EDITOR’S NOTE: Coast of Skeletons was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, January 23, 1971 at 11:30 p.m.
The sequel to the 1963 film Death Drums Along the River, this uses the characters from Edgar Wallace’s 1911 novel Sanders of the River and Zoltán Korda’s 1935 film based on the novel, but places them in a totally different story. Confused? Well, only Edgar Wallace could invent krimi, giallo and King Kong.
What happened to Wallace’s imperialist hero District Commissioner Harry Sanders after the British Empire packed up its bags? Well, after he gets laid off by a newly independent African nation, he moves back to London, takes an office job at an insurance company and gets sent right back to Africa to inspect a diamond-dredging boat.
As I said above, this movie serves as a direct follow-up to 1963’s Death Drums Along the River, forming a mini-duology produced by legendary exploitation impresario Harry Alan Towers. Both films take Wallace’s 1911 novel Sanders of the River—which Zoltan Korda famously adapted in 1935 into a piece of unashamed British colonial propaganda starring Paul Robeson (a film Robeson hated so much after seeing the final edit that he reportedly tried to buy every print to destroy it)—and completely strip away the civilizing the natives nonsense. Instead, Towers jettisoned the politics and turned Sanders into a jet-setting 1960s pulp detective.
Recreating his role from Death Drums, Richard Todd (House of the Long Shadows, Hitchcock’s Stage Fright) returns as Sanders. Todd reportedly only agreed to come back if Towers upped his paycheck and had writer Anthony Scott Veitch overhaul Towers’ original script. When the financing briefly collapsed right before shooting, Towers pulled off his usual producer magic, found the cash and shipped everyone off to film in Technicolor and widescreen Techniscope around Durban and South Africa.
Sanders is back in South West Africa to keep an eye on A.J. Magnus (Dale Robertson), a flashy, Stetson-wearing Texan entrepreneur trying to dredge diamonds out of shallow coastal waters. The moment Sanders touches down, the body count starts. He barely survives an assassination attempt before finding Piet van Houten (Dietmar Schönherr) with a broken neck. Piet was trying to blow the whistle on Magnus’ previous dredging ship, which mysteriously sank and cost Sanders’ insurance company a small fortune.
From there, Sanders is dragged into a tangled web with a double-dealing insurance fraud scheme; a secret stash of WWII Nazi gold bullion buried in a sunken U-boat; a tense love triangle between Magnus, his U-boat captain Janny von Koltze (Heinz Drache) and Janny’s superficial, gold-digging wife Elisabeth (Elga Andersen) and romancing Helga (Marianne Koch), the captain’s photographer sister, who exists mostly to give Sanders a love interest and look wide-eyed at danger. Incidentally, Marianne Koch also appeared in Death Drums Along the River, but as a completely different character! That very same year, she starred as Marisol opposite Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, before retiring from acting in 1971 to become a medical internist. Talk about a career pivot!
Before long, Magnus catches wind of the sunken Nazi gold, locks the entire main cast—good guys, bad guys and love interests alike—in the hold of his ship and floods the chamber. Will they break out? Will they trudge through the scorching desert to reach a landlocked shipwreck where the receding tides left a boat two miles inland? Will dynamite explode while our hero flies away in a helicopter?
Coast of Skeletons holds the distinction of being the first Edgar Wallace adaptation filmed in full color and scope. Because of that, it feels a bit odd that producer Towers tapped TV director Robert Lynn to helm the project. Lynn’s only real notable feature at that point was 1964’s Dr. Crippen, a low-budget black-and-white crime flick starring Donald Pleasence and Samantha Eggar. More likely, Towers hired Lynn for his experience as a second-unit director on sumptuous Hammer horror classics like Horror of Dracula and Revenge of Frankenstein. While Coast of Skeletons is nowhere near as atmospheric as those Gothic masterpieces, Lynn delivers a competent, slickly paced potboiler, aided immensely by Stephen Dade’s crisp location photography and a brassy score by Christopher Whelen.
The plot feels like an extra-long, feature-length episode of a 1960s jungle adventure show like Daktari or The Riveter, complete with 60s-style TV violence where men get punched, visibly miss the target by three inches and fly backward into the sand with clean shirts. The German-dubbed version—released as Sanders und das Schiff des Todes (Sanders and the Ship of Death)—played into the krimi craze sweeping Germany at the time, though actors like Heinz Drache and Dietmar Schönherr don’t get much room to shine beyond standard villainy and stoicism.
Still, Richard Todd is as dependably solid as ever; Dale Robertson chews enough scenery as the villainous Texas diamond prospector to keep things lively; and Derek Nimmo pops up for some light British comedic relief as Tom Hamilton (taking over the comic sidekick duties Jeremy Lloyd handled in the previous film).
You can watch this on Tubi.
