in European genre cinema.
 
Set amid misty mountains and looming stone ruins, the film follows Count Teleke of Tölökö as he searches for his lost love, opera singer Salsa Verde, only to uncover her imprisonment within the mechanized fortress of the sinister Baron Gorc. Inside the castle awaits a parade of surreal contraptions, eccentric henchmen, and mad-scientist inventions designed by Czech animation legend Jan Švankmajer, transforming the gothic setting into a playground of absurdist imagination.
 
Packed with visual gags, invented dialects, and an avalanche of sight jokes — from golden eavesdropping ears to television-eyed staffs — The Mysterious Castle In The Carpathians channels the anarchic spirit of Mel Brooks, Terry Gilliam, and Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers, while remaining unmistakably its own creation. It stands alongside Lipský and writer Jiří Brdečka’s Lemonade Joe and Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet as a cornerstone of Czech cult cinema.
 
Restored by Deaf Crocodile Films in collaboration with the Národní filmový archiv and Comeback Company, this release presents the film in its definitive form, accompanied by an expansive slate of contextual extras that celebrate Jiří Brdečka’s enduring legacy as one of Central Europe’s great cinematic fantasists.
 
directed by: Oldřich Lipský
starring: Michal Dočolomanský, Evelyna Steimarová, Miloš Kopecký
1981 / 97 min / Czech