#016 KRIMI POCKET REVIEW [THE COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS aka DER MÖNCH MIT DER PEITSCHE (1967)]

The Sublime That Could've Been: Taken in isolation, the film contains some of the most striking images to be found anywhere in a Krimi. Whether it's the camera's contemplation of the wordless, alien presence of older-than-old sea turtles, or the perversely watchable face of congenital creep Konrad Georg. The way these images follow on each other, though—the film's execution of its tone—is what makes them feel to me less than the sum of their parts. Add in that COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS is a mish-mash of themes, characters, and set-pieces better served in other Krimis, and you've got a case of the could've-beens.

In the film's prologue, a "Mabuse-alike" villain invents a new and virtually undetectable poison. Not only does he test it out on a container full of rats, he gifts his assistant with a dose of it in the face, delivered via a book rigged to spray the person opening it. Immediately after, we watch the mad scientist deliver the poison-dispensing book to a mysterious chauffeur. Instead of getting paid for the sale of his new poison (as has been apparently agreed upon), the scientist has his neck snapped by a bullwhip-wielding Monk. As the camera closes on the whip being methodically wound by the Monk, we realize we are likewise being drawn into a well-familiar Krimi plot.

Though 1967's COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS is in many ways a remake (by Vohrer) of Reinl's THE SINISTER MONK, its other Krimi sibling is Vohrer's SCHOOL OF FEAR (1969). The two are a study in contrasts, wherein the same director attenuates, carefully alters his trademark style to achieve a decidedly different film. The latter full of cold, contemplative, even visually abstract images meant to study and "explain" a similar cast of characters.

[This is the twenty-second post in a continuing series discussing and analyzing all the Krimis and Gialli I've seen. As with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

NOTE: In my last Krimi Pocket Review, I mentioned that, now that I had the perspective of being ~45 films into the genre, I'd take the time to review a few of my current favorite (and least favorite) entries. With this review, I'm continuing that plan, tackling one of my least favorite, and one that I've resisted writing much about up until now.

My Krimi Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Subcategory (if any): 
     i. Heist / Master Criminal Krimi
     ii. Masked Monk Krimi
     iii. Boarding School Krimi 
     iv. Ingénue-in-Distress Krimi
     v. Inheritance Scheme Krimi
    vi. Old Dark House Krimi
Who Portrays the Detective (amateur or official): 
     Joachim Fuchsberger (official)
Who's the Ingénue: 
     Uschi Glas
In My Krimi Top 20 (Y/N): No (Letterboxd link)


Kim Newman cites 1968's THE GORILLA GANG (aka, DER GORILLA VON SOHO) as the "jump-the-shark point" of the Rialto series.** There's a lot to support this, as GORILLA GANG is the lesser version, in every measurable respect, of the film that it is remaking: Vohrer's seminal THE DEAD EYES OF LONDON. Instead of the hulking, grinning, blind-eyed, hairy-armed killer played by Ady Berber in the original, we get a man in a cheap-looking, stupidly-funny gorilla suit. Instead of a sunglass-wearing, giggling, cold-blooded killer played by Klaus Kinski, we get Ralf Schermuly who is desperately (but unsuccessfully) trying to conjure that memory of the series' missing (and perhaps most recognized) star. Instead of comic relief via Eddi Arent's sidekick detective, we get "Sergeant Pepper," played to no memorable effect by Uwe Friedrichsen. The film is maybe the single best example of the notion of "diminishing returns" in the genre, the point at which one's pleasure in experiencing the genre levels off and/or begins to actually shrink. I've become an avowed, unapologetic fan of these films in the past year, but there is no getting around the fact that some of them are simply better than others.

For my personal tastes, the jump-the-shark point comes one year earlier, with 1967's THE COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS (also directed by Vohrer, it brings home to me the variability that exists among these films, even those made by a single director; Vohrer has directed some of my absolute favorites—SCHOOL OF FEAR, THE INN ON THE RIVER, and DER HEXER, films that tower over the field as some of the most stylized, most experimental, most successful in existence; alas, COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS does not belong in that same company). Following on 1965's THE SINISTER MONK (of which COLLEGE GIRL is at least a partial remake), this feels like a step backwards, a step *away* from the psychotronic heights of the best of the genre—away from the possibility of the genre doing both "profoundly weird" and "genuinely emotionally engaged" in the same movie. Part of this is its octopus-armed plot (that feels like it has at least five or six arms too many [and all of them too short]), and part of this is due to how recycled and "lite"-sized it all feels.

(And, it should be noted: That doesn't mean that I think everything after COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS is a wash. Just that CGM was the first undeniable instance of the series failing on its own terms.)

