The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism (1967)

aka The Blood Demon

Original title: Die Schlangengrube und das Pendel (“The serpent pit and the pendulum”)

As luck will have it, neither Dr. Sadism (the surgeon you can trust) nor a pit full of snakes make an appearance. Go figure.

The 18th Century or thereabouts. Lawyer Roger Mont Elise (Lex Barker) is just an orphan boy, whose last name was given to him on account of a misinterpreted medallion that was part of the baby package. He seems puzzled but okay with his unclear birth identity, as far as Barker’s never changing facial expression can be interpreted, but when a one-legged Moritatensänger (German for a medieval “singer of ballads”, though the guy doesn’t actually sing his material) appears and gives him an invitation to the castle of one Count Regula (Christopher Lee, in a couple of scenes) in which the Count promises to disclose the truth about Roger’s heritage, he’s off to the far away “Middlelands” (I have no idea) at once.

As is usually the case in these situations, once our hero has reached the town supposedly closest to Regula’s Castle Andomai, the local populace is less than helpful and rather fearful when asked about how to get there. Eventually, our hero manages to acquire the information from an elderly gentleman walking around carrying a large cross over his shoulders, and goes on a long, long, long, oh so very long coach ride to the castle, meeting up with what will soon turn out to be a fake priest (Vladimir Medar). During that excruciatingly long coach ride, Roger saves one Baroness Lilian von Brabant (Karin Dor, never one of my favourite German actresses of her generation, and here actively bad instead of just her typical combination of very pretty and so bland being pretty is no help) from a group of masked riders. Well, Lilian and her servant Babette (Christiane Rücker), but Roger cares so little about her, he doesn’t even help her up when he finds both women knocked to the ground by the riders. What a hero!

Obviously, love is in the air. As it turns out, Lilian has also been invited to the Castle, though in her case, it’s something about an inheritance.

After further spooky coach riding, everybody eventually arrives at the castle, which turns out to lie in ruins. But don’t fret, there’s a creepy undead servant (Karl Lange, ironically giving the liveliest performance in a film full of people emoting like the walking dead) around. The dead man is out to revive ole Chris Lee with the blood of thirteen virgins, so Regula can take revenge on the parents of our young couple by murdering their descendants, who were responsible for quartering him for the murder of twelve virgins. The fact that Regula’s servant did indeed murder the parents of our protagonists, and Regula therefore has actually been avenged already notwithstanding. Christopher Lee’s gotta murder somebody, right?

Schlangengrube’s director Harald Reinl was one of the better directors of the Edgar Wallace cycle, mostly distinguishing himself there by providing his films with some actual pulp energy. Energy is not something you’ll find in this German attempt to jump on the Corman Poe adaptation train, for everything here happens in the slowest and most tedious manner imaginable while also lacking any and all of the deliciously clever subtext Richard Matheson or Charles Beaumont were wont to bring into Corman’s films. Writer Manfred R. Köhler sure wasn’t Matheson, Beaumont, or even Del Tenney.

The film may deserve to be looked at as a record holder when it comes to the length of the coach ride that eventually will bring our protagonists to the castle, but I don’t think gothic horror is improved by drifting off into the realm of a very slow and boring version of Stagecoach. To be fair, said coach ride – which does take up about three hours of the film’s eighty-five minute runtime, I believe – does contain one of the handful of good gothic horror moments Schlangengrube delivers, when the superstitious driver is confronted with blue fog that reveals trees full of human limbs, in part growing out of them like branches. That’s obviously the sort of tone and content I wish Reinl would have emphasised, but director and script seem to go out of their way to underplay the truly fantastic elements of the film, and instead puts a lot of energy into scenes of various characters making circles through the castle cellars. Scenes that also happen to lack in in pace and energy, even though these elements of the filmmaking art should be right up the director’s alley.

The art department – lead by Gabriel Pellon and Werner Achmann - really seem to have been the only members of the production who actually got why the Corman productions this is trying to haplessly imitate were as good as they were, and do their best to create a bunch of interesting and expressionistically weird sets, only to have camera and direction put them into the worst possible, and most certainly least interesting, light. It’s a bit of a shame, really, but all too typical for German genre cinema after the silent era.

Past Misdeeds: Der Fälscher von London (1961)

aka The Forger of London

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Peter Clifton (Hellmut Lange) and Jane Leith (Karin Dor) are getting married, but the bride at least isn't very happy about it, seeing as she only marries Peter so his money can provide for her uncle, the not very successful postcard painter John Leith (Walter Rilla). Peter for his part should be happier, for he loves Jane madly, but he's surprisingly moody nonetheless, as if several dark secrets were hanging over him and his affairs.

