'DR. MABUSE VS. SCOTLAND YARD'......THE GERMANIC SUPERVILLIAN STRIKES AGAIN.....

 Dr. Mabuse vs. Scotland Yard (1963)    For those who didn't go all tingly as the mere mention of Dr. Mabuse, let us fill you in.....

       He's a mad, mad mixture of Professor Moriarity, Ernst Stavro Blofeld and Fu Manchu....a German spawned criminal mastermind who's been haunting international cinema since the Silent Era. 

       And like all iconic supervillians, you can't keep a bad man down.......his evil spirit just floats around between movies until it possesses somebody else, birthing a new improved re-conditioned Mabuse. 

           Here, once again, Mabuse is loose.....and his victims end up dead as a cooked goose. And there's no calling a truce with Mabuse....(okay, we'll stop now....)

         We harbored high hopes of enjoying a rollicking guilty pleasure with this movie, which is very much in the style those 'Krimi' creepy murder mysteries based on Edgar Wallace novels. (You know the ones......Lots of fake London fog, homicidal hunchbacks, screaming young heiresses, etc, etc.....)

         So many familiar faces too.....the cool tall blonder than blonder Peter Von Eyck, a young Klaus Kinski (!), the portly Werner Peters and imperious Wolfgang Preiss, both well knows to audiences for playing Nazis in big budget Hollywood war movies. 

          And what an enticing plot.....the evil Mabuse, who favors hypnotizing people to bend them to his will, comes across a more high tech way to accomplish just that. 

           Oh how we wish we could tell you how much cheesy fun this is to watch. .......

            It's not. Hardly worth a few passing snickers......

            It plods along for a very slow 81 minutes, with Mabuse zapping people's brains to link them up to his own nasty thoughts.....(hence turning ordinary folk into spur-of-the-moment assassins.

          If you don't count the brain zapping, nothing bizarre or extraordinary keeps this film from becoming an obscure, forgettable mess. So don't get too excited at the shrieking jazz horns on the soundtrack,  always promising a thrill ride that never happens. 

              We've forgotten it already, so you don't need wasting time to remember it......1 star (*).