Rialto Wallace Top 5 - Guest Contribution by Douglas Waltz

This is the first in (hopefully!) a series of guest contributions about everyone’s favourite Krimis (Rialto, Wallace or otherwise) that I am hoping to publish here on this blog. 

Douglas Waltz has kindly agreed to start this off. 

I first got to know Doug via the Euro Trash Paradise (ETP), a Yahoo Group - remember those? - dedicated to Eurocult productions of all kind. Long gone and deeply mourned by practically everyone who was involved in it, this was and will forever remain my favourite cinematic online hangout. Nothing that ever came in its wake, ever had the friendly and casual but also seriously well informed vibe that I encountered in this group and I am still in touch with many of its regular members. 

It was there that I first learned that a) there are Krimi fans outside of Germany and other German language countries and b) that the non-availability of decent English friendly prints is by far the biggest drawback and hurdle for new fans of this genre. 

Over the last couple of years Doug penned the series of Monster Killer books, fast quick reads about contemporary Monster Killer Morgan St. Cloud. Based on online reviews I seem to be the only person who actually ever reads those which really is a pity as they are so much fun and contain an incredible amount of world building packed into its short reading time. 

His Killer F**cking Squirrels was another Must Read for me. 

Doug is also a big fan of micro budget film making and when he doesn’t direct his own No-Budget oeuvres, he writes about film makers like the Polonia Brothers. 

On his YouTube channel he does his “Old Man Comic Book Reviews” or presents “The Basement of Baron Morbid”. 

Doug, thank you so much for this article! 

If anyone else would like to pen a few virtual lines about their favourite Krimis, please let me know. I really would love if we could create a little roundtable for other international Krimi-Fans. 

When I was asked to make a list of my favorite Edgar Wallace films, well how could I refuse? My obsession with this particular sub genre of thriller came from the oddest place; the drive-in. You see New World Pictures decided to pair the film Creature With The Blue Hand with the John Ashley, Filipino film Beast Of The Yellow Night. 

Two movies could not be more different and were a match made in Heaven. My young brain wrapped itself around the monstrous antics of John Ashley in the sweltering heat of the Philippines and, with my highly impressionable mind firmly in the tropics we shifted gears to what was, to me, the most amazing thing I had ever seen. 

 I was hooked. 

Klaus Kinski as twin brothers, one good, the other a psychotic sweaty mess. An asylum filled with some of the most insane things you have ever seen. The giant plexiglass containers filled with snakes and rats designed to drive people mad. The evil head of the asylum. A kidnapping plot, which I would find more than once in other films in this list. 

This movie was glorious. 

Unfortunately, this was the 70s when I saw this. You saw movies at the theater. No VHS, no video stores.

That would come later and when it did, it was like opening Pandora’s Box. 

Fortunately, for the world at large, we were all saved by a little business in Seattle called Something Weird Video and Mike Vraney was our savior. 

So, Hunchback of Soho came next and it took some of what I had seen in Creature With The Blue Hand and cranked it up to 11. A woman flies to London to receive an inheritance and is immediately kidnapped and dragged off to a bizarre reform school where the girls do so much laundry. To make sure they have our attention we start with a half naked girl pursued down the dark streets of Soho by a massive hunchback who strangles her in a phone booth. The kidnapped girl is replaced by someone else. The school is also a front for a brothel where girls that get sick of laundry go to be hostesses at an underground casino. 

This one cemented certain things for me in an Edgar Wallace film; loud music with an insane beat, hidden passages galore, secret communication devices in every nook and cranny of both the brothel and the school. You get double crosses, triple crosses, violence abounds and most of the cast are villains with zero moral fiber. 

In other words; pure cinema magic. 

Then The Sinister Monk, my first of many black and white Edgar Wallace films used the inheritance plotline where an old man changes his will on his death bed. Of course the lawyer never makes it back to town and soon the four siblings are plotting ways to bring the grand daughter who stands to inherit everything to the castle where they can try to coerce her out of her fortune. The youngest, Ronny tries the marriage angle and is just terrible at it. The older sister is trying to keep Gwendoline, the grand daughter safe from the others. 

To make it fun we get the imposing figure of a masked monk with a huge, white leather bullwhip with a ball at the end designed to break people’s necks. The monk appears to be trying to save Gwendoline at every turn. 

The whip gets plenty of use. 

 Honestly between that and the old man upstairs who makes death masks and the carrier pigeons that are followed by a helicopter to uncover a white slavery ring, there are just so many things going on here. And, before I forget, the young lady who protects herself with a squirt gun filled with sulphuric acid. 

So many weird, wild and lovely things. 

From there we go on to The Black Abbott where while there is no kidnapping we do have a hunt for a treasure in an ancient castle. Two and a half tons of gold. Everyone in this one is just obsessed with money and lurking on the grounds of the castle is a man all in black dressed like an Abbott. No bullwhip this time around. He prefers to stab people in the back. A very young Klaus Kinski plays a suspicious butler who knows more than he’s letting on. We get so many double crosses and what feels like a quadruple cross that it gets a little hard to keep track. Say what you will about Edgar Wallace films but they demand your full attention. Blink and you’ll miss some important clue. 

 Other than Kinski we do get some repeat actors. My favorite would be Eddie Arent who plays the bumbling assistant inspector Horatio in this film. In The Sinister Monk he is a sweet butler who tends to be a little on the bumbling side. Arent is in a majority of the films mentioned in this article and just a consummate performer. 

Finally, I present you the film with the oddest name The Squeaker. Someone is using Black Mamba venom and an elaborate contraption to deliver a lethal dose to the base of the victim’s necks. Throw in Klaus Kinski as an odd caretaker of exotic animals that are stored in a huge building before they make their way to various zoos and circuses. It was great to see Kinski and the way he had with all of his charges. He crawls on the floor with turtles, makes sure to pet a grumpy camel and seems to be have the most joyous time in this role. 

The casting for this one seems off because we have Eddie Arent being a silly newspaper reporter who reports to his superior, actor Siegfried Schürenberg who we are used to seeing as Sir John of Scotland Yard in the previously mentioned films. A role he would perform almost a dozen times in Edgar Wallace films. The Inspector isn’t portrayed by Harald Leipnitz, but Heinz Drache does a fine job and even has a running bit that he loves to smoke and never has a lighter. He plays that to the hilt in this film. 

The Squeaker makes the most of its settings and even does some interesting camera tricks. One of my favorite is the editor of the newspaper biting a carrot and the shot flips to the interior of an obviously mechanical mouth. So much fun! 

One of the things that has given me such a fondness for these films is all of the actors that return time and time again. Schürenberg and Leipnitz as Sir John and The Inspector showing up at the scene of the crime with the same matronly woman portrayed by Ilse Steppat. And we always have the stoic butler played with perfection by Albert Bessler. 

And more than once, the characters in the film acknowledge that they are in an Edgar Wallace film. 

How could you not love this series of films? There are many more than the few mentioned here and I encourage you to seek them out for yourselves and have the same great time watching them as I did.