On the couple's (such as it is) wedding reception, some of these secrets begin to come to the fore. Firstly, there's some curious business about a forged five pound note. When Scotland Yard inspector Rouper (Ulrich Beiger) finds it in his heart to go to a frigging wedding reception to question people about a forged five pound note, family doctor and friend Donald Wells (Viktor de Kowa) says he got it from Peter, who of course and quite believably says he knows nothing about it. Still at the same wedding reception, Basil Hale (Robert Graf), an admirer of Jane appears to make a very loud nuisance of himself, insinuating much and achieving little. And because fun comes in threes, next up is a certain Mrs Unterson (Sigrid von Richthofen), who races in to loudly complain that Peter doesn't deserve all his money. By rights, it should belong to her (dead) son, his half brother. Or so says wedding crasher number three.

After the best wedding reception ever is over, the newlyweds go on their honeymoon in a dark and spooky old castle that'll surely lighten everyone's mood. Jane - who doesn't want to sleep with Peter because he "bought" her, by the way, even though it really looks rather more as if she sold herself to him quite purposefully, as neither shotguns nor blackmail were present at the wedding - soon learns more awesome things about her new family life. Turns out Peter fears he has inherited a bit of violent schizophrenia from his dear dead dad. And might be the biggest forger of Britain, known as The Cunning. And might be going around murdering rude people like Hale.

Obviously, once she finds her husband in bloody clothes and with a bloody hammer by his side, Jane decides she suddenly does love her husband. That sudden love is so gigantic, Jane's even willing to hide murder weapons and lie to the police. Speaking of the police, another Yard inspector, Bourke (Siegfried Lowitz), is just as willing as Jane to break the law to protect Peter, for both he and the woman suspect somebody has it in for the young man, and that he is a poor beleaguered innocent.

This early in the Wallace movie cycle, nothing about the movies was as set in stone as it would soon become, so there was still room for a movie to be quite different from those that came before or after it. Der Fälscher is quite a bit more of a "normal" mystery than most of the other Wallace krimis, though also a film quite focused on its melodramatic elements, while the pulp elements are rather underplayed. This doesn't mean the film is totally devoid of your typical Wallace-isms, or in any shape or form interested in being realistic, its feel is just delightfully weird in ways slightly different from other Wallace films.

Sure, the film's comparative lack of two-fistedness, evil orphanages and odious comic relief (well, Eddi Arent pops in for a curious very minor double role, but I always rather liked him) may come as a bit of a shock to the krimi neophyte, especially since the first two of these things are elements of the genre the film's director Harald Reinl usually excels at, but a plot that manages to be at once obvious and ridiculously convoluted and a series of well-paced revelations, semi-revelations and reversals will soon enough distract from that particular shock.

Der Fälscher's major positive surprise for me is the emphasis its script puts on Jane as an actually active character. I suspect the relatively heavy influence of (gothic) melodrama to be the catalyst for this not very Wallace-ian change. The melodrama, after all, is one genre in film history absolutely dominated by its female characters. In a typical Wallace adaptation on the other hand, the female lead is usually there to be threatened and kidnapped, and sure as hell isn't allowed to do anything regarding the solving of the film's core mystery.

On a plot level, the damsel in distress here is really Peter, who may not get kidnapped but is knocked out and confused more often than not, and is utterly unable to help himself in any way. Even though Jane isn't allowed to solve the whole mystery herself - that's what Siegfried Lowitz in an unusually sympathetic and finely ironic performance is there for - she is the audience identification figure of the piece, not given to hysterics, and resolute when she needs to be. Even more surprising is how well Dor - all too often an actress with much beauty but little presence - sells the role. She's still as stiff as usual, but here, her stiffness seems to be there to tell us something about her character, and not because she's totally lacking in personality. If it weren't for a slight subtext of helping one's spouse during a murder investigation seen as a married woman's duty, I'd even call the film's gender politics progressive instead of just progressive for a German film made in 1961. But I'm not complaining.


While Reinl's direction has been more obviously strong in other krimis, he still shows his usual fine, often clever, sense for the blocking of scenes, an eye for the slight gothic touch - especially whenever the plot concentrates on the rather fantastic looking castle and his surroundings -, a hand for pacing that works for this melodramatic pulp mystery as well as it does in the pulp adventure movies most of his other Wallace krimis are, and of course an un-Germanic love for dynamic set-ups in the movie's few action scenes. Add to Reinl's talents some rather beautiful, moody, photography by series mainstay Karl Löb (who is probably as responsible for the actual look of the krimi as any of the various directors he worked with), and a fine semi-jazz soundtrack by Martin Böttcher (who somewhat unfairly always stood in the shadow of the slightly more crazy and original Peter Thomas, even though his scores are generally nearly as good), and you have yourself a Wallace krimi as fine and entertaining as they get.

