Three Films Make A Post: It Never Forgives Or Forgets

The House Where Evil Dwells (1982): A couple played by Edward Albert and Susan George (and their kid) move into a traditional little house in Tokyo. It was surprisingly cheap, but then, it is haunted by a trio of ghosts who have nothing better to do than to entice the couple and their best friend (played by Doug McClure) into a repeat performance of their own deadly love triangle from some hundred years ago. All of which does sound rather nice as an example of US/Japanese horror, particularly once you realize the film does actually utilize quite a few Japanese actors and locations. Unfortunately, whereas the film’s basic idea is sound, the script by Robert Suhosky and James Hardiman is tediously obvious, and lacks any even second or third hand clue about how Japanese ghosts and curses might work.

And Kevin Connor – usually great when staging scenes of Doug McClure punching rubber monsters and pirates – is a terrible director choice for a ghost story. There’s simply no sense of subtlety, nor any ability to build up the proper ghostly mood in the man’s toolkit, so all we get is goofiness and very little of substance or interest beyond the basic idea of the film.

The Black Tower (1987): This British short film by the somewhat anonymously named John Smith about a man being haunted by a building, the titular black tower that somehow follows him wherever he goes, on the other hand, is a brilliant example of how the techniques of experimental filmmaking can achieve a feeling of true, creepy weirdness. On paper, there’s very little to a film that consists of an off-screen monologue and shots that mostly show that black tower from various angles and in various surroundings, and some dislocating editing tricks, but in practice, this is one of the most effective treatments of the encroachment of true strangeness into daily live I’ve seen. That it also from time to time manages to be very, very funny indeed just adds to Smith’s achievement.

Im Schloß der blutigen Begierde (1967): But let us end our first post in this new October on a bummer, as is traditional in horror. This was initially supposed to have been directed by the great Jess Franco, and thereby acquired some members of Uncle Jess’s ensemble like Janine Reynaud, Howard Vernon and Michel Lemoine. Fate in form of the siren song of a Fu Manchu movie put Adrian Hoven on the director’s chair instead. As treated by Hoven, the film mostly consists of a series of scenes of characters babbling horrifying double entendres, having flashbacks, getting their kits off and from time to time committing acts of violence, all badly held together by your typical Gothic horror guff and flashbacks to former lives; also included are some real life operation shots, which the film treats as a big selling point.

Hoven is very good at aping the tedious side of Franco (or he can be tedious all by himself, I don’t want to be unfair to the guy), but brings little of the visual inventiveness, the obsessive energy, or the plain coolness of Franco’s filmmaking into play. For a film full of Gothic tropes, nudity and a bit of blood, this feels surprisingly boring and anaemic. The theoretically good stuff is there, but it is treated perfunctorily, without any drive or actual interest in it.

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.

In short: Das Rätsel der roten Orchidee (1962)

aka Secret of the Red Orchid

In a development that’s enough to make one’s bowler rotate, two rival American blackmail gangs, or in one case what’s left of one, make their way to the shores of London and start their brutal ways there. Scotland Yard is shocked, because clearly, before the Americans came, there was no violent crime, and certainly no machine gun murders, in peaceful straight-laced Great Rialto Britain.

Inspector Weston (Adrian “Boring” Hoven) is on the case, though, and seeks the occasional help of FBI man Captain (look, I didn’t write the script) Allerman (Christopher “The American” Lee), who helps out as much as the budget allows. Hilarity in form of murder ensues.

As much as I agree with the early Rialto Wallace adaptation cycle’s attempt to not deliver films completely to one formula, it’s difficult to ignore most of the films that were really mixing up things just ended up like Das Rätsel der roten Orchidee, which is to say, not very good.

Part of this particular film’s problems surely is Helmut Ashley’s technically competent but stylistically uninvolving direction that recommended the man for the career in indifferent German TV direction jobs he took up soon after. Where Rialto Wallace core directors Reinl and Vohrer (both later TV victims themselves) always demonstrated the kind of style and personality that effortlessly turns silliness and distractible scripts into assets, Ashley’s attempts at something comparable feel much more like a series of tonally disparate scenes, following a plot nobody involved actually cared about. Even the identity of the evil mastermind – as much as the film even has one – is obvious even to the dumb very early on, making a lot of the plot’s contortions look like pointless ways to prolong the inevitable.

