A sinister German sports pilot is getting a job by a gang of smugglers to fly some millions of Marks abroad but tries to escape with the money on his own. Now the gangsters are chasing him and an innocent female eyewitness through the woods.
The plot of this German 1974 production sounds so old-fashioned as the film really is - just boring. In the beginning, the action is nearly non-existent, the pacing is just dumb and uninteresting, and only in the second half of the movie, when you're possibly waking up again and trying to get hold of what it's all about.... Ralf Gregan's direction and Michael Ballhaus' photography are missing everything you're expecting from a simply crime thriller, and it's no wonder that the German cinema of the seventies was no highlight at all except for stupid sex comedies and boring art house student films with no space left for well-made mainstream entertainment.
There is also some sex and crime involved, notably a hot sex scene between Dutch main actor Rutger Hauer of later Hollywood fame (Blade Runner, Hitcher, Flesh and Blood etc.) and sexy Vera Tschechowa. Especially in the end during the fight between Hauer (ridiculously named "Blondi" here) and the gangster boss, German b-movie standard villain Horst Frank, lots of blood and guts are all around (although these scenes are badly edited in later TV screenings).
You will wonder how such actors became involved in such a boring stuff. Other notable supporting actors are Bavarian star actor Walter Sedlmayer (who gets beaten to death like in his real life later on during a spectacular homosexual killing affair), "Tatort" detective Walter Richter and Edgar-Wallace-movie veteran Gunther Stoll. The movie was mainly filmed in the Black Forest woods and some private houses which gives him a really cheap and home-made touch. And nobody really knows what the "Amulett des Todes" (the bracelet of death), worn by lovely looking Vera Tschechowa, really stands for... probably a touch of horror which cannot save the movie at all.
O.K., enough words for such a boring movie, but if you get the occasion to watch this film in groovy seventies fashion and hair styles with its driving Moog synthesizer score and some famous European actors in some of their worst roles just do it once and forget it afterwards!
