User reviews

THE STRANGLER OF BLACKMOOR CASTLE is one of the best of the German krimis I've watched, this one based on the works of Bryan Edgar Wallace. The story is relatively straightforward: a masked killer prowls the corridors of Blackmoor Castle, searching for a stash of hidden diamonds and ready to strangle anyone who gets in his way.

Veteran director Harald Reinl uses the opportunity to deliver a film that's loaded with atmosphere, murder and action. The killer, who has a penchant for beheading his victims, is truly a sinister creation and the scenes of him prowling through dimly-lit corridors are hugely atmosphere. Some of the set-pieces provide bizarre highlights, such as the motorcycle beheading, and there's even some fisticuffs to keep the story bubbling along.

The cast acquit themselves well enough that the viewer is able to distinguish some solid performances despite the atrocious English dubbing. Regular Scream Queen Karin Dor headlines but the statuesque Ingmar Zeisberg wins most of the attention as a scheming barmaid. There are red herrings galore, dogged detectives and intrepid reporters, everything you'd want from a good murder mystery. Add in some broad comedy involving a kilt-wearing "lord of the manor" who's got an obsession for birdsong and you have a great little movie overall.

***SPOILERS*** German movie about a masked killer in and around the English castle of Blackmoor who's out to avenge his fathers murder by the future Lord Lucius Clark, Rudolf Fernan, who lives there.

The killer who's father Charles Manning was Clark's assistant and good friend in the British colony of Kimberly in Africa, where Clark was the district governor, was murdered by Clark who stole over 6 million in pound sterling worth of uncut diamonds that his father had. What the killer doesn't seem to know is that Clark is really his father, which was brought out at the end of the movie. But there seems to be some disconnect here with the killer when it's revealed that he came upon a batch of love letters by Clark to his mother Bettie Manning that he found hidden in the castle! the guy couldn't put two and two together?

Early in the movie we see that Clark is having the stolen diamonds cut by his creepy butler Anthony, Dieter Eppier, who used to be an expert diamond cutter until he was sent up the river for five years for stealing diamonds from his employer. Clark is secretly sending the diamonds hidden in cigar tubes to the owner of the "Old Scavenger Inn" in London Mr. Travish, Hands Nielson, who's fencing the hot diamonds by paying Clark in cash for them.

What both Clark and Travish as well as Clark's lawyer Mr. Tromby, Richard Haussler, doesn't know is that the killer has someone working at the "Old Scavenger Inn", his wife, who's tipping him off about the transactions. At one point in the movie he ambushes Clark's delivery man with the diamonds who happens to be his gardener Sebastian, Albert Bessler, killing him and taking the stones.

What the cagey Clark is doing is getting rid of the diamonds so that the killer can't get his hands on them and giving the money that he gets from Travish to his niece Claridge Dorsett, Karin Dor, as stated in his will on or after her 21th birthday. The masked killer is determined to get the diamonds or the money that Clark gets for fencing them before she does even if it kills her.

Interesting German 1963 import that has you guessing to who the killer is until he's dredged out of the swamp outside Blackmoor Castle at the end of the movie and his identity reveled. "Strangler of Blackmoor Castle" is a bit too violent for movies released back then in those days in the early 1960's with a number of shocking and bloody decapitations that are really gruesome even watching the movie now.

The film does have some comic relief in it with the lord of the castle Lord Blackmoor, Hans Reiser, spending all his time listening and recording on his portable tape recorder bird love calls in the woods.

The problems are. 1) the comedy relief, is the wacky mustache-bird- recording character and if that isn't enough the spunky little kid that sometimes acts as his sidekick. 2nd problem is the music score, all electronic though not much of it, but it is also used mostly for comic relief which is not early electronic music's strong point. Some other sounds are comically dated now--though music for these German films is frankly usually pretty bad--awful non stop squealing rock/jazz so this film's lack of music is mostly a good thing but the comic electronic burbs and beeps are hard to get over and distracting, but, like I say at least there isn't a lot of music. And the comic relief also doesn't overwhelm the plot but does pop up just when you least need it.

The last deficit is that just past the half way point in the movie briefly stops making sense, this is another problem with these films there are so many characters that you lose track at some point. This film has a series of car ride sequences with the cops talking about various suspects and it just becomes a blur, this one holds up longer than most though plot wise and it does get back on track before the ending.

The Alpha DVD is full frame and things are obviously cropped but the print is in decent shape, just turn down the brightness a little.

For a Strangler film the strangler does almost as much beheading as strangling, this is a good thing and it adds variety and strangling can be pretty dull on film, the spfx are pretty good especially one on screen decapitation. There is one awful mechanical bird but is part of the equally bad comic relief and only appears twice and very briefly.