I'll get the summary out of the way, then turn to the stylistic choices (or, perhaps better, *non*-choices) that make this entry one of the "lesser-thans":

After the hand-off of the poison (and the murder of its inventor), we are introduced to another master villain, this one a shadowy, unnamed man who sits with his back to the camera in his Bond-on-a-budget villain's layer. His grimacing, squinting chauffeur shuttles convicts from the local prison in and out for meetings with the boss, where they are given assignments to carry out on his behalf. (There is a complicated scheme that the corrupt prison guards participate in, sneaking the convicts out of prison in refuse bins, but honestly the amount of screen time devoted to it makes my eyes glaze over.) These crimes consist of the serial murdering of a number of local college girls, using the pilfered poison gas as the m.o. In addition to the poison-gas murders, the college appears to be haunted by the sinister Masked Monk from the prologue, whose whip-wielding skills ensure more than a few snapped necks in the cast. As the murders accumulate, Scotland Yard's finest—Joachim Fuchsberger and his silly "Sir John" boss Siegfried Schürenberg—are dispatched to investigate what could really be behind the multiple murders (and murderers).

Professional pickpocket Frank Conner gets sprung from jail and given his first assignment: To commit one of the titular murders.

[DREAM LOGIC THAT IS NEITHER LOGICAL NOR DREAMY]
Krimis and Gialli share that peculiar ability to use style, elision, associative editing, et al., to achieve something that pushes past "realism" (whatever that is). Sometimes this takes the form of a hyper-realism, a hard, dazzling surface of flickering (and impossible) textures like we get in TENEBRAE. Sometimes it is a time and place steeped in the subjective, erotic, murderous dreams of its inhabitants (say, Fulci's LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN, where the "dream reality" of the story is, in fact, the "real" reality by the end). Always it is an argument for a version of reality that moves past the trappings of rational understanding, and instead finds itself tied, hopelessly, to the urges and impulses that drive, that compel human beings from one station of their lives to the next (a "piercing of reality," to borrow a phrase used by Kier-la Janisse in HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN). This piercing of the rational fabric, the "four walls" of the world we are watching, lets out what is secretly (usually monstrously) churning behind it. Maitland McDonagh talks about this in terms of the "excess" of Argento's Gialli: 

"... the seductiveness of these films lies ultimately in the realm of their excess: the spatial and temporal warping, the curious disjunction between soundtrack and image (principally a matter of music so far out of line with the imagery as to be bizarre ...), the violently saturated color palette, the obsessive examination of surfaces ... the full panoply of non-narrative detail that generates the overwhelming sense of weirdness evoked by Argento's work."

(For particular examples of this in the Krimi, see the series of tranced ceremonies between Karin Dor and her doppelganger-mother's portrait in ROOM 13; the parade of Shelton ringers who serve as visual bridges between scenes and ideas in THE TERRIBLE PEOPLE; the use of what seems like proto-"tilt photography" in SCHOOL OF FEAR; the DEEP RED moment in MONSTER OF LONDON CITY; the theatrical staging and dreamy transitions used to build the prologue of THE INDIAN SCARF; the "sigil hand / art as trigger" moment in THE SECRET OF THE BLACK WIDOW; the way the killer's light-casting gloves are pov-shot in THE PHANTOM OF SOHO [esp. during the attack on Elisabeth Flickenschildt's character in the bowels of the airport]; etc.)

And CGM's plot contains elements that *could* qualify as dream logic. As mind-altering stylization. As the intrusion of subjective, internal forces into the otherwise objective, natural order of the world. But it all falls down in the execution of these elements, the film content to strike a tone that at best could be considered camp and, at worst, that old bugaboo for the Krimi: nothing more than "Scooby Doo".

Case in point comes in the prologue: Putting aside that this killer Masked Monk is simply a redo of the character from THE SINISTER MONK (the only thing superior about his presentation here is the eye-popping red of his robe and mask), the prologue introduces us, in miniature, to the film's m.o. There will be many, many subplots, many potentially colorful characters, and the film will cycle through them at sometimes breathtaking speed. Breathtaking because the haphazard abandon with which they're introduced and discarded has the ultimate effect that none of them end up mattering.

The "Mabuse-alike"—who could easily, given the rich history of invoking and expanding on Mabuse that we find in the genre, be expected to be the film's main villain—is dispatched within minutes of being introduced. 