Past Misdeeds: Der Würger von Schloß Blackmoor (1963)

aka The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Former colonial bureaucrat Lucius Clark (Rudolf Fernau) has found a pretty sweet set-up for himself. He's soon to be knighted for his crimes against humanity/deeds for the British Empire, and spends his life sponging off the money belonging to his niece Claridge Dorsett (the inevitable Karin Dor) which he is uses to rent most of the castle of a certain Lord Blackmoor (Walter Giller). Oh, and he also has an oven full of stolen raw diamonds he's slowly selling off to the - of course - shady bar owner Tavish (Hans Nielsen). Because Clark's lazy, he has hired on ex-con diamond cutter Anthony (Dieter Eppler as Klaus Kinski) as pretend butler, so that everything needed for the illegal diamond trade is happening in house, or rather in castle.

Alas, all good things have to come to an end, and so Clark soon enough finds himself confronted with various problems, most of them connected to his dark past (so it's all his own fault). First and foremost, a masked man who knows quite a lot about Clark's past wants him to hand over the diamonds, and kills whoever gets in his way. That guy, let's call him "The Strangler", strangles his victims and then cuts an "M" into their foreheads before he decapitates them for extra fun and games. Then there's the fact that Tavish, the shady lawyer Tromby (Richard Häussler) and barmaid Judy (Ingmar Zeisberg) - in varying configurations - would very much like to acquire some of Clark's diamonds without having to pay for them. Oh, and did I mention Claridge's colleague Mike (Hans Reiser) and Lord Blackwood are also acting quite suspiciously? Or that Anthony's raving mad, wants to make sweet sweet love to the diamonds, and would prefer to make Clark rich by killing Claridge instead of seeing his boss sell his precioussss?

Fortunately for the blandly innocent Claridge, Scotland Yard sends its most wooden inspector, Jeff Mitchell (Harry "I'm so emotionless, I'm two pieces of wood" Riebauer) to romance her painfully somehow solve the strangler cases.

Der Würger is yet another of those non-Edgar Wallace krimis that are doing their best to emulate the successful formula of the Rialto movies; that's certainly easier to do when you have, like krimi veteran director Harald Reinl does here, a Bryan Edgar Wallace novel to adapt. Edgar Wallace's son did, after all, make a career out of emulating his father and selling his surname to the highest bidder (that frequently being German producer impresario Artur "Atze" Brauner, who is as close to one of the eccentric producer impresarios of the US and the UK as we Germans ever got), so the shoe fits perfectly well.

Of course, with the sort of movies I generally champion, keeping as close to a successful formula as possible is not necessarily a bad thing as long as one knows what to do with it. Reinl (and scriptwriters Ladislas Fodor and Gustav Kampendonk, both men of excellent names, interesting filmographies, and a talent for writing absurdly confusing scripts) is as good at producing excellent, low budgeted entertainment out of a formula as one can be. Whenever I praise one of Reinl's krimis, I mention his highly mobile camera, his talent for serial-like action sequences and the noir-like mood of the slower scenes (often also thanks to cinematographer Ernst W. Kalinke), and these three elements are again what turn Der Würger into a pretty great time.

Sure, the action isn't quite as good and frequent as in some of Reinl's higher budgeted Rialto productions, but what is there of it is as exciting as action in German movies of this period (or, frankly, any period, for German director almost always just suck at this sort of thing) gets, showing off some nicely creative touches.

The art direction also isn't quite up to the Rialto standards; fake Britain is not as playfully fake as it sometimes gets, nor does the film show quite the absurd imagination of its big predecessors. There's your standard castle, there's fog, there's a boring bar, and for most of the film's running time, that's perfectly enough to put me in the not-Britain of the krimis.

The film's other big flaw is clearly the acting. While German movies of this period always tend to the stiff and slightly melodramatic, most of the performances here are just the decided bit stiffer than usual (that might vary with the dubbed versions, of course); the performances aren't horrible, they're just not as good as the could be. There are two exceptions to that in the cast: Riebauer who plays exactly the same character Heinz Drache or Joachim Fuchsberger usually played lacks so heavily in charisma I have a hard time understanding why anybody would want to cast him as anything, not to speak of as the male lead, while Dietler Eppler may not be a Klaus Kinski, but sure as hell does his utmost to channel the great actor's spirit by ranting, raving and making bug eyes at Karin Dor, something I do heartily approve of.

I also do approve of the production's peculiar choice of soundtrack. The krimis always had a tendency to involve some of the better German film composers like Martin Böttcher and the godly Peter Thomas, but Der Würger goes one step further by (like a few other films did) employing the pioneer of electronic music Oskar Sala, co-inventor of the Trautonium and all-around eccentric musical genius. His weird, abstract electronic score probably isn't what one would expect to hear in a piece of pulpy entertainment like this (some of Sala's musical decisions seem somewhat perverse) but it's often exactly what the film needs to feel more unique than it actually is. Sala's music even turns what may be the most boring bar in the krimi genre into a place of weirdness and (slight) wonder.


