Der Würger von Schloß Blackmoor

Krimi is the German word for crime thriller.In the 60's through the very early 70's the Germans made dozens of them. Most were based on the works of Edgar & Bryan Wallace. While the quality of the individual films varied, this is one of the best I've seen so far.

The plot revolves around a country estate. A masked strangler is on the loose. His victims are branded with an "M" on their foreheads.The complex plot revolves around the killer,family skeletons in the closet,lineage,a fortune in diamonds and a ruthless gang of thugs.

The atmosphere of this film is appropriately dank but excellently done. The swirling fog on the moors adds a touch of menace to the night air.The castle and all of its secrets is a grand affair.Even the grounds capture the crispness of the air during the day.

The acting is top notch.Usually the same stable of actors appeared in most of the series.A lot of fun can be gained by seeing roles change from film to film as they move from the sides of good and evil.The comedy relief is not a millstone in this film as it usually is a bane.The soundtrack is moody and well done.

Best watched late at night with the lights down low. A rare 10.

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.

There's a heavily disguised man who appears mysteriously, threatens Rudolf Fernau, and disappears. His daughter, reporter Karin Dor, enters, distraught she has almost run over Hans Nielson, who owns Blackmoor Castle; he's renting to Fernau to avoid having to sell the place, and lives in a corner turret. As the movie goes on and Fernau becomes seriously ill and paranoid, Inspector Harry Riebauer investigates the mysterious goings on, while reporters cluster around the story -- and pretty Miss Dor, too.

It's one of the Edgar Wallace mysteries produced in Germany that were so numerous in the 1960s. They certainly had a large corpus to work with; Wallace had written over 170 novels, almost a thousand short stories, and 18 stage plays before heading off to Hollywood, coming up with early drafts of KING KONG and dying in 1932 at the age of 56. He died deep in debt -- to the bookies, mostly -- but the enormous popularity of his books cleared the estate within two years.

THis is a gothic-looking production, with its gloomy castle setting, and the visuals are good.. I can't judge the performances, given I looked at an English-language version. Unlike most of the mystery writers of the era, the people who solved the mysteries were not brilliant amateurs, but the police. Shocking, isn't it?

The Germans turned out tons of films based on the work of Edgar and Bryan Wallace, father and son authors who wrote in similar styles. The books were old dark house-ish with mysterious villains running about killing people. One enterprising producer even linked unconnected books together by having the villain get away thereby creating his own series.

This is not one of those films. However like those films it suffers from awful English dubbing that makes you wonder if its so bad because the film is genuinely dreadful or because the dub is.

The plot has an Englishman informed that he is to be knighted. At the same time a masked bad guy shows up and begins killing people and demanding the return of stolen diamonds. There are some interesting twists, where the diamonds are hidden for example, but this is the same old same old from the German Wallace factories.

I would say that this is the perfect film if you want to fall asleep, unfortunately its just interesting enough that it will keep you up for its 80 odd minutes.

Not really recommended, but as these things go you could do worse, lord knows I have.

4 out of 10

A strangler is loose on a British estate, and he not only strangles his victims but brands an "M" onto their foreheads before he decapitates them.

The letter M features heavily in the story, scrawled on the foreheads of the victims, one head is mailed to someone, which quite gruesome. Complicated and dullness hinders the film, making it not so gripping. Castle, strangler, diamonds and light and shadow atmosphere- quirky and mysterious characters all with their own sinister motivations is here, and sounds enticing, however the direction is pedestrian and the excitement is lacking. It's just passable, but of its ilk it's not top tier. Karin Dor is great as always. The killer here is like those fiends from a 1980's slasher film -sometimes strangling his victims, but also machine-gunning them or chopping their heads off. For its time, there's a fairly gruesome scene where a guy gets his head lopped off while on a motorbike.