Instead of giving us time to link the prologue here to the truly deranged scenes of a phantasmagoric Mabuse possessing the bodies and minds of others so he can continue to attack the world. Or Mabuse peeling off his mask before an unbelieving Gert Fröbe, moments before he mounts a train engine and is engulfed by a tunnel exploding in flames. Or Mabuse's outsized intellect, using a superhuman grasp of science and technology to subject the world's governments—instead, we get a short-sighted, vaguely pathetic scientist so blinded by greed that he's willing to sell his world-domination weapon to the highest bidder without doing anything to make sure he'll not get double-crossed. Instead, we get a petty, shrunken, fairly uninteresting Mabuse-alike who might as well not have existed in the movie once the opening credits roll. He is unimaginatively drawn, a kind of cardboard cutout that reminds you of the original Mabuse through the sheer *lack* of this current stand-in. 

(When the red-hooded Monk overwrites Mabuse in your memory as soon as he appears, one might ask, why bother to include this half-baked character at all, if he's only going to be thrown away within five minutes of being introduced?)

Next is the problem with the first murder set-piece:

When Conner gets sprung from jail and ushered into the presence of the *third* mysterious mastermind to be introduced within the film's first 15 minutes (the Mabuse-alike being #1, the Masked Monk #2), he's instructed to replace the girl's Bible with the rigged one. He does this, and on cue, when she opens her Bible, she is poisoned. Here's the problem: It makes no rational sense that, when the Bible is opened and the poison gas erupts in a cloud of aerosol spray, the other people around her (including the then-series ingénue Uschi Glas, pictured above) aren't also killed. We're to believe that the cloud of poison gas is confined to only one victim's face, and doesn't expand or get transferred in the air? That the people sitting packed around her aren't, at the very least, sickened by the poison erupting from the book? 

One defense of this silly-ism is to argue that the Wallace Krimis are nothing but exercises in camp, not ever to be taken seriously, not ever to be seen as anything other than sugary, cartoon-colored diversions that make us knowingly roll our eyes and laugh along on cue. Personally, I reject this way of reading the Krimis, and tbh if that's all they were, I wouldn't bother to spend the time and energy I have in tracking them down, repeat-watching them, writing about them, trying to spread the word. If the entire series amounted to an ironic and kitschy punchline, then, you know, who cares?

Camp—"a social, cultural, and aesthetic style and sensibility based on deliberate and self-acknowledged theatricality"—doesn't have to equal an excuse not to take style seriously. Here, when Conner returns to confront the mystery man pulling his strings, Vohrer gives us palpable mood via the lighting and visual composition of the scene, a scene where the dummy head of the supervillain rolls across the carpet and leads us, along a visual bridge, back to Conner, in his jail cell, hung to death.

The other defense would be that the film is part of a cinematic tradition that trades in an irrational, stylized version of reality that isn't bound by the rules of a "real world" (what we discussed above). Thus, no explanation is needed for why the gas doesn't act like gas and magically targets only its single, intended victim.

But this argument falls down too, because the accompanying irrational, dream logic stylization that should exist in such a scene is MIA. There's nothing about the gas scene that suggests the filmmakers are trying to achieve some sort of altered cinematic state, that denies a mundane understanding of natural laws. Instead it draws attention to the lazy plot-hole unreality of the story without answering that unreality with narrative or stylistic devices to justify it. Or explain it. Or make it more than the sum of its parts. It feels not like a baroque time-slip into another dimension, an altered state, but just amateurish and unbelievable.

It's the same effect that the opening murder set-piece in Argento's SLEEPLESS (aka, NON HO SONNO [2001]) has, convincing the viewer not of an altered reality, but of a shoddily constructed, throwaway script. In that film, a prostitute has accidentally come into possession of evidence that the client she's just left is a serial killer. She doesn't discover this until she has left his apartment and boarded a train. While on the train, she calls a friend (meant to pick her up at the station) to tell her what she knows. When she gets done relaying the information, the killer calls her on her cell phone and vows to kill her because of what she's stolen from his apartment. During the phone conversation it's clear that 1. the killer is still back in his apartment and 2. he doesn't know (at first at least) that she's on a train. The woman seeks out a conductor for protection and he assures her the man can't possibly attack her because the train will make no stops before she gets to her destination. 

And yet?

The killer is on board the train just a few minutes later. I've read reviews praising this scene in the film for its use of patented Giallo dream logic. But when Giallo dream logic works, it works because it fashions (shores up, imbues the film with) another layer (or level) of reality—a subjective, altered state that overwhelms (through stylization, diegetic and shifting use of musical cues, unaccountable camera movements) the "real" world. It acts—as it does in DEEP RED—as a pivot point for the story, where the rationally explained detective narrative shifts, irrevocably, into something no longer able to be explained.

