The College Girl Murders / The Monk with the Whip / The Prussic Factor / Der Mönch mit der Peitsche (1967) -***
In retrospect, it ought to have been obvious. Of course a mystery author who published 173 novels over the course of his career would have a recurring detective hero. In fact, he’d probably hava a bunch of them. And of course that would eventually get reflected in the movies based on his work— especially if the studio making them had an exclusive contract, like Rialto-Film had with the Edgar Wallace literary estate after 1960. Nevertheless, it didn’t occur to me until I caught an offhand line of dialogue about two thirds of the way through The College Girl Murders that there could possibly be such a thing as the Sir John of Scotland Yard Cinematic Universe. I’ll go back to pick up that story from the beginning one of these days. For now, though, suffice it to say that The College Girl Murders is but one small, strange part of a much bigger and more complicated picture.
In a dungeon-like laboratory somewhere in what is definitely England, and not at all West Germany, mad chemist Dr. Cabble (Wilhelm Vorwerg, from The Sinister Monk and The Indian Scarf) has at last achieved a longed-for triumph: a toxic gas derived from prussic acid that kills any form of animal life in just ten seconds. Cabble’s assistant, Robson (Kurt Buecheler), is troubled by his boss’s ecstatic reaction to the first successful test of the compound, evidently never having been told just what the two of them were working on. And he’s even more troubled by Cabble’s cavalier attitude toward the law requiring them to report the poison’s development to the authorities. Thus it is that Robson earns himself a gig as the test subject for the gas’s intended delivery system, a sprayer mechanism compact enough to be concealed within a modified book, and triggered by opening the front cover. But while Cabble is in no hurry to tell the government about his invention, he arranges immediately after disposing of Robson to hand over the whole kit and caboodle to a mysterious man who apparently funded the research. Then the chemist himself is eliminated— by a whip-wielding figure in a hooded, scarlet monk’s habit, who snaps Cabble’s neck with the weapon as if it were a long-range noose.
Some time later, at a high-security prison, a guard called Carrington (Kurt Waitzmann, from The Curse of the Hidden Vault and The Secret of the Black Trunk) removes professional pickpocket Frank Keeley (Siegfried Rauch, of The Zombie Walks and Alien Contamination) from his cell, and takes him to the one occupied by Cress Bartling (Narziß Sokatscheff, from The Mad Executioners and Swingin’ Swappers). It’s unclear what Bartling is in for, but imprisonment has done little to impede his criminal activities. He offers Keeley a cool thousand pounds to do a little job for him on the outside, assuring the thief that it’ll be no trouble slipping him first out of prison and then back in again to create the most bulletproof alibi a crook ever had. Not the sort of man to turn down large sums of money, Frank agrees at once, and the next thing he knows, Carrington and the staff of the prison galley are smuggling him outside the walls within a kitchen garbage can. Then a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce picks Keeley up, and takes him to an isolated chateau where he receives his marching orders from— that’s right— the guy who commissioned Dr. Cabble’s poison gas. All the mystery man wants Keeley to do is to visit the chapel of a certain college before services tomorrow morning, and to exchange the Bible belonging to a student named Pam Walsbury (Ewa Strömberg, from Blackjackets and Vampyros Lesbos) for one that will be provided to him by Greaves (Günter Meisner, of Hauser’s Memory and The Boys from Brazil), the menacing driver of that Rolls. Keeley doesn’t realize that he’s just agreed to perform an assassination, but £1000 is £1000.
