When inspectors have to deal with the devil – i.e. not with one of the usual villains, but with the true Satan, the opponent of God in whom many still believe – it usually ends badly for the inspectors. Which is why, unfortunately, this also applies to the cases in which the lord of darkness lifts his terrible head.
So you have to be pretty strong in October. It begins – long before Halloween, when one would have understood all outbreaks of Satanism to some extent – the occult weeks in Sunday evening crime. Shamans, disguised as therapists operating with strange mushrooms, are up to mischief and exorcists, witches are burning in Brandenburg. All hell broke loose.
But everything begins now in Vienna. That’s pretty close. Vienna seems to be particularly close to non-Viennese people, not only because of hell. According to legend, the gate to hell is somewhere here. Where exactly, one does not know. And what you don’t know can drive you crazy.
But that brings us to the heart of the new case of Bibi Fellner and Moritz Eisner. To call it an enlightenment would be presumptuous. What Thomas Roth has stirred together in his witch’s kitchen is, let’s say it carefully, too nebulous for that.
At the beginning of the occult weeks you see a little girl. That’s often the way it is in horror films, for whatever reason. Like a late creepy sister from Sterntaler, she walks through the barren corridors of a farm museum farm at night, as if “The Gate to Hell” had come to ORF like an apocryphal Stephen King film via magical paths.
Pseudo-Gregorian chants (what else) waft around in an endless loop, some ritual is in progress. And then she sees something, the girl, a picture falls off the wall, blood comes out of the sink, a woman in nightgown falls to her death with a noose around her neck.
Bibi Fellner (Adele Neuhauser) and Moritz Eisner (Harald Krassnitzer) question the ex-lude and satanism expert Günther Dambusch (Roland Düringer)
Those: ARD Degeto / ORF / Film 27 / Hubert Mi
Of course, none of this is relevant to Sunday crime. This is just a dream Bibi’s dream. In the possibly not so true reality, Prelate Gabler lies at the foot of a church tower. Someone treated him badly before he fell to his death. He has a satanic symbol in his hand.
The man was a liberator, what – we are in Austria! – of course has nothing to do with liberation theology. He freed souls from demons, devils, from satanic madness. He was an exorcist. We don’t have them anymore, but they do in Austria and Switzerland. So what happened to Bibi and Moritz afterwards would probably never have happened to Lena Odenthal.
Moritz thinks this occult nonsense is for people who find life too boring. Bibi, plagued by the aforementioned exorcist dreams and impregnated by her grandmother with scary, hellish dreams, is built very close to being spooky. Which creates a fine friction between the commissioners.
Cliche cardboard comrades in the ghost train
To put it briefly, it doesn’t get boring in “The Gate to Hell”. One of the reasons is that you have to shake your head all the time. Because in each of the underground ghost train passages into which Bibi and Moritz have to dive like exorcists into Satan’s system, only the faded cliché cardboard comrades of the exorcism complex are standing around.
Whoever is dealing with the demons here – a sinister psychologist named Sittsam, for example, a former slob whose further career, which is probably only possible in Vienna, led him after jail from a converted Catholic directly to a satanism expert, a clergyman appointed exorcist – has, as expected, a lot of trouble.
What could have been a glorious satanic cliché massacre had Thomas Roth taken any stance on what he was presumably trying to tell about.
Before someone hangs garlands of garlic cloves around their apartment door and buys a crucifix against the Lord of Darkness. There is a simple trick against the devil in the “crime scene”: Switch to the ARD media library and watch “Lauchhammer”.
It’s very out of this world, it’s about the turning point and the cultural and climate change and its consequences. And — it’s in six parts — it’s enough for all three upcoming Sunday night’s faded occult cases.