Saturday, August 1, 2015

WARTEZIMMER ZUM JENSEITS - Martin Böttcher - "Mark Of The Tortoise" (1964)

I'll probably still be doing lots of cartoons on Wednesdays for awhile, but for right now Saturday night is going to be about Sinister films and sinister people, and tonight's film "Mark Of The Tortoise" is a prefect freakin' example! 

Dingy, dark and dirty, those are three elements in film we enjoy, and that's something that German filmmakers are really good at! Oh, yeah, and dank too!

Time for a public service announcement! Drink, Drank, Drunk!  "DRINK DRIVE DEATH!" Just don't do it! Drink, stay home, and watch cool old movies instead!

So who is that reading Holiday magazine and listening to some cool tunes by the brilliant composer Martin Böttcher!?

None other than Dungeon hero Klaus Kinski again, this time as a washed up knife thrower in need of a job! If you listen to the sound clip, check out the voice they have dubbed in for Klaus, it's pretty ridiculous! Martin is not used in this film as much as I would like to hear, but what there is, is great! Here's a tasty morsel from this scene, and a bit more from the end! Do a search on the sidebar for Martin, and you can get a good handle on some of his massive library of achievements!

Here's a great twofer, Hildegard (The Lost Continent) Knef as sexy evil girlfriend Lorelli, and Carl (Death In The Red Jaguar) Lang as scarred henchman Crantor!! What a great pair! The knife in the wall was just thrown by Klaus in the dark to prove that his skills even improve a little when he's under the influence!



Hence the American title, "Mark Of The Tortoise!" Somebody had fun painting those tortoise shells!

Doing a door by door check for the killer turns out to be a pretty good gig for this bobby!

Richard Münch is The Boss! Richard had a long history of playing evil dudes, and he was in at least four Jerry Cotton flicks! He's pretty damn good at being bad!

Nice pad! This is the kind of locale that makes these type of flicks so enjoyable! If you need all kinds of CGI animation and stale gags, then this is not your kind of movie, but if you like cool pages out of history and tricky stories then this is a film you'll dig!

The Boss has a pretty damn advanced video surveillance system for back in the day!

And a herd of turtles to boot! Pretty suspicious!

Command Central!

The male lead character quasi-hero in this film is a guy named Götz (The Cat, The Swine, The Sandman) George, and I'm pleased to tell you that unlike a lot of names that come up around here, Götz is not only alive and kicking today, but is also filming a movie as we speak called "Böse Wetter!"

So when the Boss has machine guns built into his wheelchair and he kills his devoted employees without any sense of remorse, is it politically correct to call him a crippled little bitch? Personally, in this case, I think so!

Well, it was definitely The End for this poor bastard, and Sinister Cinema is the place to go if you have a hankering to know the whole story of why!

3 comments:

  1. Well, technically, "Wartezimmer zum Jenseits" means "Waiting Room for the Afterlife"! A bit different than the tortoise thing!

    -Da-da

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  2. Here's the way it works in my world; a 1960's German film is set for release in English, and some hotshot executive watches part of the movie, and sees the tortoise with the skull on the shell, and comes up with an English title on a whim that has nothing to do with the translation of the title at all, hence "Mark Of The Tortoise" and not "Waiting Room For The Afterlife," which just so happens to not have anything to do with the movie either!

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  3. For that matter they could've called it, "OBLISCENCE."

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