Crawlspace (1986)

(In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) If you’re looking for a reason to watch Crawlspace, I’ll tell it to you straight: Klaus Kinski as a landlord. Need more? Klaus Kinski as a Nazi-descended landlord who observes, tortures and kills female renters. Oh, you did not need that much? Well, too bad, because even the film’s production history is about Klaus Kinski being a terror on set, earning the enmity of the cast, crew, producers (who reportedly considered having the actor killed for the insurance money and de-aggravation factor) and director David Schmoeller, who later directed the short essay Please Kill Mr. Kinski. Considering all of this, it makes sense to report that Kinski is just about the most interesting thing is this humdrum slasher/torture horror movie. While the cinematography occasionally scores a striking image, the rest of Crawlspace isn’t much more than a young-man-versus-psychopath thing that we’ve seen countless times, made even more exploitative by Nazi imagery. But hey: Klaus Kinski.