The Trygon Factor

Stewaret Granger is probably not an actor recognised by anyone these days. The same can be said for Edgar Wallace who wrote a vast array of paperback crime thrillers in the 1950's and 1960's. For some reason the West German film industry churned out a lot of  Edgar Wallace film adaptations, many of them featuring Granger and a variety of other actors, both German and English, who were regularly cast in these cheap as chips B movies.

The Trygon Factor actually had relatively high production values starring Granger, Robert Morley and the English Rose actress Susan Hampshire (ala Forsythe Saga). Cooper-Smith, a Scotland Yard detective (Granger) is called in to investigate the strange goings on in a nunnery. The nunnery is run by the Embardy family who are led by a domineering mother Livia , her strange son Like and the seemingly normal daughter Trudy (Hampshire). In fact the nunnery is a front for a gang of murderous, bank robbing nuns led by the Sister General (German actress Brigitte Horney).

There is also a mysterious masked killer prowling the grounds of a nunnery and Granger's predecessor was a victim of the killer making this investigation a bit more personal for him. He tries to become closer to Trudy but she rebuffs him. Whilst the indicators are that Luke is the killer it comes as no surprise that it is Trudy who is the culprit. Luke is shot by Livia when he attacks Trudy for 'playing with his toys' and Trudy then suffers a terrible fate when she turns the gun on Cooper-Smith.

Final impressions are that this film is deeply bizarre. The film is undoubtedly working at a different level than other Wallace screen adaptations and there is an underlying theme of sexual abnormality running throughout, hinting (and no more than hinting) at Oedipus complex, transexualism, lesbianism and sadism. Hampshire is untypically cast as the a baddie but is somewhat underused.