User Reviews

"Die Tote aus der Themse" or "Angels of Terror" (really?) is a West German movie from 45 years ago and it is one of the later additions to the Edgar Wallace series. I have seen some of these films, but I personally must say that they are mostly quantity over quality unfortunately. The crime cases are rarely interesting and I am almost never tempted to make guesses who the killer is and this is really everything that the films rely on. The characters are not written particularly convincingly, but just as means to the story. The music is over the top. About this one here, I would almost say the somewhat comedic scenes at the slaughterhouse were the funniest, because it is all so mediocre and forgettable in terms of the drama and crime stories. The cast has a couple famous names here. Uschi Glas was a big star back then and this resulted in a somewhat unusual occurrence for these Wallace films. I am not speaking about the fact that she plays two characters in here, but that she has so much screen time that she can almost be seen as a bigger lead than Hansjörg Felmy. She is also first-listed in the cast. Werner Peters and Vadim Glowna could also be known to older German audiences as they both had really long careers. But this quality cast cannot turn this script into a decent crime movie either. I give it a thumbs down.

The conundrum at the heart of "The Dead One in the Thames River" is not whodunit, or why they dunit. It's the movie's two warring attributes of incomprehensibility and tediousness, and which came first. Is the movie so boring because it doesn't make sense, or does it not make sense because it is so boring? Part of the problem is, aside from the female lead (Uschi Glas), not a one of the other characters makes any impression whatsoever. By the end of the movie I still didn't know who any of them were. It should be pretty simple: some are cops and some are gangsters. Either the actors used were so colourless they were impossible to tell apart, or the script was so trite it didn't give the actors anything to do that might distinguish themselves. It's a bit like the fight between confusion and tedium outlined above.

The story is something about a ballet student who helps gangsters sell heroin. Apparently she tips off the police (or something) and seems to get killed. Her sister, also played by Uschi Glas in a duel role, comes from Australia (she doesn't exactly seem Australian) to find out what happened to her. While this is going on, a sniper is taking people out with perhaps the least violent headshots I've ever seen in a movie. There's no bullet hole or even much of a wound from his fatal gunblasts, just the tiniest dab of red paint. You could do a better job with a paintbrush.

Late in the movie it is revealed that the sister we saw killed in the beginning isn't actually dead? She comes back, only to be killed again? Didn't they pull her body out of the water earlier? Sorry, but that just went completely over my head.

This is the first krimi I've seen. If they're all like this one, I won't watch many more.