When a franchise has reached a certain point, it has to decide whether to reinvent itself or start all over again. The latter is exactly the case with The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, thirty years after Lang’s original. The usual line is to say that it is not up to Lang’s original, but that might make us miss something. Examined on its own, the film is a formulaic, though competently produced B-movie that has Mabuse-like crimes taking place again after many years. These years include those the evil doctor has spent in a mental hospital lost in some unreachable state of psychosis. That leaves the Inspector (Goldfinger’s Gert Frobe, under a different name than he was in Lang’s last film, The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse reviewed elsewhere on this site). Who is committing the crimes then? What is the key to the criminals’ movements? How did they get access to Mabuse’s private information on how to pull off these crimes?