Directed by Alfred Vohrer
Written by Herbert Reinecker
Starring:
- Joachim Fuchsberger as Inspektor Higgins
- Uschi Glas as Ann Portland
- Grit Boettcher as Betty Falks
- Konrad Georg as Keyston
- Harry Riebauer as Mark Denver
- Tilly Lauenstein as Harriet Foster
- Ilse Pagé as Miss Marjorie
Rating: 
Out of Rialto Film’s long-running series of Edgar Wallace thrillers, it was Alfred Vohrer’s The College Girl Murders that first drew me in. The film’s eccentric premise—a labyrinthine whodunit steeped in perverse innuendo and dripping with Hammer-style color spectacle—works so aggressively in its flamboyance that it practically forces the audience’s gaze. That flamboyance is exactly what kept me entranced as Inspector Higgins (Joachim Fuchsberger) set out to unravel a sordid tale that begins with a student killed by the deadly trick of a poison-spitting bible. But the absurdities hardly end there: soon the case widens to include a masked figure in a crimson Ku Klux Klan–like robe who stalks the school grounds armed only with a whip.
Sometimes it’s a proto-slasher goof, sometimes it’s a busted James Bond knock-off, and in between it’s pure ’60s Euro weirdness. It feels like the ultimate lost murder mystery classic—except it’s not, it just pretends to be. Its energy lies in the way bodies drift through the frame with careless ease, choreographed to match the camera’s oily, ostentatious pirouettes. Vohrer, absorbed wholly by this ornamental motion, abandons the story itself, which collapses into a stiff, awkward, automated routine.
Vohrer’s technique is willfully chaotic, a disorder meant to masquerade as complexity. The tangle of suspicious characters—so elaborately introduced—suggests, for a fleeting moment, a shrewd mosaic, a riddle of dazzling intricacy. Yet what is offered as profundity reveals itself as sheer artifice: a circuitous design with nothing at its center. The greater irony is that such ambition seems to promise an ending drenched in delirium, yet what emerges is startlingly banal. Extraordinary chaos dissolves into ordinary motive, as though the film insists that behind all madness lies nothing but mediocrity. If you’ve seen the conclusion, you know this truth; if not, you will soon.
