La critique de Roger Ebert(fin)

This much sounds like a standard horror-film outline, especially since Stander looks amazingly like Frankenstein. But Polanski ignores the horror to concentrate instead on macabre humor. The criminal, it appears, has an accomplice who was injured in an auto wreck. While he has been at the castle intimidating the couple, the tide has come in and nearly drowned his friend in the car. The friend is brought up to the castle, dies and is buried. Everybody gets drunk and confesses meaningless secrets.

In the morning, friends come to visit. The grisly and unshaven criminal masquerades as a butler. There is a hilarious stretch in which the dinner party gets involved in box kites, pressure cookers, Sir Walter Scott, Dior ties and omelets (the castle, it appears, subsists entirely on eggs). Then a little boy blows out a stained-glass window with a shotgun, and Pleasence, in fury, orders the guests out of his "f-f-fortress."

Polanski has fun stealing scenes. He lifts the procession of visitors to the crypt from "La Dolce Vita," the woman and bird outlined in a sunny doorway from "Through a Glass Darkly" and a shaving scene from W. C. Fields' "The Barbershop." And he plays the grave-digging scene with overtones of "Hamlet."When he finally gets back to the horror in his story it's too late to do much about it. But Pleasence, in a role that requires him to run sideways most of the time with his head at a crooked angle, is hilarious and frightening as a man going mad, and the film has an eerie appeal.