Now, even though I've been pretty critical about nearly every part of the movie, I do like Der Würger von Schloß Blackmoor quite a bit, even ignoring Sala's and Eppler's contributions. The film may not be quite up to the standards of the best of the Rialto Wallace krimis, but those films are as good as this genre gets; Der Würger may not be quite as excellent, yet it's still an all-around fun film despite all of its flaws.

Past Misdeeds: Der Frosch mit der Maske (1959)

aka Face of the Frog

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only the most basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

For over a year now, a (rather large) gang under the leadership of the mysterious masked villain only known as the Frog (played by himself, if we can believe the credits), has been terrorizing Britain with a series of robberies and break-ins, blackmail, as well as a bit of murder to make things more interesting, always leaving behind the mark of a frog at the places of their crimes. Why it's so difficult to catch the members of a gang in the habit of branding its own with the sign of the Frog in a pretty visible place I don't know.

On the case is Scotland Yard's Inspector Elk (Siegfried Lowitz, who'd later go on to play another smug and rude cop in the long-running - and pretty damn boring - TV police procedural Der Alte, in popularity only second to Derrick), a man of a smugness and rudeness as great as his success at catching the Frog is small. But even the incompetent must get lucky some time, and Elk's time comes when the Frog takes a carnal interest in a certain Ella Bennet (Eva Anthes). The villain's idea of romance is a bit peculiar: suddenly appearing masked in a lady's room at night and declaring that you'll come again to take her with you another night, whether she wants to come or not is - I think - not what Miss Lonelyhearts recommends. I'm not sure what Miss Lonelyhearts says to blackmailing the lady of your heart by pulling her improbably naive brother (Walter Wilz) into a contrived murder affair, but that's The Frog's Way of Romance™, too. Whatever happened to roses and long walks in the park?

The Frog's rather dubious handling of his romantic situation is good news for Elk, though, for it provides the inspector with ample opportunity to gather clues regarding the plans and identity of his enemy.

Fortunately for everyone involved, Elk's not the only one the case. Cocky millionaire amateur detective (and nephew of Elk's boss) Richard Gordon (Joachim "Blackie" Fuchsberger, some time before his career as a popular TV host, or as we Germans say, "Showmaster") and his competent comic relief butler James (Eddi Arent) are inserting themselves into the investigation. Gordon's pretty damn enthusiastic about his hobby, too, at least once he's met Ella; he's also a bit more competent at the whole romance thing than the Frog.

Now, our heroes will only have to find a traitor inside of Scotland Yard (don't trust the thin 'staches and eyebrows), investigate a dubious night club, survive captivity and wait until so many of the film's human red herrings have been killed off that there's only one guy left who can be the Frog.

Watching the very first of Rialto's Edgar Wallace adaptations (this early in the proceedings still keeping comparatively close to Wallace's novel, I am told), it's becomes clear at once why the cinematic Wallace krimis took Germany by storm. Compared to just about anything else the country's cinema put out at the time, Der Frosch is pure pop cinema: a bit lurid (as lurid as you could possibly be in Germany in 1959, really, which isn't that lurid, but certainly also not coy), a bit silly, delightfully pulpy, taking itself not too seriously, yet not walking into the trap certain later Wallace movies would enter where a film takes itself seriously so little it can be read as self-hatred or as an attempt at self-destruction. It's not the sort of film you'd expect coming from German cinema at all, especially not in 1959 when pop cinema as an idea didn't really exist over here and pop culture itself had entered the slow, sad years between 1959 and 1961 when it looked as if pop itself had only been a fad.

Mainly responsible for the film's energetic (and energizing) effect is Harald Reinl's direction. Though they roughly belonged to the same generation of filmmakers who started out in the biz in the 1930s and were therefore pretty damn old for being "pop", Reinl's style is quite different from that of his Wallace adaptation colleague Alfred Vohrer - until now the only krimi director I've talked about here or over at my home base. Where Vohrer likes his acting melodramatic and his direction zooming in the direction of the surreal, Reinl seems to be going for an updated serial effect, using the much better technical and financial state of his production when compared with a serial to achieve a feeling of dynamism and intensity atypical of the usual ponderous German movie. Reinl uses a lot of separate shots for every scene (pretty much the antithesis of all German filmmaking), loves snappy (ditto) and tight editing and is no friend of scenes going on for too long. The editing is especially effective when it comes to the action scenes. As you probably know, neither the 50s nor Germany are usually praised for their action choreography, but (if you can ignore the minor fact that fists don't actually seem to connect with faces in Wallace land) Reinl and his editor Margot Jahn manage to actually make the action sequences exciting through the cinematic wonders of clever framing and speedy cuts.

