Austria-Hungary based film director Harald Reinl is largely
known for his output in the German krimi subgenre of films ala the Dr. Mabuse
sequel films The Return of Dr. Mabuse and The Invisible Dr.
Mabuse as well as The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle from Eureka
Entertainment’s excellent Terror in the Fog crime film box. While prolific and highly successful as a
genre director in the 1960s, having amassed more than sixty titles, Reinl
initially started out as an extra in the mountain films of Arnold Fanck before
contributing screenwriting to controversial German auteur Leni Riefenstahl’s Tiefland
before making his own directorial debut with the mountain film Mountain
Crystal in 1949.
Going on to garner
an Oscar nomination for his much ballyhooed documentary Chariots of the Gods,
Reinl soon found his filmography drifting away from the krimi film and back to
his mountainous rural roots through the comedy subgenre before reinvigorating
the mountain western with his 1973 German western Die blutigen Geier von
Alaska translated roughly to The Bloody Vultures of Alaska, Fight
for Gold or as it is more commonly known among public domain copies The
Hellhounds of Alaska.
Shot in the Austrian alps as well as West German and the
Plitvice Lakes and Dubrovnik in Yugoslavia by Uncle Tom’s Cabin cinematographer
Heinz Hölscher with sets by Croatian The Tin Drum production designer Željko
Senečić, an overqualified score by recurring Sergio Martino composer
Bruno Nicolai and prominently starring frequent television actor Doug McClure,
the German western unfortunately suffers from a labyrinthine script by Kurt
Nachmann and Johannes Weiss that can get easy to lose track of while also not
exactly delivering in the way of vultures or hellhounds outside of Siberian
huskies.
Set during the Klondike Gold
Rush which saw over 100,000 prospectors mining for gold in the Yukon region, the
Alaskan snow filled yarn zeroes in on Don Rutland (Doug McClure) a fur trapper
who becomes ensconced in an extended battle to retrieve his best friend’s son
from the vile clutches of thieves including one who aims to claim the boy as
his own new son. Meanwhile Don becomes wrongfully
accused of robberies in the town and fights desperately to clear his name.
Between a scary violent encounter with an
eagle and an extended chase sequence near the film’s climax, The Hellhounds
of Alaska while often unfocused and a bit sloppy occasionally reminds of
the far better more focused krimi works of Reinl but still manages to pack its
own mannered punch. Disjointed and not
always dubbed well in English and there’s a bar fight featuring a cackling
black man that feels briefly like a blaxploitation hero invaded the period
western, this tight yet overstuffed German spaghetti western of sorts kind of
stumbles and the numerous alternative titles render the thing as a kind of
public domain Grindhouse flick.
A jack-of-all-tradesman film worker disinterested in artistic expression
over creating involving by-the-numbers entertainments, Reinl’s career is
checkered at best with some of his best and worst offerings coming out of
subgenres he typically excelled at. The
Hellhounds of Alaska is far from being on the same page as his prior krimi
works released in Eureka Entertainment’s Dr. Mabuse and Terror in the
Fog boxes, but it was cool to see him working within his primarily mountain
ranged field of cinematic interests again back where he began.
--Andrew Kotwicki