Guglhupfgeschwader (2022)

The main storyline revolves around “Lotto Otto,” Nicole’s somewhat dim-witted 24-year-old son. Nicole runs the lottery kiosk in Niederkaltenkirchen. Otto is fired upon in front of Franz, and it turns out that half of one of his fingers had already been cut off. Later, a Molotov cocktail explodes in Nicole’s shop, and she does not survive. Franz initially puts Otto up at Rudi’s place, where Otto steals Rudi’s car and sells it off just across the Czech border. It turns out that Otto is a gambling addict. A gang is after him because of his huge debts. Its leader, “Mike,” is a police officer who trained with Franz. Mike is now head of the local police station and involved in criminal dealings. After a series of complications, Franz takes Otto in. When Otto then tries to blackmail Mike, a gang of corrupt police officers eventually opens fire on the Eberhofer house in broad daylight. Thanks to Leopold, who had actually been planning to shoot himself, they manage to take out the attackers. Subplots that intersect with the main storyline: Franz Eberhofer is supposed to celebrate his ten-year anniversary on the force. The Gugelhupf cakes his grandmother baked for the occasion are shot to pieces during the attack on the house. In the end, Franz is the only one who misses the celebration because he makes up with Rudi on the island in the middle of the roundabout. As a replacement for Ludwig, the dog who died in the previous film, Rudi gives Franz the shelter dog “Hinkelotta” at the beginning—the three-legged dog with which the witness found the first murder victim in the previous film. Franz doesn’t want the dog, even though his grandmother and Pauli take to it immediately, so Rudi ends his friendship with Franz for good. Rudi has a new girlfriend anyway, a woman named Theresa who lives an emphatically spiritual life and is, naturally, someone Franz simply cannot get along with. However, over the course of the story she falls in love with Lotto Otto and leaves Rudi. In the final scene, Franz finally accepts “Hinkelotta” as his dog. In the previous film, Franz’s brother Leopold badly damaged the house they were building together in a fit of rage. Since the insurance will not pay out because the damage was intentional, their grandmother orders the whole family to play the lottery. A ticket Leopold filled in using his children’s birth dates really does have all six winning numbers, but Franz quietly gave it to Ignaz Flötzinger as an improvised birthday present, which initially enraged Flötzinger. Flötzinger, whose family left him in the previous film, begins living the high life, until it turns out that the connection between the lottery kiosk and the central office had been down and the ticket was never transmitted to lottery headquarters. As a result, the million-euro prize cannot be claimed. After a desperate search, Leopold accidentally finds out how his ticket went missing, and family peace is seriously disrupted. When it comes to light that Franz had a brief affair with Nicole 24 years earlier, while he was already together with Susi, everyone takes him to be Otto’s hitherto unknown father, and Susi avoids him. During the siege scene, in which everyone fears for their lives, Papa Eberhofer confesses that he is Otto’s father. A secret DNA test ultimately reveals, however, that Otto is not even related to Franz, and therefore can be neither his son nor his half-brother.