Reinl's no slouch in the atmosphere department either. There are some fine examples of moody (studio) night shots to be found whenever appropriate, with some stylish uses of high contrast light and shadow play you can describe as noir-ish without having to stretch things too far.


Ironically, all that visual beauty comes from a director whose filmography shows him as a pure work for hire guy who spent his time directing whatever was thrown at him - Wallace krimis, Heimatfilme, unfunny comedies, Karl May adaptations, some Erich von Däniken "documentaries" or even (later in his career) a would-be Roger Corman Poe adaptation. Directors like Reinl never get a fair shot at being taken seriously outside of our cult movie specialist world, as if the qualities of a director were defined by the commercial situation he works in, and not by what we see on screen. This isn't to say that parts of the director's output aren't pure and simple crap - because man, they sure are – but then we should probably not decide the worth of a life's work by looking at someone's worst films.

Zimmer 13 (1964)

aka Room 13

Evil mastermind Joe Legge (Richard Häussler) returns to his native London with plans for a Great Train Robbery. Because of a mysterious shared past he is able to blackmail pillar of society Sir Marney (Walter Rilla) into providing a hiding place for the loot once the deed will be done. Marney isn’t happy at all with this and hires two-fisted private eye Johnny Gray (Joachim Fuchsberger) to take care of business. At the same time, a black-gloved killer is slitting female throats with a razor that just might belong to Sir Marney.

Gray will need to hit various people in the face, romance Sir Marney’s daughter Denise (Karin Dor), and pal around with comic relief crime scene forensic Dr Higgins (Eddi Arent) to get behind what’s really going on. Gray isn’t helped by the police investigation into the matter being pursued by Sir John (Siegfried Schürenberg) himself, nor the fact that his client quickly decides hiring him was a very bad idea.

If you’re among those people who are understandably a bit sceptical about the influence the German krimi had on the Italian giallo (before the giallo started to influence the krimi right back), watching Zimmer 13 will probably clear up all doubts, for its side plot about the razor killer – including the identity of the killer and the explanation for their madness - is pretty much exactly what you’d get a few years later from the Italians, just not as stylishly and sleazily done here, and unfortunately made by people who really rather seem to prefer the train robbery business. Still, the influence is obvious.

Apart from the influence game, Harald Reinl’s film is one of the lesser known Rialto Wallace films, probably because it’s another one of the cycle’s films that very much is a thing all its own instead of a repetition of the best beloved elements of half of the other films, with no masked pulp mastermind hiding in an bizarre lair (Legge’s really just a clever criminal, and working from a nightclub), no curious murder methods, and not even a proper threatened heiress. The resulting film still goes for a pulp/serial type of enthusiasm (which is much preferable to the few attempts to make a “realistic” Wallace film in the Rialto cycle, because those turned all out rather awful and pretty darn boring), but where the core Wallace films are very much weird crime pulpy goodness, Zimmer 13 is more Gangbusters than the Shadow.

This certainly might be a problem in a film that doesn’t actually deliver on the required amount of fisticuffs, car chases, shoot-outs and train robberies. Fortunately, it’s this slightly more straight stuff Harald Reinl was best at, so Fuchsberger and company find themselves in a film much faster and rather less talky than usual in Germany, with seldom more than two scenes going by before some sort of outward excitement happens. Even better, the action is as good as a German filmmaker of the time could provide, so even as a hardcore fan of mysterious people in masks, I found myself rather too entertained by the stuff on screen to complain about the lack of Blue Archers or Hogs with Masks.

I found myself also rather pleased with the way the proto-giallo subplot went, even somewhat subverting the way basically every other Rialto Wallace film ends. Add to that a bit of the cycle-mandated off-beat weirdness like Eddi Arent’s (whose character is once again even doing something beyond being funny or “funny”) sexual relationship to a manikin, a Peter Thomas score that sounds more peculiar the closer you listen, an adorable strip tease (though one Alfred Vohrer would have done more with) and the expected professionalism in front of and behind the camera, and you’ll find me enjoying myself quite a bit with this one.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,reviews,krimi,harald reinl,joachim fuchsberger,karin dor,richard häussler,walter rilla,siegfried schürenberg,eddi arent

Die Weiße Spinne (1963)

aka The White Spider

The gambling addicted husband of Muriel Irvine (Karin Dor) has a car accident that leaves him quite exploded. The only way to identify his body is via his miraculously safe talisman, a white spider made of glass. Despite Muriel and her husband not having had the best of marriages, hubby's death is not the start of happier times for her. The company responsible for her husband's life insurance delays the payment of a much larger sum than Muriel had expected because they suspect something isn't right about the accident, and Scotland Yard starts poking around.

