mark.waltz
This isn't one of those horror/thrillers that is going to car ate a cult following. It is often stagnant, frequently loud and sometimes confusing. A German film dubbed into English yet set in England, this starts off as promising, appropriately Gothic even if set in obvious modern times. The confrontation between an allegedly evil aristocrat and a masked intruder gives enough back story and motive, although there are way too many characters involved and perhaps too many minor plot twists. Creepy sound effects and music add to the atmospheric setting which makes for an intriguing look.In spite of all of the positive aspects, I found myself only on occasion completely engrossed, yet found the sets more interesting than the overall story. I can't judge the performances simply because of the dubbing, but the editing and photography are certainly noteworthy. However, by the time that the strangler was identified, I was not all that intrigued anymore, so the conclusion to me did not come as a surprise. A few chilling moments made it on occasion spooky, so for what it is and for the era that it came from on, I didn't completely think that I had wasted my time.
ferbs54
It was back in mid-June 1967 when I--and millions of other baby-boomer boys, I have a feeling--first developed a crush on beautiful, redheaded Karin Dor. With the opening of the fifth James Bond blowout, "You Only Live Twice," Dor, already a long-established actress in her native Germany (although few of us realized it at the time), was revealed to an international audience...one that could scarcely fail to be impressed by her turn as Helga Brandt, S.P.E.C.T.R.E. agent No. 11, whose demise in Ernst Stavro Blofeld's piranha pool is one of the series' most memorable moments. Over the intervening 47 (!) years, this viewer has endeavored to see a lot more of Dor, but with only scant success. Her role in Alfred Hitchcock's "Topaz" (1969), playing the brunette widow of a Cuban revolutionary, was easy enough to see, but other than that, I had to wait many years before finally seeing her in anything else. Thanks to the DVD revolution, I was fortunate enough to catch Karin in the 1967 German film "Die Schlangengrube und das Pendel" ("The Snake Pit and the Pendulum"), released here in the U.S. as "Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism," which costarred her opposite Christopher Lee in an exceptionally well-done and exciting thriller. And now, oh happy day, we have Karin in a much earlier role, appearing in the 1963 German thriller entitled "Der Wurger von Schloss Blackmoor" ("The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle"). This film comes to us today via those notorious underachievers at Alpha Video, but for a change, the DVD picture quality of this B&W affair is pretty darn good, although the dubbing is abysmally lame.In the film, 25-year-old Karin plays a young reporter with the unlikely name of Claridge Dorsett, who lives with her Uncle Lucius (Rudolf Fernau) in the titular abode that they rent from its goofy, bird-watching, Scotch landlord. Though Lucius is about to become a peer, he is sorely troubled, as a masked, nine-fingered intruder has begun to enter the castle grounds, demanding a cache of diamonds that he claims Lucius once purloined from his parents. This masked intruder also has the nasty habit of strangling anyone who gets in his way and scrawling the letter "M" on their foreheads (an allusion to Peter Lorre in a classic German film of 1931, perhaps?). It is soon revealed that Lucius does indeed have a hoard of diamonds hidden behind a blazing furnace in the castle dungeon, and that he is trying to sell them to the seedy owners of the Old Scavenger Inn strip club. But with the body count constantly going up, Lucius may be hard pressed to make his sale. Meanwhile, Inspector Mitchell of Scotland Yard (portrayed by Harry Riebauer, who looks like a cross between Mike Connors and ABC's Charlie Gibson) surely does have his hands full, trying to catch the murderer and stop the killings....Unlike the only other "krimi" that I have ever seen, 1961's "Dead Eyes of London," which had been based on a novel by the remarkably prolific English author Edgar Wallace, "Blackmoor" was based on a novel by Wallace's son, Bryan Edgar Wallace. Though perhaps a tad less stylish than "Dead Eyes," and lacking the distinctive presences of that film's Klaus Kinski and grotesque Ady Berber, the 1963 picture still has much to offer. Director Harald Reinl (who was Karin's husband from 1954 - '68, and who later directed her in "Torture Chamber") does a nice job of keeping the atmosphere moody and suspenseful, while the ultrastrange electronic score of Oskar Sala only adds to the creepy feel of the proceedings. The story itself is a complex one that fortunately hangs together nicely, providing the viewer with many plausible suspects and red herrings, all of whom--the strip club owner, Lucius' butler, Claridge's fellow reporter, a crooked lawyer, that inane Scotsman, a blonde bar floozy--could conceivably be the killer. The film has a bare minimum of goofy humor, happily--"Dead Eyes had sported quite a bit, mainly in the person of the sweater-knitting police inspector played by Eddi Aren't--and boasts some well-done bits of nasty gruesomeness and spurts of action. In perhaps the most memorable of these, a wire strung across a country road decapitates Lucius' motorcycle messenger (in a scene that was seemingly copied in the worst film of 2013, Ridley Scott's "The Counselor"), after which our killer mails the head back to Blackmoor Castle in a box! The picture also dishes out an exciting indoor dukeout between Mitchell and the killer, an explosive sequence in which the killer uses a trail of burning gasoline to attack Mitchell's squad car, and a nighttime chase through the swamps around Blackmoor, nicely shot by DOP Ernst W. Kalinke. And as for our Karin? Well, she looks just fine (although her gorgeous red tresses cannot be appreciated in B&W, of course) and acts even better, although her character is a bit too much of a namby-pamby for this viewer's tastes, essentially coming off as a helpless damsel in distress. (Granted, Claridge IS threatened in one sequence by a diamond-cutting tool held to her eye and in another is held at knifepoint...either of which is preferable to a dunking in a piranha pool, I suppose.) Still, as I said of the "Torture Chamber" film, seeing Karin Dor in one of her difficult-to-see screen appearances was, for me, worth the price of admission alone. Now, if I can only track down a print of her following picture, 1963's "The Secret of the Black Widow," I will be an even happier man....
goblinhairedguy
Despite the noticeable absence of series regulars Eddie Arent and Klaus Kinski, this is another solid entry in the long-running Edgar Wallace (or in this case, son Bryan) krimi series, and probably the most action-packed. Unlike the playfully gimmicky Alfred Vohrer, director Harald Reinl (an acknowledged Fritz Lang disciple) preferred to play his material straight, emphasising action and violence. The proceedings are highlighted by surprisingly gruesome assaults and murders (decapitation being a specialty here), but to his credit, Reinl filled in the edges with imaginative touches, eccentric behaviour by oddball characters, and quirky humour (the knock-out by moosehead would have pleased Vohrer immensely). The cheekiest Langian homage is the M inscribed on the victims' foreheads, but there are plenty of other visual and thematic tropes that smack of the master's influence (it was Reinl who took over Lang's Mabuse franchise at about the same time as this picture). For instance, one minor character, a henpecked clerk, insists that he could definitely tell that the suspect who phoned him was a blonde by her voice (wink-wink), prompting a withering look from his wife. The moody b&w cinematography is often striking, and the creepy modernist score is effective and memorable. The director's statuesque wife and regular leading lady, Karin Dor, is disappointingly mousy in her role, but Ingmar Zeisberg steals the show as a sultry, unnatural-blonde barmaid at a sleazy Soho cabaret who leads a double life. Only the final revelation of the murderer is a bit of letdown, but that was par for the course.
