Dead Eyes of London (1961)
Yes, beloved BQers, once again we visit the strange weird theme park of.....Krimi-Land!
Return with us to those forbidding foggy London streets of the 1930's (or thereabouts)....a place and time that fascinated prolific author Edgar Wallace, and for reasons we still can't figure out, West German filmmakers and their audiences.
Dubbed 'Krimi' films, these German adaptations of Wallace novels enjoyed their golden age from 1960 to the early 70's. Usually they featured creepy castles or mansions, a masked or hooded unseen killer, random deformed minions and plenty of fresh corpses popping up every ten minutes. (Among the cast members you can spot a young Klaus Kinski lurking about in more than few of these films.....)
If all that intrigues you enough to give the genre a try, we'd recommend this one as a starting point, since it throws in all the familiar tropes that movie buffs associate with Krimis.
We're off and running with a great typical sequence......a befuddled old man stumbles his way through a fog shrouded lonely London road and then promptly murdered by a massive, hulking bald blind man with opaque white eyes. (Adi Berber, whom you'd never recognize as the gentle giant who protected Charlton Heston's leprosy-afflicted mother and sister in 'Ben Hur').
And this poor old guy, who's later found dumped in the Thames, isn't the only victim. An entire line-up of wealthy codgers became dead floaters right after they bought life insurance policies from a shifty company. Hmmm, this bears investigating....
So it's up Inspector Holt (Joachim Fuchsberger) and his comedy relief sidekick Sgt. Harvey (the overly clownish Eddi Arent) to untangle the multiple mysteries and suspects. These include a shelter for the blind, a sleazy gambling den, and those forever murky fogbound streets.
(And only in a Krimi would you see a guy spraying his throat, photographed from inside his mouth, looking out from his teeth....)
We'll not take on the task of describing the labyrinthine plot complications, cause at some point, we lost track of some of them ourselves. We did love the overall atmosphere, and gazing upon the film's lovely ingenue, Karin Baal, whose striking, expressive eyes reminded us of Veronica Cartwright (of 'Alien' and the 1978 'Invasion Of The Body Snatchers'). This girl appeared custom made for horror movies.....
With the additional unnerving sound effects every time something sinister occurs, you've got yourself at least a B Plus Krimi......that is if you're interested enough to check it out. If you like what you see, there's a whole bunch more of 'em available on Tubi and other free streaming sites.
3 stars (***)....as good an example of the genre as you're likely to find.
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