The murder menu

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Movie
Original title The murder menu
Country of production Germany
Publishing year 1986
length 87 minutes
Rod
Director Michael Günther
production ZDF
music Hans-Martin Majewski
occupation

The Murder Menu is a television play based on the play Deadly Embrace by Eric Paice.

action

The professor's wife Julia Shepherd from Cambridge has just thrown her husband Michael out of the house after another affair. The occasion was a telltale card from Connecticut (USA), signed Dein Kuschelchen . While her friend Liz tries to comfort Julia, she muses with thoughts of revenge: "I wish he were dead - then he would be worth at least the quarter of a million life insurance for me!" Liz says goodbye with the advice that Julia should start a new life and get yourself a lover - or two.

In the evening, the representative Steven appears, who is supposed to install an update on Michael's PC and show him a new model. Out of curiosity, Julia shows her the computer (there is an entertainment program for abandoned wives on it) and sleeps with Steven the following night. When she was playing around with the computer the next day, she came across a program called "Murder". Steven cannot explain this; he suspects that it is a game that was installed on the hard drive by a previous user.

When they want to try out the "game" together, it offers help in planning a perfect murder in a sophisticated user dialogue. It asks questions about the person to be murdered, the murder weapon (poison) and finally asks whether the victim is a patient in a hospital. When Julia says “Mid-Anglia Hospital”, she is offered: “There computer is compatible; should the murder be carried out? ”Then the computer asks for modem access and Steven connects the modem . The computer connects to the hospital, opens Julias Mann's electronic medical file and recommends a murder by increasing the dose of his heart drug ( digitalis ) tenfold . Michael would get the wrong pills at the pharmacy next time and die of heart failure; an examination could then at most reveal a fault on the part of the hospital. Steven shows Julia how to change the data. When he tries to undo this, she holds him back. Finally, Julia Steven offers a stake: she would invest part of the sum insured in Steven's company.

The next day - after Michael's usual appointment at the hospital - Julia and Steven want to cover their tracks and reset the drug dose to the old value. But this is delayed; for some reason the patient record is currently unavailable. Strangely enough, when they are given access a few minutes later, the dose has already been reset. They cannot explain this. Steven erases the treacherous program and both leave for Paris.

When they get back from there, a number of surprises await, including the newspapers of the past few days - without the expected article about the sudden death of Professor Shepherd; Then a call from a hotel in the area, Professor Shepherd had left part of his hand luggage there. Julia has this sent by taxi: Michael pajamas with the smell of Liz's perfume - and her earring that Julia had given her for her birthday.

When Liz appears shortly afterwards, Julia confronts her. Without a sense of guilt, Liz then explains:

  • In fact, she was Michael's lover - but by no means the only one, because "nothing has happened" between them for half a year.
  • Nor was she a "cuddle"; this must be Michael's new lover.
  • Even if she slept with Michael again - for the first time in six months - she suggested that he stop his affairs that same night - that was the only reason why she went to him.
  • Michael had even promised to do so, and he should actually show up here at any moment for a tearful reconciliation.

Minutes later Michael is actually "there": Julia finds him dead in her marriage bed.

The next morning - after the shock - she was relieved when the doctor diagnosed “heart failure when climbing stairs” and decided against an autopsy . She is less enthusiastic about the fact that Michael had appointed his lover Liz as executor - and bequeathed his body to science.

Alex bursts into the discussion with Liz; Psychology student and Julia's stepdaughter from Michael's first marriage. Julia is surprised that Alex and Steven know each other: He was a lecturer at Alex's university. And she had developed the murder program in Steven's programming course - an exercise with no criminal intent. The access data used by the clinic came from a fellow student whose father works at the hospital in question. She also had a relationship with Steven - who knew from her that Alex's father was a lucrative victim. Then he had stolen the program and the computer in order to become Julia's accomplice and collect money. Alex had realized this: after seeing his car in front of Juliet's house, she wanted to prevent the murder; she had reset the dose from a computer at her university, but unfortunately a few minutes late. She also explains that Steven could not delete the murder program because it was burned into ROM memory.

Steven coldly suggests having a sexual relationship with both women in the future - after they were tied to each other anyway because of the jointly committed murder and could not go to the police, but the program had to come out - and if he had to hack it up. Alex explains that it is too late for that because she copied the program over the modem to a computer at Yale University - in Connecticut - as evidence during their conversation . There is Kuschelchen , her birth mother. And Michael had planned to return to this in the past few months - in Alex's eyes the motive for the murder.

When Julia tries to escape, Alex calmly explains: “We are at the beginning of the computer age . Soon all hospitals will be networked with one another. And when the time comes, we'll find you. You must never get sick. You mustn't have an accident. You mustn't get old! "And then she types on the computer:" See you soon, mother! "The answer appears immediately:" We have a lot of time. "

dramaturgy

In the narrative technique, the piece is reminiscent of the tragedies of Friedrich Dürrenmatt : At the beginning of the final scene, the protagonist seems to have achieved all of her goals - not without luck. But then it turns out that it was only the last link in a whole chain of manipulations. She will never really benefit from the crime, but has also lost opportunities from her life before the crime (her husband's return) - and is now faced with the choice between a life in fear or a murder charge.

The piece is definitely not part of science fiction - even if the capabilities of the computer initially seemed very utopian - because these are ultimately fully explained from the state of the art at the time: modems were quite available - in countries with liberal telecommunications legislation - and that Bypassing security measures through social engineering has been no less topical since then. The apparent "intelligence" of the computer also turns out to be targeted programming to manipulate Julia. Electronic health records were new, but their widespread distribution is already correctly predicted. However, hospitals have long since developed appropriate security systems to rule out such "poisonous murders by computer".

To the title

At the time of production, most computers were still operated entirely with the keyboard. In order to save the user from typing long commands, possible actions were displayed as a “menu”, ie as an alphanumeric selection that only required the pressing of a single key, such as “A - open existing document”. Such user interfaces were considered very advanced at the time and only became obsolete with the spread of the mouse . Nevertheless, the term “menu” has been retained for selection boxes in the header, for example.

music

The film music is played on a 1-channel synthesizer and is reminiscent of the background music of computer games of that time .

Trivia

  • The computer shown ("Aladdin with 512 kilobytes of RAM") is a Commodore PC-10 , at the time of production actually a common IBM -compatible office computer. However, the device shows a very rough text display in the film (20 characters per line); probably for better "filming" in PAL television.
  • The user interface is fictional and has nothing to do with MS-DOS, which was then used . However, from the dramaturgy it would be quite conceivable that this was completely programmed by Steven to guide Julia on the murder program.
  • Visits from representatives for software updates were by no means uncommon for premium brands at the time - the common operating systems did not yet allow updates via remote data transmission. On such occasions, new products were actually shown and sometimes maintenance work was carried out on the drives, which were very expensive and sensitive at the time.

swell

  • ZDF program database

literature

  • Based on the novel “Deadly Embrace” by Eric Paice

Web links