Castle Freak (1995)

An old lady feeds a cat, meanders down into her castle dungeon, whips a chained up guy with a barbed cat o' nine tails, goes upstairs, and dies. The camera is trying hard to be cool, but not managing.

What luck, she was the unknown, secretive shut-in Italian auntie of a middle-class American businessman, Jeffrey Combs (director Stuart Gordon's earlier Re-Animator, Deep Space Nine, The Frighteners). He brings his wife Barbara Crampton (Puppet Master) and blind daughter Introducing Jessica Dollarhide™ (nothing) to Italy to liquidate their new castle.

The guy who was being whipped in the first scene is somehow still alive, despite this being quite some time later and him having no source of food. He's all malformed with a /Pumpkinhead/y latex skinsuit, and still shackled to the wall. But he breaks his own thumb off grotesquely to slip out of the shackles. Not sure why he didn't do that before, in all of the countless years he's been locked up.

This freak who was secretly living in the castle lurks around, hiding just out of sight and breaking things and making noises. The family is perplexed. We learn that the dead old lady had a son who was presumed dead, but is, we the viewers have now deduced, not, in fact, dead.

Jeffrey and Barbara are having marital issues stemming from the fact that Jeffrey crashed the car and blinded his daughter and killed their son. Since his wife won't forgive him, he hires a prostitute and bangs her in the basement, fulfilling the quota for gratuitous nudity.

The castle freak also bangs her in the basement, albeit more literally, and to death. He also bites off one of her nipples, followed by a substantial portion of the rest of her breast. This was an unrated direct-to-video release, you see.

The local cop comes to investigate the missing prostitute, and finds her corpse and the head of the housekeeper in the basement. He charges Jeffrey with a murder most foul, and assigns a couple of cops to guard the women in the castle. A castle freak rips the cops apart, knocks the mother out, and sexually assaults the daughter.

Jeffrey whacks his way out of the police station and runs home to the castle, just in time to save his wife and daughter. He sacrifices his own life, quite unnecessarily, to defeat the freak and save his family, achieving redemption through self-sacrifice. They live happily ever after, and hardly a passing thought is spent caring about why there was a murderous castle freak to begin with, or why this guy who hadn't eaten solid food in months and hadn't had any exercise in decades was so difficult to kill.