Or rather, Inspector Dawson (Paul Klinger) of Scotland Yard does. The policeman is convinced a murder syndicate has established itself in London, delivering murders that look like accidents, and - perhaps not the best idea when you want to actually have your murders look like accidents - leaving behind white glass spiders as their calling card. Dawson soon is killed by one among the half dozen bad guys who are all played by Dieter Eppler (and if you think that's a spoiler, I really don't know what to say).

Scotland Yard's boss Sir James (Friedrich Schoenfelder) decides to give the case to a secretive Australian master criminalist who hides his face behind blinding spotlights and has methods decidedly related to those of the criminal mastermind behind the white spider business. I'm sure he has nothing at all to do with Ralph Hubbard (Joachim Fuchsberger), an ex-con who - depending on one's tastes - charms or slithers around Muriel in the social worker job provided by another Dieter Eppler she has to take. Muriel's other problems include the possibility that her husband is still alive and Scotland Yard will think her to be his accomplice in insurance fraud, another ex-con with the charming name of "Kiddie" Phelips (Horst Frank), and a criminal mastermind with a thousand faces that all look like Dieter Eppler's who has grown quite fond of her and is much worse at romancing than Hubbard is, though makes up for that by turning out to be very adept at killing people with his favourite wire noose.

Now, all this may sound as if we were in the presence of another Edgar Wallace adaptation, but in truth Die weiße Spinne belongs to the number of German krimis of the 60s in the business of keeping as close to Rialto's Wallace movie style as possible while only shelling out for a novelistic source by Louis Weinert-Wilton. Not that you'd really find much of a difference, especially since this was written by Egon Eis who was also responsible for writing the earliest Rialto Wallace films. Eis, knowing what is expected of him, does not change anything of the krimi's established style. It's the German version of pulp mystery through and through, with all the curious ideas about the UK and stiff-necked melodramatics one expects here. So of course, Die weiße Spinne features the fun convoluted plot full of mildly inventive contraptions and too complicated evil plans one also expects.

Other Wallace veterans are involved too. The film is directed by Harald Reinl, whose films in the genre usually put the emphasis on fast pace and show a particular talent for and love of doing the more pulpy and outlandish elements in his films justice. Reinl can't quite bring all of his usual visual imagination to bear here, though. Neither Ernst H. Albrecht's production design nor Werner M. Lenz's cinematography (both man weren't very deeply involved in the krimi) are quite on the level of their Rialto counterparts, making the lower budget of the second row krimis quite visible in places. Even so, not quite living up to the standards set by the best part of popular German cinema of that era still leaves us with a film that always has something interesting to look at, which is as much as I'd ask of a second row krimi.

Another Rialto Wallace alumni working on the film is Peter Thomas. Thomas is generally the weirder of the two main krimi soundtrack composers, with Martin Böttcher usually providing somewhat straighter yet not weaker scores. In the case of Die Weiße Spinne, though, Thomas goes for an archetypal, horn-driven style that sounds exactly like you imagine a krimi soundtrack to sound. It's not exactly inspired work but it gets the job done.

Finally, you'll also know just about anyone on screen from playing similar roles in the Rialto Wallace films: Fuchsberger is charming and two-fisted, Dor very pretty but cursed with a horrible thing for mistaking woodenly opening her eyes really wide with effective melodramatic acting (honestly, it might be an irrational dislike for the actress speaking here, but she's so wooden, Anthony Steffen playing a wooden Indian would be less like a piece of wood), Eppler the least thousand-faced man with a thousand faces imaginable but always fun to watch, be it in bad brown-face as a Sikh or in bald eye-patched main henchman mode, and Horst Frank his usual entertaining psycho.

That's not enough to make for one of the top spots in krimi history, but it sure as hell makes for an entertaining ninety minutes.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,reviews,krimi,harald reinl,joachim fuchsberger,karin dor,horst frank,werner peters,dieter eppler

On WTF: Der Fälscher von London (1961)

aka The Forger of London

Perhaps the greatest problem the German Edgar Wallace adaptations made by Rialto Film had was the intense family resemblance of many of the films. Once you've seen enough of them, they become a confusing mass of masked villains, smirking detectives, bowler hats, fog, Eddi Arent, evil reform schools, Klaus Kinski and young heiresses in need to be kidnapped.

That's not a problem Der Fälscher von London shares with the rest of the series. What the film puts in the stead of many of the usual elements, I'll tell you in my column over at WTF-Film.

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Three Films Make A Post: The girls do exactly what you think they do!

