User Reviews

When Night Falls on the Reeperbahn is a genuinely weird movie. Shot on location in Hamburg (we see the docks, plus an all too brief glimpse of the Top Ten Club), the film imagines a world where LSD usage is rife amongst the local younger generation, who are being fed a diet of the psychedelic by the Owsley-like son (Fritz Wepper) of wealthy industrialist Voss (Herbert Tiede). Young women are being dosed and turned over to a cabal of Voss's wealthy colleagues, who use them as love toys. Some of them subsequently end up dead, and reporter Sonntag (Erik Schumann) is determined to get the story and reveal the sordid truth. There's a ton going on here, and the film pushes the boundaries of what was likely allowed in mid-60s West German cinema: there's a surprising amount of nudity, lots of references to what's going on inside men's trousers, and of course plenty of drug references (the film makes the common mistake of describing LSD as a narcotic). It's a sordid affair that dresses up a right-wing message in a sensational package; perhaps a precursor of the Schulmadchen Report films that were just around the corner.