In DEEP RED it's that moment when Marc Daly *should* be able to see the face of the killer standing in the doorway of his piano room—the killer's shadow has advanced into his sight line, into the room, and the doorway where the killer stands is in full view from where Marc sits—and yet: he cannot. The killer is a persistent visual "blank" in his consciousness, one that he can't fill even when he comes face to face with the killer. DEEP RED uses this moment of dream logic as a stylistic extension of the film's central mystery—that Marc has seen the killer's face at the beginning of the film but cannot consciously decipher or realize what he's seen. He is unable, profoundly unable, to know it. (I.e., the mystery of human perception.)

There's nothing remotely like this to be found in the SLEEPLESS killer magically teleporting himself onto a moving train; it just feels lazy. And, frankly, a bit insulting. Likewise with the magically specific gas attack. It feels like the scriptwriters couldn't come up with an imaginative (either fantasy- or reality-based) explanation for why the gas doesn't kill the whole pew full of college girls, so they just kind of hoped you wouldn't think of that ... and, you know, if there was some sort of delirious style being employed at the same time to distract you, as viewer, from such concerns, then maybe so. But not here ...

(It's true that the image of the college girl falling flat-on-her-face dead in church—dead only because she opened her Bible—could be horrifying. But 1. we-as-the-audience already know what's going to happen when the Bible opens—it was all telegraphed to us in the prologue—and 2. there's just nothing memorable in the staging or shooting of it. It's hard for me to picture it even as I write this, and I've now seen the movie at least three times.)

Other Ways the Film Falls Down in its Execution: Though it's always a strength to find Joachim Fuchsberger in the cast, here, for the first half of the film esp., he does little but chew his gum furiously and play uninvolved second fiddle to Siegfried Schürenberg. (Schürenberg's Sir John has just finished a course in psychology, and he's determined to solve the case using nothing but his fad new theories. This, combined with the transplanting of Eddi Arent's comedy stylings to Schürenberg's character, are just more marks against enjoyment of the film.) ... There is also something about how little time is spent on each rapid-fire element of the plot that prevents you from investing the necessary time or import to be able to take it seriously.

And It Ain't No HEXER: To me, too many of these later camp entries feel like massive steps backwards—away from the weirdo and envelope-pushing erotic passages of earlier films (DER HEXER, ROOM 13, and MONSTER OF LONDON CITY are just three examples that come to mind). It feels like a regression; a deliberate attempt to back away from where the genre had been, and move toward a broadly drawn cartoon.

Another way the dream logic feels drained in execution: the unlikely reveal of the Masked Monk's identity at the end of the film. Put aside the overly convoluted relationships that are hurriedly explained to Fuchsberger et al. when the unmasking occurs (a series of relationships so convoluted, you'd need a flowchart to keep them straight), and focus instead on how mind-bogglingly unbelievable the reveal is. Not unlike THE GIRL WITH ROOM 2A's insistence that we believe sensual, curvaceous Rosalba Neri is the film's much-thicker (and obviously *male*) masked killer. 

In CGM, we learn that the Masked Monk is, in reality, the short, squat, elderly headmistress of the boarding school (she honed her bull-whipping craft in a past life in the circus, a back story that only adds to the clot of irrelevant details in the story). And when they stage her unmasking in much the same way as Arent's melancholy reveal at the end of SINISTER MONK (both lay on the floor, dead, staring blindly up at the ceiling), the *lack* in the execution here is only made harder to ignore. Whatever emotional or borderline tragic investment the audience may feel when learning it was Arent (playing a version of his series persona that feels like it's human for once) is voided by a moment that's experienced as Scooby Doo. That can only make you laugh with ironic disbelief or roll your eyes. Whether here or elsewhere, trying to compare it to the film it is remaking is an exercise in disappointment. 

[SO WHAT DOES WORK?]
Three words: Vohrer's stylized direction. When the movie does work, it comes because of Vohrer's eye, and his ability to elegantly choreograph the growing stable of conventions. I.e., as much as I've discussed camp, I wouldn't want to suggest that a knowing appreciation (and use) of mystery-story elements *isn't* one of the things most enjoyable about a good Krimi. One of the pleasing things about watching a Vohrer film is his deep understanding of these conventions (some of which he invented), and the new ways he finds to deploy them. Here he uses his camera to pull off something that I call "Mapback Topography". ("Mapback is a term used by paperback collectors to refer to the earliest paperback books published by Dell Books, beginning in 1943. The books are known as mapbacks because the back cover of the book contains a map that illustrates the location of the action.") Fans of those paperbacks know the pleasure of seeing these stylized illustrations meant to help the reader visualize the scene of the crime, a kind of visual mnemonic to help imprint the world of the mystery onto your brain. 