Female Chivalry (1975): This Taiwanese martial arts comedy directed by Yeung Jing-Chan is mostly playing the cheap variation of its genre by the book. It's still more entertaining than I'd have expected thanks to Chia Ling's (you may knows her as Judy Lee) performance: she kicks people around with great conviction, she smirks as if her character knew she were a nameless roguish heroine in a silly martial arts movie and approved of that particular lot in life, and she looks pretty smashing in men's clothing. That's more than enough to not only carry the film but drag it up a notch or three in quality and win my heart for ninety minutes.

Der Tod im Roten Jaguar (1968) aka Death in the Red Jaguar: There's a minor series of films based on German "Heftroman" (which are a little like post-war pulps, but different in ways generally making them inferior - I'll explain someday, if I ever find a more interesting film based on one) hero Jerry Cotten (in the movies played by the sleeping pill medicine knows as George Nader), working for an FBI that has as little to do with the original as the German Edgar Wallace movie adaptation Scotland Yard has with the real one. Cotten's adventures usually take place in a not-New York that's unreal in similar, yet less interesting, ways to the Wallace movies not-London; Der Tod mostly takes place in not-San Francisco.

Despite being directed by Harald Reinl who was generally pretty great at pulpy thrills, Der Tod contains a bit too much of the typical provincial stink of German genre film, and way too little that could lead to actual excitement. In fact, watching the film, one can't help but think the film is actively trying not to be too exciting, or weird, or funny, instead aiming for the boring middle ground for no discernible reason beyond the idea that a good German bourgeois is in love with the concept of the "middle ground".

Vessel (2012): This little SF/horror movie directed by Clark Baker, on the other hand, packs more excitement into its thirteen minute running time than can be found in a whole Cotten movie. Clearly, you can still use airplanes and tentacular aliens and a certain Twilight Zone episode for good.

 

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On WTF: Der Würger von Schloß Blackmoor (1963)

When Harald Reinl wasn't directing the adventures of Winnetou or adapting Edgar Wallace, he was probably out adapting Edgar Bryan Wallace.

Der Würger von Schloß Blackmoor is one of the latter cases, featuring slightly lower production values than usual in these films, but a lot of the usual faces.

Read about my adventures in strangling in my column at WTF-Film!

 

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In short: Der Teppich des Grauens (1962)

aka The Carpet of Horror

The secretive - he's the type who only communicates with his minions via wall-projected text, like an old-fashioned teacher gone mad and invisible - leader of a criminal organization that has moved from India to London mercilessly kills traitors and supposed traitors with a peculiar nerve gas that's damnably difficult to treat.

Among the victims is the uncle of sweet, good-natured, nauseatingly innocent Ann Learner (Karin Dor). Being practically a saint, Ann did not know of her uncle's involvement in EVIL, which does not hinder Scotland Yard in form of the incompetent Inspector Burns (Julio Infiesta) and the mean-spirited, incompetent and frighteningly square-jawed Inspector Webster (Marco Guglielmi), from suspecting her in her uncle's murder. Fortunately, a rather stalkerish, yet clearly romantic lead-featured character named Harry Raffold (of course Joachim Fuchsberger), has taken an interest in Ann and protects her from the Yard and the expected attacks and kidnapping attempts of various evil-doers of various quarrelling factions of the gang her uncle worked for. But is Harry - who unfortunately only comes with his racist caricature servant/assistant Bob (Pierre Besari) - really a good guy, or part of the gang too? (Hint: he's played by Joachim Fuchsberger, not Klaus Kinski.)

Only time and a series of shady characters (among them Krimi mainstay Carl Lange as suspicious Colonel and Eleonora Rossi Drago as suspicious and Fuchsberger-adoring boarding house owner) will tell.

After that synopsis, you just might be surprised to hear that Der Teppich is not based on a novel by Edgar Wallace, but on one written by Louis Weinert-Wilton; though Weinert-Wilton's book was published as part of the same paperback line as the Wallace books. This is one of the numerous attempts of companies not Rialto Film - in this case Rialto's distributor Constantin Film with some Italian help - to also get at some of that sweet Krimi-money, and because Rialto had Wallace's works all tied up, those other companies adapted books of a comparable style to those of Wallace. Or at least turned these books into films very much in the style of the Wallace adaptations.

Because the German film industry never was all that big, some of the usual names of the Wallace krimis appear here too: there's Joachim Fuchsberger giving his usual energetic and often charming leading man performance, Karin Dor being pretty and very decorative when being kidnapped yet also being utterly bland and without any chemistry with her supposed love interest, and Carl Lange looking suspicious. The direction falls to Harald Reinl, one of the two big directors of the Wallace films, and he keeps to his style: much less comic relief and irony than in an Alfred Vohrer movie leaves even more room for moody scenes full of noir-inspired shadow-play that meet not spectacular yet enthusiastic and fun action scenes in a slightly more mannered (it's a German movie, after all) serial style, in a combination I find pretty much irresistible, seeing as it mixes the visual cues of two of the three movie genres black and white film was made for.