Enter the aforementioned Sir John of Scotland Yard (Siegfried Schürenberg, in what is either his tenth or eleventh appearance in the part he first played in The Door with Seven Locks, depending on whether you watch the Anglo-American cut of The Trygon Factor or the German one), paired this time with Inspector Higgins (The Fellowship of the Frog’s Joachim Fuchsberger, revisiting the role that he originated in The Mysterious Magician). Sir John has just been awarded a degree in criminal psychology, and he figures the case of a girl gassed into a bogus heart attack by persons unknown in the middle of church services should present plenty of opportunities to apply his newly acquired skills in competition with Higgins’s more traditional approach to crime-solving. Somehow both men manage to keep their hands off of Sir John’s amorous secretary, Marjorie (Ilse Pagé, from The Man with the Glass Eye and Creature with the Blue Hand), long enough to absorb a briefing on the facts of the Walsbury girl’s murder, whereupon they set off for the victim’s school in order to interview headmistress Harriet Foster (Tilly Lauenstein, of Naked in the Night and Black Market of Love), her staff, and as many of Pam’s acquaintances within the student body as they can find.
The Scotland Yard men arrive just in time to deal with a veritable epidemic of murder on and around the campus. The next victim is Betty Falks (Grit Boettcher, of The Black Abbot and The Wanker), Pam’s best friend and one of several students who knew about the affair she was having with pervert chemistry teacher Mr. Keyston (Konrad Georg, from Playgirls of Frankfurt and School of Fear). Naturally that causes Sir John to view Keyston as the number-one suspect— especially after it comes to light that the teacher has a well-concealed criminal past, and especially especially after Keyston goes missing. On the other hand, Higgins quickly learns that there was a witness to Betty’s death: the driver of the bus she was taking into town at the time, who confirms circumstances broadly analogous to those of the Walsbury murder. The trouble is, the bus driver (Bruno W. Pantel, from Summer Night Fever and Secrets of Sweet Sixteen), during a session with the police mugshot books, identifies the killer as Frank Keeley, and everyone knows he’s been locked up for months. A visit to the prison confirms that Keeley is right where he’s supposed to be, too, so I guess it’s back to the drawing board for Higgins, huh?
This being a Krimi, there is no shortage whatsoever of other shady characters hanging around the school, most of whom will attract either Sir John’s or the inspetor’s attention at one point or another. Glen Powers, the groundskeeper (Claus Holm, from The Gorilla Gang and The Curse of the Yellow Snake), is ludicrously overqualified for his position, and clearly has something going on under the table with Ms. Foster. Author-in-residence Mark Denver (Harry Riebauer, of The Swingin’ Pussycats and The Horror of Blackmoor Castle), who happens also to be Ms. Foster’s brother, is almost as big into young girls as Mr. Keyston, although he’s thus far been much more discreet about his affair with Mary Houston (Suzanne Roquette, from The Vengeance of Fu Manchu and The Hunchback of Soho) than Keyston generally was with his dalliance. (Also, Denver doesn’t look at all times like he’s deeply ensconced in a mental game of pocket pool, which gives him another leg up on the vanished chemistry teacher.) Harriet herself consistently acts like the threat posed by the murders to her school’s reputation matters more to her than the safety of her students and staff. For that matter, the same could also be said about lead administrator Harrison (Heinz Spitzner, of The Squeaker and Again, the Ringer)— and what the hell does a college administrator need with a personal goon (Jan Hendriks, from Castle of the Creeping Flesh and The Devil’s Daffodil), anyway? Lastly, although there’s no plausible reason to look askance at a kindly old teacher named Bannister (The Green Archer’s Hans Epskamp), the Krimis had absorbed enough influence from their giallo cousins in Italy by 1967 that Bannister’s obvious innocence of everything should probably be taken to incriminate him of something.