The film moves well and "attacks" come pretty regularly and the ending is very well photographed in a foggy swamp and forest. The dubbing is actually not too bad which helps the movie too. There is a very clever hiding place for the diamonds too.

So prepare yourself for the bads and enjoy the goods and this film is well worth the time to watch it.

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.

Enjoyable krimi film; I really need to see more of these. A man in black strangles people and threatens an old man to reveal where the diamonds he stole are hidden. The old man's niece is a journalist, so naturally she becomes interested in the story of the strangler (without knowing how her uncle is involved) and the police also investigate.

Reasonable suspects include the old man's strange butler, and the eccentric Lord of the castle, among others.

Despite the title, the "Strangler" also carves an "M" into his victims' foreheads and decapitates two of them, one of them right before our eyes.

As with the last Wallace krimi I watched, this one has people looking through peepholes, and secret passages.

Watched Alpha's DVD of this; no complaints.

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

This is my first Krimi, and according to several reviews here on IMDb, it's apparently one of the best; if that's the case, this could also very well be my last Krimi. To say I wasn't impressed is an understatement.

The convoluted murder/mystery plot involves all manner of shenanigans at Blackmoor castle, home to Lord Blackmoor (Hans Nielsen), a bumbling aristo with crazy facial hair, and his two tenants, Lucius Clark (Rudolf Fernau) and niece Claridge Dorsett (Karin Dor). There's some nonsense about a fortune in diamonds, stored in a vault behind a furnace, but the real mystery is the identity of the masked man with nine fingers who has been choking the life out of his victims and branding them with the letter 'M' before cutting off their heads. While this all sounds like a lot of fun, especially with the titular castle featuring hidden passageways and tunnels, I actually found it all rather disappointing. The meandering story and the countless characters meant that I soon became lost and gave up caring.

The many players include Harry Riebauer as Scotland Yard Inspector Jeff Mitchell, Gerhard Hartig as his assistant Watson, Dieter Eppler as suspicious butler Anthony, Hans Reiser as Claridge's reporter friend Mike, Ingmar Zeisberg as sultry barmaid Judy, and Stephan Schwartz as plucky child Phips, but there are quite a few others to keep track of, which only adds to the confusion.

Horror fans will appreciate the film's one or two grisly moments - a severed head delivered in a crate, a decapitated body on a railway line, and a motorcyclist losing his head when he hits a wire stretched across the road - plus there's a cool scene in which the killer opens fire with a machine gun on the cops, causing their car to burst into flames, but these are brief highlights in an otherwise forgettable film.

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.

1963's "The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle" (a literal translation of "Der Wurger von Schloss Blackmoor") was among the more popular krimi to emerge from West Germany, crime thrillers based on the works of Edgar Wallace or, in this case, his son Bryan Edgar Wallace. More straightforward than some of the more convoluted entries, the prolific Harald Reinl directing his young wife Karin Dor to play Claridge Dorsett, reporter/niece of diamond smuggling uncle Lucius Clark (Rudolf Fernau), both renting the huge castle of Blackmoor from its eccentric, tax burdened owner (Hans Nielsen). There is indeed a strangler on the loose, wearing a mask to completely cover his face (very similar to the culprit in Lew Landers' 1962 "Terrified"), later revealed by Scotland Yard's Inspector Jeff Mitchell (Harry Riebauer) to have only 9 fingers. When he can't get his hands on them he sets traps like a line across the road to behead one cycling victim, the letter 'M' a calling card branding their foreheads. The moor is dotted with hidden passages that occasionally turn up (or drop in), while Clark's ex-con diamond cutter (Dieter Eppler) seems especially determined to prevent Claridge from earning her share of the estate on her 21st birthday. A spot of blackmail finds several shady types frequenting a certain London tavern, but most of the mayhem takes place on the foggy marshes or inside the castle, a suitably eerie setting for added horror atmosphere. What sets this apart from the others is to be a virtual blueprint for the more violent Giallo, as there's little blood shown but times would change by decade's end.

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?

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.

Very fun, sinister film. This is the kind of movie I remember waking up and seeing at three o'clock in the morning on television when I was a child--good thing or bad? Anyhow, Karin Dor is terrific, and who wouldn't love the disjointed creepiness of a German version of Britain in which everyone speaks American English--at least in the version I own. Nice use of marking victims with the letter M--reference to Lang? Why oh why can't we find these movies on television anymore?--not even on cable! And, by the way, where the heck is HUNCHBACK OF SOHO?