Das Rätsel is not horrible, though. Apart from the film’s basic competence, there are some actually fun moments hidden behind the indifference. At least one third of Eddi Arent’s humorous shenanigans are actually funny, Kinski (playing a gangster called “Pretty Steve”, if you can believe it) seems in a particularly good mood, the Peter Thomas soundtrack is groovy before groovy was invented, a pre-Italian exploitation movie Marisa Mell demonstrates how much better her acting got a few years later, and Christopher Lee’s German is pretty fine. Of course, Lee also seems bored, and Adrian Hoven wins the no-prize of “dullest Wallace adaptation Inspector” but then you can’t win all the time, or so I’m told.

I have to admit, I would have hoped a film adding fake-Americans to the bizarre fake-England of the Rialto Wallace films would be rather more exciting but then I didn’t expect the fake-Americans to be this less interesting. So it really is true you can’t win them all.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,krimi,in short,helmut ashley,adrian hoven,christopher lee,marisa mell,klaus kinski,eddi arent

In short: Die Schwarze Kobra (1963)

aka The Black Cobra

Truck driver Peter Kramer (Adrian Hoven) is having a bad week: his latest cargo turns out to be drugs oh so cleverly disguised as washing powder, the owner of the cargo, a gangster known as The Corse, makes a very rude front-seat passenger, and then a competing gang working for the Syndicate kills the Corse right in front of Peter's eyes to boot. Which of course makes poor Peter a risk for the gangsters.

Soon enough, Peter finds himself alternately fleeing the Syndicate, the former gang of the Corse, and the police. Because this is that kind of movie, what ensues is mostly a series of kidnappings and re-kidnappings of Peter's girlfriend Alexa (Ann Smyrner) by the various factions, while Klaus Kinski betrays one gang to the other so he can snort that sweet, sweet coke. Also an appearance make Klaus Löwitsch as "Boogie", the violent pumped-up coke fiend to Kinski's snivelling one, a mysterious police undercover agent, a mute thug named Goba (Michel Ujevic), a knife-throwing Herbert Fux, mildly eccentric policemen (Paul Dahlke and Peter Vogel, the latter doing a milder version of the traditional Eddi Arent bit), Peter's former box champion now roadside rest stop animal show owner friend Punkti (Ady Berber), and a cobra (well, for one scene).

Obviously, Rudolf Zehetgruber's Die Schwarze Kobra is another non-Edgar Wallace krimi attempting to catch a bit of the commercial fire of the Rialto movies. Despite being shot in Vienna and at least nominally being an Austrian film, Zehetgruber's film features many of the usual faces in the more or less usual roles. The German language genre film world wasn't big after all, and really, when you can hire Kinski to do some snivelling, you do hire Kinski to do some snivelling.

Stylistically, this is - of course - much less intricately styled than the Rialto films were, with some okay sets and locations but also a handful of rather impoverished looking ones. The visual influences of and parallels to noir and gothic are mostly rather minor; moodiness, it seems did not stand high on Zehetgruber's list of things to include. Instead, the director does his best to make up for a very silly and often inappropriately melodramatic script (so one quite typical of German as well as Austrian genre writing), by getting as energetic as genre films of its place and era got. He's not quite as elegant at it as Harald Reinl was in comparable Wallace movies but the resulting film still is pleasantly fast-paced and action-filled. Sure, the fight choreography and quality of the stunt work (such as it is), isn't anything intricate, but the film had no problems convincing me that watching two big, slow man ponderously and very visibly not hitting each other in a fight was a rather fun thing, soon to be followed by other fun things, which is really all I expect of pulp-y krimis.

After having seen Die Schwarze Kobra I'm not at all surprised Zehetgruber would go on to direct a few of the Komissar X movies. While not being quite as enjoyable and pop as the later films, Die Schwarze Kobra is clearly the product of exactly the sort of sensibility best suited to bringing to live that particular series of cult film fan favourites, and therefore a fine way to spend ninety minutes.

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