Just the same, Higgins never lets go of his certainty that Frank Keeley killed Betty Falks, even if he can’t figure out yet how a prisoner could have pulled off such a caper. Similarly, the inspector remains convinced that there’s rational motive behind the murder spree at the college, however much it might look on the surface like the work of a maniac. Those twin convictions stand him in good stead when both his favorite suspect and Sir John’s turn up dead, having apparently hanged themselves. That’s because Higgins’s theory of the case predisposes him to reject the coincidence as too perfect to be trusted. And in fact neither Keyston’s death nor Keeley’s was really suicide, for both ran afoul of that whip-cracking, neck-snapping, scarlet-clad monk— the thief-turned-assassin for getting too big for his britches with the boss, and the teacher seemingly for reasons related to some old vendetta. The police medical examiner (Tilo von Berlepsch, of Come to Vienna— I’ll Show You Something! and The Love Keys) confirms that the injuries to the dead men’s necks are only superficially consistent with self-inflicted strangulation, which reminds both Higgins and Sir John that they’ve seen something like this before. You remember the case— the one about five years back, with the criminal mastermind who dressed as a monk, and killed his victims with a weighted whip*? The upshot is, this is a very bad time for the current criminal mastermind to assume that he can go right on ahead with his original plan, only with Kress Bartling handling the dirty work in person. Worse yet, from the villain’s point of view, the last girl he wants killed— aerospace trust heiress Ann Portland (Uschi Glas, from Seven Bloodstained Orchids and The Tower of Screaming Virgins)— is connected to him in ways that are certain to be discovered by any enemy with the motivation to look closely at her background.
Don’t bother searching Edgar Wallace’s bibliography for a novel called The College Girl Murders— you won’t find one. Nor will you find one called The Monk with the Whip. So which the hell book is this movie supposed to be based on, anyway? As befits a Krimi, the answer to that seemingly simple question is absurdly convoluted. In 1926, Wallace published a novel called The Black Abbot, which he adapted himself the following year into a stage play called The Terror. That’s the same The Terror that served as the basis for the first talking horror picture in 1928, and which was filmed again in Britain a decade after that. The play was such a hit that Wallace then went back and wrote a re-novelization in 1930, using the stage version’s title instead of the original book’s. Rialto-Film got just as much mileage out of the story as the original author once they got their hands on it, producing The Black Abbot in 1963, The Sinister Monk (officially based on The Terror, but trading the play’s supposedly haunted abbey for a supposedly haunted boarding school for girls) in 1965, and finally The College Girl Murders in 1967, reusing the setting and imagery of the previous film, but inventing a whole new mystery underlying the action. Since the pieces that carried over from The Sinister Monk were precisely the ones that didn’t appear in any of the official source material, The College Girl Murders has only marginally more to do with Edgar Wallace than unapologetically bullshit “adaptations” like What Have You Done to Solange? (which wasn’t in any sense based on The Clue of the New Pin, but pretended to be in the Northern European markets where the Krimis did their briskest business).
The obvious question, of course, is why do that? And part of the answer, at least, is that The College Girl Murders differs rather starkly in tone from its predecessors. It would be going a little too far to call the film a parody of previous Krimis, but the winks toward the experienced viewer that were always a feature of Rialto-Film’s output in the genre come more often and more openly in this movie than ever before. Sir John had always been portrayed as a bit of a pompous stuffed shirt, subject to unflattering comparison with his suavely competent subordinates, but at least so far as I’ve seen, he’d never been a buffoon until now. Krimi plots had always been tangled and circuitous, but this one consists entirely of loose ends, and all of its explanations and resolutions are undisguised horseshit. It’s as if the studio bosses had come to recognize that not even they could take these movies altogether seriously anymore. The overall vibe is somewhere between a gothic mutation of the campier Eurospy films and a sexier, more violent version of the Adam West “Batman” series— which leaves me at something of a loss to account for why I enjoyed The College Girl Murders so much, because I’d normally regard any film meeting that description as 88 minutes in Purgatory. Maybe it’s just the crazed unreality of the whole business, or even the simple novelty of seeing what is normally so meticulous a genre with regard to tying up and sorting out even the most minor and unlikely of plot threads conduct itself instead with a downright Mediterranean lack of give-a-fucks. I mean, we’re talking about a film whose main villain has a crocodile pit in his lair, but which ends without a single one of his henchmen ever falling into it! Meanwhile, the link between the sometimes-titular monk and the remainder of the mystery turns out to be absurdly tenuous, and that villain’s motivations, once revealed, defy belief as starkly as those of any Black Glover in the annals of giallo. Whatever the reason, though, I really did get a kick out of this silly, slovenly movie, in a way that almost never happens for me with mid-60’s camp trash.
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