Klaus Kinski

  • Schizoid (1980)

    Schizoid (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2021) There’s a long list of reasons why I loathe slasher movies, with gore and nihilistic disregard for human life being near the top of the list. But the inherent misogyny of the genre, especially in its first flash of early-1980s popularity, is right up there with the worst. It’s always young women being targeted, with the desecration of their bodies being integral to the murders. Schizoid, while better than many other slashers from a narrative perspective, is harder to excuse when it comes to violence directed at women: the targets are older, they’re not necessarily a cheerleader squad and the identity of the killer underscores its misogyny badly enough. From a narrative point of view, Schizoid has a few more things going for it than the usual summer camp bloodbath slasher: As a psychiatrist receives threatening letters and sees members of her therapy group being murdered one by one, she wonders: who’s the murderer? Could it be… creepy Klaus Kinski? Well, maybe—terribly miscast as what’s supposed to be an irresistible senior psychiatrist, he rings off red herring alarms the moment he walks on the screen. Could it be… creepy Christopher Lloyd as an unhinged handyman? Well, maybe—except how about that weird teenager with an axe to grudge against the protagonist? There are plenty of possibilities and Schizoid, once it moves away from the gruesome murders, does have some interest as a whodunnit. Alas, it does remain a slasher and not a particularly well-handled one. Whatever attempts at giallo style are there fall flat and there’s not much more to compensate. Kinski is a presence by himself, but Marianna Hill is merely beautiful-but-bland in the lead role. I’ll tolerate Schizoid as being slightly better than the average slasher, but that’s not a very high bar to begin with.

  • Our Man in Marrakesh aka Bang! Bang! You’re Dead! (1966)

    Our Man in Marrakesh aka Bang! Bang! You’re Dead! (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) James Bond derivatives were hot properties during the 1960s — as other studios tried to match the debonair secret agent, they went for imitations, comedic takes, parodies and outright Bondsploitation. The complement of that was the kind of thriller (often tragic) about innocent men abroad getting caught up in intrigue and discovering substantial inner strength. Our Man in Marrakesh stars Tony Randall playing slightly against type as an ordinary tourist getting caught up in a spy operation in (where else?) Marrakesh. Executed with a slightly comic tone that avoids veering into parody, the film is clearly meant for mass-market fun rather than moral lessons, and so we get the usual overlapping plots, romantic interest, action sequences and other standard components of the genre. Rather good Moroccan scenery is defeated by the not-so-good image quality of the version I saw. Surprising character actors fill up the cast, going all the way from the blonde menace of Klaus Kinski to the joviality of Terry-Thomas. I suspect that the film isn’t as remarkable today given decades of variations on similar approaches, but it does offer a touch of 1960s exoticism, Randall in fine form and enough adventure plotting to keep you busy until the end credits.

  • Creature aka Titan Find (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2021) I’m reasonably sure I’ve seen Creature as a teenager: There’s something very familiar about its ending, in which the protagonist and two attractive women return home to Earth in a capsule during a weeks-long trip—with the film practically winking at the audience, “guess what they’re going to do during that time?”  Or I may have let my hyper-libidinous teenage imagination run away with the situation. There’s no way to be sure, not with the incredibly generic narrative that the film rips off from Alien. Once more, a spaceborne crew discovers an alien creature and gets slaughtered and you don’t really need more details than that, right? There are plenty of goop and black chitin and spikes and egg-laying parasites to go around, but the film itself is incredibly familiar. There’s probably a completely terrible movie marathon to be made from Alien clones (starting with Galaxy of Terror, then on to a few others), but the shocking thing is that Creature is probably among the best or rather the least awful of them. There’s some science-fictional awareness in the script (notably in referencing the classic The Creature from Outer Space), none other than Klaus Kinski drops by to chew some scenery worse than the alien, and the special effects are not that bad. (Ironically enough, some of the SFX crew would then go on to work on Aliens.)  It’s not much, but considering the abysmal quality of the subgenre, Creature is already far ahead of the pack. If you’re really digging for compliments, let’s just say that there’s a pleasant fuzziness to the early 1980s low-budget look and let’s leave it at that. Amusingly, it seems to be in the public domain, so there’s really no way to stop you from watching it.

  • Crawlspace (1986)

    Crawlspace (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.

  • Fitzcarraldo (1982)

    Fitzcarraldo (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) There are a few films about which the story of the film’s production rivals and perhaps exceeds the narrative of the film itself. Most of the time, we’ll never suspect those stories (and it’s not as if the publicists will ever tell the whole thing). For Fitzcarraldo, though, the incredible is right there on the screen in the film’s showpiece sequence: A 300-ton steamboat being dragged up a mountain to the other side, from one river to another. In a pre-CGI era, you can feel the weight and effort of every shot in that sequence, especially as the hundreds of extras labour to clean-cut the side of the mountain, prepare the boat with timber supports and drag it all the way up. It’s a ten-minute sequence that almost raises as many questions as it answers, most notably what kind of director would ever think this was a viable way to shoot a movie. The answer could only be Werner Herzog, in telling the story (inspired by real events, although the real story is not nearly as insane as its recreation) of an opera-obsessed entrepreneur who hits upon a rubber-extraction scheme that hinges on a boat making an extreme portage between two rivers separated by a mountain. Deep up the Amazon, the entrepreneur (Klaus Kinski, suitably weird) finds the spot he’s been looking for and gets the natives working for him. As the frontier between fact and fiction blur, as Kinski and Herzog blend together, the real production set out to do what the characters do, stripping away trees from the mountainside, preparing the steamboat, pulling it up. Calling Fitzcarraldo a support mechanism for that extraordinary sequence is not much of a stretch — even if it feels a bit bloated as such. Utterly unforgettable if only for those ten minutes, Fitzcarraldo still ranks as a reference for cinephiles for a good reason — one of the most difficult move shoots in history. Just let me close with a delicious quote from Wikipedia’s article on the film: “Herzog says that one of the native chiefs offered, in all seriousness, to kill Kinski for him, but that he declined because he needed the actor to complete filming.”

  • Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes [Aguirre, the Wrath of God] (1972)

    Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes [Aguirre, the Wrath of God] (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Kanopy streaming, October 2018) You never quite know what you’re going to get when Werner Herzog is behind the camera, and Aguirre, the Wrath of God is as good an illustration of that as any. Something that, at first glance, looks like a historical jungle adventure eventually becomes an ill-fated tragedy, with death striking at any moment and the lead character diving deeper and deeper in madness. The film may have pacing issues, but the final sequence is unforgettable. Klaus Kinski authentically looks insane and dangerous in the lead role, while Herzog lets the landscape do about half the cinematographer’s job. It’s not a jolly film, and watching it often feels like being on an express train to hell with no stops. But it does have a few things running for it, especially once past the tedious exposition and on to the final act. I’m not sure I’m going to put Aguirre anywhere near my list of favourite movies, but it is an experience.