Guardian of the Castle

Very cheap, pale and unconvincing. The plot is obviously inspired by the assassination of the ex-communist state oil company INA top manager Djurekovic, but the details has been changed unnecessary and without a purpose. SDB (secret Yugoslav intelligence service) did not recruit some labile drug addicts and pickpockets for hunting and murdering immigrants but top criminals instead of that. They did not use the addle-brained old men for that either. It is ridiculous that the character of the professional killer, Dragicevic, goes to Austria to kill a Croatian immigrant and brings his file with him, and browses it in the car (it would never happen in the real life). Main characters are shallow and one-dimensional, they look as if they don't have a private life, but plan assassinations all the time. Furthermore, they are stiff and they act unnaturally and artificially. Numerous details make the whole story unconvincing, almost humorous; Hundreds staff members were employed in the SDB headquarter but Biscan always comes to the empty building. Same thing for the Kockica building (the Croatian communist party headquarters), empty building with a few cleaning women. Whenever the characters meet in the bars or restaurants, they are the only guests and the objects are completely empty, even without the barmen. In real life it would be impossible that the character of captain Uzelac of the military intelligence agency speaks anything but strong Serbian language and in the show he speaks with Croatian Zagreb accent. Besides that, in real life military secret service has never interfered with the civil one. Biscan has an aquarium in his apartment and put the fish food in it but there is no fish in the aquarium. A woman is awakening after a party by the numerous empty bottles of alcoholic drinks and first thing that she does in the morning she grabs a bottle of vine and drinks it.

We tune into "Walter Presents" World Drama from time to time - our all-time favourite being "Professor T". However, Guardian of the Castle was a wonderful, accidental discovery.

If you're looking for factually-correct Cold-War/espionage drama, don't watch this. It's not about the real history, so much as an allegory. For example, anonymous headscarfed women are constantly employed as a metaphor, hoovering the same areas again and again, demonstrating that there's always someone employed by the State to clean up the mess (and at the same time, that in the Communist era, full employment in any form of drudge job was the order of the day). It's really quite funny, but also tinged with the sadness that these government-sponsored meaningless tasks would be repeated day in, day out.

Without giving too much away, two of the main themes are faithfulness and betrayal. Two of the older characters have continually supported the glorious revolution and always acted professionally to serve it. But they are too honest to be bought and too much part of the established order to be ousted easily. The answer? Do something to discredit them. So along come two other characters, for whom filthy lucre and personal gain are much more attractive propositions than toeing the Communist Party line. Firstly, they engineer a mistake by the (very experienced and ice-cold) state professional contract killer and then they set up the government official who sent him on the job as a patsy ... emphasising how "OLD" they both are (hinting isn't it time for a change, maybe?)

The suspense builds as the government official is compelled firstly to use his influence to deploy state resources to save an official's ne'er-do-well son and his mates who have been causing trouble over the border in Austria and then to use them as professional killers, even though they haven't got a clue what they're doing (the whole premise for selecting them being that they'll stuff it up). But they don't ... well, not entirely! So what happens now? Well, I'm not going to tell you - you really have to see it for yourself. Beautifully styled for the era, including the weird and wonderful behind-the-Iron-Curtain vehicles (God knows how some of them are still going, given the build spec) and with excellent, low-key acting by the cast. I highly recommend it from opening credit to the cleverly "redacted" end titles!

One of the best TV drama series in a long time. Atmosphere, casting and exterior/interior scenes are really authentic. I liked the psychological characterization of the main character so much. It also represents brutallity and inhumanity of Yugoslav secret UDBA. Like those slow intensification of the plot also.