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Turtles in Movies   Mark of the Tortoise [Wartezimmer zum Jenseits] (1964)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   The original title of this movie was “Wartezimmer zum Jenseits” or “Waiting Room for the Afterlife.” It's a West German crime thriller or krimi about a blackmail gang led by a disabled man who calls himself "The Tortoise" (his girlfriend refers to him as "The Green Tortoise"). Like a psychotic Bond villain, he wears sunglasses indoors, rides around in a wheel chair with machine guns built into the arms, and lives in a seaside Italian castle full of video and audio surveillance at his fingertips, hidden passages behind book cases, and a death room with a ceiling that lowers onto his victims crushing them like bugs. As an extra bonus, the movie gives us Klaus Kinski as knife-throwing assassin. When he blackmails a rich Englishman, he has a cardboard box left on his doorstep that contains a tortoise with a skull and crossbones painted on its carapace. I suppose the tortoise was so non-threatening that he had to paint a skull on it to make it seem dangerous. Later wee see the same tortoise, and other tortoises, walking around on the floors of his mansion. A slow-moving reptile that retreats into its shell at the least sign of danger is not a very ominous villain alias. It's only a movie device, not unlike Bond's Blofeld's cat on his lap, except we never see The Green Tortoise with any of his namesake pets. The tortoises we see are similar in appearance to Hermann's Tortoise, which inhabits the Trieste area where some of the movie was filmed, but they could also be other similar tortoises in the region such as the Spur-thighed Tortoise. You can watch the entire movie and read a good synopsis of it at The Silver Scream website.