Director Richard Oswald’s quasi-remake of his 1919 portmanteau film turns out to be a semi-anthology.
A journalist named Richard Briggs (Harald Paulsen) pursues an unhinged (and unnamed) wife murdering inventor (Paul Weggener) through four distinct episodes based on / inspired by classic horror tales – guess which ones;
(1) The inventor’s wife’s black cat upsets one of his experiments, the inventor flies into a rage and kills the woman and bricks up the body in the wall of his cellar laboratory. The reporter, who had heard the woman’s screams while driving past, returns four days later with the police – the cat, which has been accidentally entombed with its mistress gives the game away.
The murderer flees into (2) a nearby travelling carnival’s Chamber of Horrors, exhibiting animatronic models of historical criminals (Mechanischen Museum). The journalist follows, there’s a fight, the killer escapes again, arriving at a nearby hospital where he deliberately acts insane in order to be sent to the nearby mental institution and thus give the authorities the slip.
But (3) the lunatics have taken over the asylum and when Briggs arrives the increasingly eccentric behaviour of the asylum’s director, staff and dinner guests and their refusal to let him leave make him realise his life is at risk. When his original quarry joins the party and starts inciting the loonies to murder, it looks like it’s curtains. Luckily, the police arrive in the nick of time but their man escapes again.
Some years pass and the paper where our newshound works receives an anonymous letter denouncing the existence of (4) a Suicide Club. Sent to check it out the investigator discovers that the man behind said ‘Selbstmörderklub’ is none other than…you guessed it. Defying death yet again, Briggs finally traps the elusive wife murderer and the men from Scotland Yard arrive to make the arrest.
A slightly lightweight and rather irregularly paced film, but nonetheless entertaining and fun to watch. The balance between the comedic and the horrific is well maintained and Paul Weggener, with his Slavic features and larger than life screen presence carries the film (Paulsen doesn’t leave much of an impression in the ‘hero’s role). The asylum sequence is both funny and disturbing, with some memorable performances and an appropriately anarchistic tone: there’s virtuoso ballad singing, delusional declamations, chamber music, violent fits, piano playing, grandilocuent speeches, brawling, pop-eyed oddballs in evening dress – it could be a sequence from a Marx Brothers movie with a more sinister edge.
The cinematography occasionally harks back to (or perhaps spoofs) German Expressionism while at the same the Anglicised names and supposed London locations seem to be foreshadowing the German cinema’s 1960s obssession with setting their Krimis in an imagined sterotypical English landscape.
Unheimliche Geschichten (aka Eerie Tales, 1932)
Director Richard Oswald’s quasi-remake of his 1919 portmanteau film turns out to be a semi-anthology.
A journalist named Richard Briggs (Harald Paulsen) pursues an unhinged (and unnamed) wife murdering inventor (Paul Weggener) through four distinct episodes based on / inspired by classic horror tales – guess which ones;
(1) The inventor’s wife’s black cat upsets one of his experiments, the inventor flies into a rage and kills the woman and bricks up the body in the wall of his cellar laboratory. The reporter, who had heard the woman’s screams while driving past, returns four days later with the police – the cat, which has been accidentally entombed with its mistress gives the game away.
The murderer flees into (2) a nearby travelling carnival’s Chamber of Horrors, exhibiting animatronic models of historical criminals (Mechanischen Museum). The journalist follows, there’s a fight, the killer escapes again, arriving at a nearby hospital where he deliberately acts insane in order to be sent to the nearby mental institution and thus give the authorities the slip.
But (3) the lunatics have taken over the asylum and when Briggs arrives the increasingly eccentric behaviour of the asylum’s director, staff and dinner guests and their refusal to let him leave make him realise his life is at risk. When his original quarry joins the party and starts inciting the loonies to murder, it looks like it’s curtains. Luckily, the police arrive in the nick of time but their man escapes again.
Some years pass and the paper where our newshound works receives an anonymous letter denouncing the existence of (4) a Suicide Club. Sent to check it out the investigator discovers that the man behind said ‘Selbstmörderklub’ is none other than…you guessed it. Defying death yet again, Briggs finally traps the elusive wife murderer and the men from Scotland Yard arrive to make the arrest.
A slightly lightweight and rather irregularly paced film, but nonetheless entertaining and fun to watch. The balance between the comedic and the horrific is well maintained and Paul Weggener, with his Slavic features and larger than life screen presence carries the film (Paulsen doesn’t leave much of an impression in the ‘hero’s role). The asylum sequence is both funny and disturbing, with some memorable performances and an appropriately anarchistic tone: there’s virtuoso ballad singing, delusional declamations, chamber music, violent fits, piano playing, grandilocuent speeches, brawling, pop-eyed oddballs in evening dress – it could be a sequence from a Marx Brothers movie with a more sinister edge.
The cinematography occasionally harks back to (or perhaps spoofs) German Expressionism while at the same the Anglicised names and supposed London locations seem to be foreshadowing the German cinema’s 1960s obssession with setting their Krimis in an imagined sterotypical English landscape.