(1964)
Overall: MEH
Another Edgar Wallace krimi from director Franz Josef Gottlieb and the Rialto Film production company, The Curse of the Hidden Vault, (Die Gruft mit dem Rätselschloß), was adapted from the author's 1908 novel Angel Esquire. As the film's title would suggest, its plot revolves around a comically booby-trapped vault whose treasure various dubious characters are desperate to get their hands on before before its owner's daughter is set to inherent the goods. People threaten each other, point guns at each other, get captured and then escape and then get captured again, and we are witness to at least two grisly deaths. In one, a guy gets electrocuted and stabbed before plummeting to his doom when foolishly thinking that he has cracked the vault, and in another, a different guy falls onto a piece of mill machinery that crushes him as he screams. For anyone hoping to see some gore though, these movies were still some years away from indulging in such things, plus the structure and narrative components adhere to the tired and true shtick while keeping things in a comparatively more confined location. Klaus Kinski collects an easy paychecks here as one of the most pointless characters that he ever portrayed, sporadically popping up for a second or two, uttering not a single word, and doing nothing of even slight significance until the finale.
(1964)
Overall: MEH
Shifting to the identically-tinged works of Edgar Wallace's son Bryce, The Seventh Victim, (Das siebente Opfer, The Racetrack Murders), is an adaptation of his novel Murder Is Not Enough, which was released the same year. A Horse Called Satan would have also been an appropriate title, since the story hinges around a prized racing stallion that is in fact named Satan Various bodies keep piling up around an upcoming race that Satan is favored to win, most if not all of the characters have deplorable attributes, there is plenty of lying and scheming, a police inspector collaborates with a guy who is posing as somebody else, and eventually the people who are the most bad get revealed and end up dead. The plot goes everywhere as can be expected, only sparsely concerned with logic, and throwing suspicion on numerous characters who are worthy of such suspicion. Visually though, this is one of the flashiest krimis from the time period. Director Franz Josef Gottlieb had made a steady stream of these movies at this point, and he along with cinematographer Richard Angst, (also a krimi expert), keep the camera angles extravagant, which of course would be a tactic that craftiest Italian filmmakers would utilize in elevating giallos in the following decade.
(1964)
Overall: MEH
A madame in a wheelchair serves as the cold-hearted baddie in another krimi collaboration between director Franz Josef Gottlieb and author Bryce Edgar Wallace, The Phantom of Soho, (Das Phantom von Soho). These films were usually set in England, dubbed by actors with posh accents, done in a style that bridged black and white Golden Era Hollywood film noir with what would become the slasher and giallo sub-genres, and were all plotted with formulaic pulp contrivances. With a sparkling gloved killer being hunted down by a Scotland Yard detective and his unofficial and pesky crime novelist partner, a ring of blackmail, insurance scams, prostitution, and the usual unwholesome tomfoolery is uncovered. Keeping the plot points of these movies straight is a fool's errand since they are all equally frequented and interchangeable from one to the next, but they were also done competently enough to appreciate. Gottlieb and cinematographer Richard Angst utilize the same snazzy techniques that they indulged in with the same year's The Seventh Victim, giving us some low angles, spinning cameras, and POV shots of the killer, the latter motif of which would be copied across the board in countless future slasher films.
