A typical situation: The reading of a will - all the relatives and
friends who hope to inherit something have gathered, including the
scheming trophy wife, the greedy daughter and her even greedier husband,
the spinster secretary, the forever meandering professor and of course the
too-innocent-to-be-true niece of the deceased and her inspector boyfriend.
And as it happens at this events - only in films not in real life -
instead of just leaving all of them what they deserve, the deceased, a man
of a rather crude humour, delivers his will in the form of a riddle, one
that has to do with killer pigs and a wooden steel door (?).
And as it is on such occasions, the greedy relatives´, instead of
concentrating on the matter on hand, start quarelling ... until someone
starts to kill them off one by one, starting with the attorney reading the
will and working his way through pretty much all of them, until only the
too-innocent-to-be-true niece, the inspector and the butler are left
alive. These three finally make it through the killer pigs (which are
unfortunately never shown) to the wooden steel door, open it, and stumble
upon a madman, the monk with the meat whiplash (??) ...
Intended to be a hommage to/parody of the German
Edgar Wallace-films of the 1960's, the film only succeeds in
being just that to a very modest extent: the story sounds as far-fetched
as anything Wallace might have written, and the eccentric characters are
in all the righjt places - but that's about as good as it gets.
Unfortuntely most of the film takes place around a dining table - a
sequence that lasts about 30 minutes and is entirely composed of 3, maybe
four shots, all taken from the inspector's point of view - which means the
camera is constantly moving to catch the action to an extent where it gets
annoying, while the actors seem a little lost lacking good dialogue and
quite often, everyone tends to just talk all at once, while the camera
quite often seems to chase the action without catching it. Add to that
poor sound quality and actors not always up to their roles and you are
left with pretty little (though the last two aspects are forgiveable since
this is an amatuer or fan production).
A pity, this film could have been quite amusing, but the artistic
choices (especially the POV camera) have marred the result ...
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