In CGM, Vohrer uses sustained camera movements to both create relationships between the many characters and to help imprint their significance onto the viewer. Additionally, he maps the spatial relationships that exist within the boarding school. Take the sequence below for example, where we start with the camera carefully tracking the movement of the headmistress through the school set, and continue as we are "handed off" to other story elements—Konrad Georg's leery teacher spying on the headmistress, the blustery Sir John bungling the investigation, and (perhaps most importantly) the Mesmer-like relationship that Georg seems to have with the college girls.

In this sequence, Vohrer builds in another layer of linkage between the characters: audio. Konrad Georg eavesdropping outside the door is our bridge to the scene going on behind the door.

Grit Boettcher's (Betty's) in-a-trance reaction to Georg's appearance in the doorway is one of the weirdest (and most unexplained) elements in the film. We learn that Georg had an illicit relationship with the girl murdered in church, and that Boettcher's character was her close friend. But even if we are to take Betty's strange behavior as an expression of her fear and hesitancy regarding what to do with this information—Georg's character of course wants her to keep his secret—her encounters with Georg throughout the movie are deeply strange. And, in each instance, the closer she gets to him, the more she seems to be equally drawn and repulsed by his presence. Above, she is compelled to approach him in the doorway, but once she does, she seems to realize who he is and she slams the door in his face. Repeatedly, in his presence, she seems confused to the point of being almost drugged. And Vohrer, to his credit, never bogs down the mystery of their grotesque connection with exposition. 

Their third meeting, in which Boettcher swims in a pool that contains a peepshow window in its bottom, is equally strange in its execution, with Boettcher descending below the pool to confront Georg, who is spying on her through the glass. But nothing plot-specific is resolved during their meeting, and Vohrer instead gives the two characters space to act out their unspoken lust-hate (physical attraction + revulsion) dynamic.

Georg's sweaty, twitchy performance as the teacher inappropriately consorting with his college students is one of the strengths of the film. His physical performance often recalls other movies, genres, and images. Here his grip on Boettcher, as he attempts to approach with his open mouth, almost feels like he's channeling Hammer's Dracula.

Vohrer creates an echo for this scene later, when the missing Georg is discovered (this time by Uschi Glas) hanging beneath the pool.

Uschi Glas Makes a Discovery: For my own tastes, I much prefer Glas' roles toward the end of the Rialto cycle, when her ingénue-in-distress status isn't hamstrung by making her a wide-eyed (and annoyingly naive) boarding school student. ANGELS OF TERROR and the Giallo/Krimi Hybrid SEVEN BLOOD-STAINED ORCHIDS are two of the best. Never quite on the same plane as Karin Dor, but much more fleshed-out and pulp-believable than here.

These are sequences that don't succumb to a camp humor, or an ironic distancing that allows us to dismiss their dramatic weight. They are, instead, passages of trauma (trauma between the characters as expressed by their physical performances, trauma from the past recurring as present events) that feel mostly (imo) like they belong in another film, a more consistent, more compelling one.

Leonard Jacobs

January, 2015

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: The German DVD release offered in Vol. 7 of the Edgar Wallace Box Sets. The film is also available Stateside, from Dark Sky films. But as that release is both cropped to 4:3 and lacking the German soundtrack, it's not one to be recommended. | LANGUAGE: German soundtrack with English subs | DIRECTOR: Alfred Vohrer | WRITER(S): Herbert Reinecker, Edgar Wallace | MUSIC: Martin Böttcher | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Karl Löb | CAST: Joachim Fuchsberger (Inspektor Higgins); Uschi Glas (Ann Portland); Grit Boettcher (Betty Falks); Konrad Georg (Keyston); Harry Riebauer (Mark Denver); Tilly Lauenstein (Harriet Foster); Ilse Pagé (Sekretärin); Siegfried Rauch (Frank Keeney); Claus Holm (Glenn Powers); Günter Meisner (Greaves); Hans Epskamp (Bannister); Heinz Spitzner (Harrison); Jan Hendriks (Brent); Rudolf Schündler (Sergeant Hanfield); Narziß Sokatscheff (Cress Bartling); Tilo von Berlepsch (Polizeiarzt); Kurt Waitzmann (Carrington); Suzanne Roquette (Mary Houston); Susanne Hsiao (June Bell); Inge Sievers (Mildred Miller); Ewa Strömberg (Pam Walsbury); Bruno W. Pantel (Busschaffner); Kurt Buecheler (Winston Robson); Siegfried Schürenberg (Sir John)

**He mentions this in the course of his 30-page review of the German Edgar Wallace Box Sets released in 2007. It's published in issue #137 of VIDEO WATCHDOG, and is well worth tracking down.