In short: Der Fluch der grünen Augen (1963)

aka Cave of the Living Dead

aka Night of the Vampires

A small town situated in what I assume is supposed to be somewhere in the Balkans is struck by a series of murders of young women. There’s something really strange going on there, for whenever a new victim is killed, the whole place suffers from a sudden and inexplicable loss of electricity. The corpses of the victims show a tendency to simply disappear the first night after they have been found, too.

When big time police inspector Frank Doren (Adrian Hoven) is sent to the village, he quickly learns that the villagers have their own explanation for the occurrences. Obviously, the vampire women living(?) in a cave in the area are at fault. Doren isn’t exactly a believer but the strangeness mounts up high enough he soon takes instruction from the village wise woman and begins to accept the idea of vampires. Why, perhaps the creepy Professor von Adelsberg (Wolfgang Preiss) living in the local castle with his black servant John (John Kitzmiller) and his assistant Maria (Erika Remberg) may have something to do with it all? Doren’ll investigates that one, too, for he has the creeps, I mean hots, for Maria.

There were only a handful of German horror movies made during the 60s, and usually, the spookiest German movies got was in the Edgar Wallace krimis. Hungarian director Ákos von Ráthonyi’s Der Fluch der grünen Augen (which would properly be translated as “The Curse of the Green Eyes”) is one of these few films, and once you’ve watched it, you just might be happy there wasn’t more of this stuff being made, for these are pretty dire proceedings.

Von Ráthonyi’s direction is as bland and visually boring as possible, far below the standards of the Wallace films and more on the level of the sort of local US production that is proud whenever a scene doesn’t use a nailed-down camera, or a Poverty Row movie directed by William Beaudine. During the vampire attacks (spoiler?), von Ráthonyi actually tries to use shadows and shots of snaking vampire fingers in the spirit of expressionist silent cinema but the attempts have such an amateurish and unconvincing air, I found myself cringing and waiting for the blandness and utter disregard for mood building to return.

The script is rather on the dire side, too, with barely anything of interest happening whatsoever, and most of that paced so as to be easily overtaken by a snail. The characters are one-note and bland and our supposed hero is an unsympathetic creep even by the standards of 1963, making grabby hands at every woman he encounters, something the film treats as an admirable trait. Not surprisingly, the treatment of Kitzmiller’s character, who acts like a child and speaks in the sort of accent a kid would come up with for that thing Germans are most afraid of, a black person, is pretty terrible too. To be fair, the film is down on the villagers treating the guy as if he were the devil himself, but its own treatment of the character isn’t much better, instead of horribly racist like the villagers ending up being pretty racist indeed. Which would be much easier to overlook in a film that has anything else to offer.


Alas, Der Fluch der Grünen Augen isn’t that film.