The Tour de Nesle has come to notoriety after a bunch of dead
noblemen have popped up in the vicinity, a few too many for coincidence,
and the locals believe it's the work of a witch - while actually the
noblemen were killed in the tower by a hooded topless woman and her hooded
henchmen and then dropped into the river ... Capitan Buridan (Jean Piat)
has come to Paris to reunite with his girlfriend Blanche (Uschi Glas), who
has become one of the queen's (Teri Tordai) handmaidens - which worries
Buridan because he suspects Blanche's father to have been killed by the
queen and her closest ally, the Duke of Saint Laurent (Karlheinz Fiege).
Then Buridan, his young friend Philippe and a third guy are invited to the
Tour de Nesle to have sex with three hooded ladies - who are actually the
queen and her girlfriends. After this, Philippe and the other guy are
killed by the hooded henchmen, but Buridan manages to escape. During
their night in the tower, Buridan has never seen the queen unmasked, but
has figured everything out anyhow, so the next day, he confronts the queen
with quite a few facts, not only about last night but also the fact that
he was her first lover, that they had twins together ... but that she
eventually abandoned all of this thanks also to the influence of the Duke
of Saint Laurent to become the queen. Later, by the way, it will turn out
that Philippe, the young man the queen had sex with in the Tour de Nesle,
was actually her son. The queen wants to have Buridan killed for his
knowledge, but he instead blackmails her into making him chief of police. After
much to and fro, everything ends in the Tour de Nesle, where the queen and
the Duke on one side and Buridan on the other all set traps for each
other, and it eventually looks as if the queen would win the upper hand,
but in the meantime, Blanche has presented the King with evidence of his
wife's misdeeds, and he sends his loyal guards off to right a few wrongs
and support Buridan's cause. And in the end, botht eh queen and the duke
end in a fire that also brings down the Tour de Nesle ... After
a very atmospheric beginning set in the tower in which the hooded but
topless queen has her lovers killed, the film turns out to be little more
than your run-of-the-mill swashbuckler, with some topless nudity thrown in
for added attraction. Unfortunately, the film is rather lacking when it
comes to the action side of things: Sure, there's much fighting going on,
but it seems none of the actors knows too much about fencing, all the
stabbings throughout the film are executed in an embarrassingly tired way
(this has to be seen to be believed), and the action sequences are
generally poorly timed and edited. On top of that Jean Piat comes across
as so self-assured in his fole it borders the annoying, Uschi Glas puts
very little weight in what could have been a pivotal role, and Teri Tordai
is pretty much limited to revealing her tits every now and again, which is
at least something but doesn't add much colour to her character. That
all said, Turm der verbotenen Liebe is certainly NOT the worst low
budget swashbuckler ever, basically it's just disappointingly and boringly
mediocre...
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