The film's script suffers a little from a typical krimi problems in that its more emotional scenes belong to the sort of hollow melodrama that, instead of being an emotional intensifier for the film's pulp action and noir leanings, always ends up feeling limp and unconvincing, reminding me of the horrors of the German Heimatfilm instead of the glories of Douglas Sirk.

Fortunately, there are three scenes of Fuchsberger fake-punching people and shadowy people looking shadowy in shadowy rooms for one of Karin Dor and Fuchsberger suddenly feeling the urge to marry (or worse), so while Der Teppich isn't quite up there with Reinl's best films, it's still pretty darn entertaining.

 

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Die Bande des Schreckens (1960)

aka The Terrible People

Before his execution, master criminal Clay Shelton has a friendly meet-up with the people he holds responsible for his arrest and his death (poor executioner of London). Shelton promises that all of them will be killed by "the Gallow's Hand".

Chief inspector Long (Joachim Fuchsberger), also known as "the Better", bets against it, which is pretty understandable, seeing how he is one of the threatened victims himself. To nobody's surprise, the promised murders begin soon after Shelton's death. What's really peculiar, though, is that people see someone looking a lot like the dead criminal in the vicinity of these murders. Is Shelton taking his vengeance from the grave into his own hands, or does somebody just want Scotland Yard to think he is?

Of course, this being an Edgar Wallace adaptation, this is not the only troubling question Inspector Long will have to answer before the criminal or criminals can be apprehended. He'll also need to escape various assaults on his own life, muddle through the usual pool of suspect victims and even more suspect suspects (among them usual professional suspect actors in the Wallace films like Dieter Eppler and Ulrich Beiger), un-kidnap the woman and - of course - heiress of his dreams (Karin Dor), and find out how his own father, the brilliantly named Lord Godley Long (Fritz Rasp), is involved in the whole affair. Who said it's easy working for Scotland Yard?

Die Bande des Schreckens is one of the more straightforward movies in Rialto Film's Wallace cycle, not in its plot construction - that part is as byzantine and improbable as usual in these movies - but in its presentation as a classical thrill-a-minute pulp movie with relatively little interest in self-irony, camp or madness. The film is not completely without humour. There's still Eddi Arent walking around doing his usual shtick, yet - also as usual - being allowed to do a few things that make him actually useful, too. However, where the humour is all-pervasive in many of the other Wallace films even this early in the cycle, it's really just a minor element Die Bande des Schreckens includes because films are supposed to have comic relief, and Edgar Wallace movies are supposed to have Eddi Arent as comic relief.

On the down side, director Harald Reinl replaces some of the comic relief with additional scenes of stiff melodrama, putting more energy into the "romantic" (as romantic as scenes between two actors with zero chemistry and horrible dialogue can get) parts than strictly necessary or recommendable.

Generally, the Wallace films tend to revel in their own silliness and divorce from reality in a way that straddles the Weird and the absurd, while still trying to keep a straight face. Reinl's movie just doesn't seem to be all that interested in its own silliness and ridiculousness, instead putting the emphasis on, in the beginning, creating a mildly spooky mood through techniques influenced either by the film noir or the films that influenced film noir (take your pick). The scene where Shelton basically curses a bunch of people just before he is going to die is one of Reinl's finest achievements in a directorial career containing quite a few of these. With the help of Dutch angles, uncomfortable close-ups and stark shadows and lights, Reinl sets Shelton's threat up as something closer to destined doom than just your normal death threat. It's as gothic as any scene of classic gothic horror.

Die Bande des Schreckens doesn't keep to the gothic mood for very long, though, only using it as the starting point for a much more conventional pulp thriller with the expected assortment of weird murder methods (shot by phone is a fine one), last minute escapes and heroine kidnappings. In combination with the romance bits that just don't work, I could have become quite disappointed with this state of affairs, but - the more Vohrer-like stiffness of the acting notwithstanding - Reinl is pretty darn great as a director of straight-up pulp thrills packaged in sometimes painterly, more often dynamic black and white pictures. The downplaying of the more outrageous elements of the Wallace cycle in this particular movie just makes all the more clear how good Reinl is at this sort of thing, how energetic a director he is when he wants to be.

 

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On WTF: Der Frosch mit der Maske (1959)

Finally, my expeditions into the wild and weird world of German Edgar Wallace adaptations lead me to the point where the Rialto cycle of adaptations began.

It's also the first time I talk about one of the films of Harald Reinl.

"But is it any good?", I hear you ask. Click on through to my column - soon to be renamed to The Edgar Wallace Mystery Hour - on WTF-Film and find my answer.

(This will be my only post for this weekend, by the way. Normal service will resume on Monday).

 

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