At the burial of Sir Oliver, witnesses hear a terrible laughter, and quickly the rumour spreads that Sir Oliver returned from the dead - as a walking skeleton. His brother Cecil (Wolfgang Kieling) soon suffers from persecution mania, because everybody he knows seems to be the target of an (attempted or successful) assassination. Inspector Higgins (Joachim Fuchsberger) has no clue why, but reporter Peggy Ward (Siw Mattson) pushes the investigation a bit with her reckless curiosity.

The cast also includes Hubert von Meyerinck as Sir Arthur, clearly trying to make a difference from his predecessor Schürenberg with little human touches such as his musical interests, Pinkas Braun in a typical twisted role as a man who could be a bad guy as well as a good guy, and Lil Lindfors who gets to sing a great song whose lines ("I wanna feel my heart beat") seem quite ironic if you consider it's all about a "zombie". The undead may look a bit silly on still photos, but believe me, it's scary enough in the film. It inspired the title character of the comedy "Der Wixxer" (2004). Something that didn't work was the make-up for Ramiro: he looks green like a Martian, not olive like a Creole. Nonetheless, tremendous entertainment!

"Im Banne des Unheimlichen" or "The Zombie Walks" or "The hand of Power" is a German color movie from 1968, so not too long anymore until this film has its 50th birthday. If you read the name of the director Alfred Vohrer, the name of writer Ladislas Fodor and the name of lead actor Joachim Fuchsberger, you will realize immediately that this is another West German movie adaptation of the Edgar Wallace crime novels. This trio worked on many of these. There is one unusual thing about this one here and that is the title. Usually, it includes the name of the main antagonist, mostly a non-human creature (that is in fact a human dressing up),so this film also could have been called "The Laughing Corpse", but it is not. The rest of it is the usual though. It runs for under 90 minutes, there are several unrealistic plot twists, unsuccessful attempts at humor (especially at the very ending for example the sound effect when she injects herself the deadly poison) and of course many characters with whom you can never be sure who's the good guy and who is the bad guy. And the women are also always the same in these films in the way they were written, which is pretty tough as they are really just vehicles to the story or to make the police detective look good. No strong characters here in terms of females. As a whole, I thought this was a pretty mediocre watch, like basically almost all the other Wallace films. Kinda disappointing looking at how America and the UK dished out one good Bond film after the other during that era. I give "Im Banne des Unheimlichen" a thumbs-down.

Actually it is Inspector Higgins, played by Joachim Fuchsberger ... and he did a few of these movies. I remember that I loved them as a kid, even if they were done way before I was even born. But I had a thing for crime stories anyway, so that wasn't that hard actually.

They may be more about the mystery and us guessing who the culprit is all along. And while Higgins is no Sherlock Holmes, this is not supposed to be any Holmes either ... there are elements of Giallo I reckon in this ... with the fake red blood and the killings ... and the story quite frankly. A nice little movie and throwback ... when criminals coorparated after you apprehended them ... for no good reason at all....