Taking place in the 1970's and based on a real crime case this German film is sensationally well made - but disturbing, so sensitive viewers
be warned. I'm a hardened viewer of horror films but i must confess the murder scenes were painful to watch, these poor old alcoholic women,
human wrecks forgotten and unwanted. Yes, i promise, when you get older you will get more soft-hearted.

The winning point of this film was, for me, the look of it. "Der Goldene Handschuh" looks fantastic down into every detail. The film is a mix
of horror, crime and drama and it's so nasty and dirty that some black humour is added to it. Almost like Ettore Scola's "Ugly, Dirty and Bad"
from 1976, if that film had been a horror-comedy instead of a drama-comedy. The film takes place in Hamburg, Germany 1974 (besides the
murder in the intro from 1970 where we get to see Mr. Fritz Honka (Jonas Dassler) dispose of the body of a murdered prostitute.

The settings of the film are mainly the scruffy bar "Der Goldene Handschuh" where Honka picked up his victims, and Honka's disgusting
attic apartment. The Bar where the local drunks, freaks and misfits hang out.
If you look at the sleeve everyone can see that Mr. Fritz Honka is an ugly man, hare-lipped and with a disfigured nose, and not even the
dirty alcoholic women frequenting the bar will accept his invitations to follow him home. Only, the worst skid-row derelicts and half-dead
old women (in their 60's - 70's) will follow him home with the promise of drinking more booze.

Honka is also a bum, even though not on Skid row as he manages to have a job, but he drinks a lot and has a lot of bottles hidden in his
cupboards, a fact that probably made the poor women follow him home, and where he killed them. Honka tries to have sex with the ladies
but can't get it up, an erection malfunction that puts him in a state of rage.
Honka is an abominable man for sure and he's proned to use violence. We never get to know Mr. Honka and to why he became a psycho,
or if the alcohol caused his fits of rage and violence. When he's "On the Wagon" he seems almost normal and can handle a job.

The victims of his beatings, the one's that survived, strangely enough didn't tell about what happened in his apartment. Or maybe as bum
ladies on skid-row nobody cared, and maybe not even themselves. A monster as Fritz Honka instead seems to be very well liked by the
patreons at the bar.
And, aaaah! Poor mistreated Gerda (a great Margerethe Tiesel) luckily is snatched out of Honka's hands, saved by a salvation soldier.
Great acting from Jonas Dassler as Honka, a good looking guy in real life and the make-up crew for sure did a fine job disfiguring him.

The DVD presents the film in an anamorphic 1.85:1 ratio and with a German audio DD 5.1 or 2.0 with swedish subtitles, region 2.
Extra a trailer, a slideshow gallery and some trailers for other films