Crawlspace (1986)

Sadly Over-hyped

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Klaus Kinski plays Gunther, an apparently retired doctor who is the landlord of an apartment block. His appearance is effete, certainly he gives off the impression of being very withdrawn. It becomes apparent that his father was a Nazi genocide employed by the SS and the family minus dad flew to Argentina after the war. Little Gunther became Doctor Gunther and started to "euthanise" dozens of patients suffering from minor ailments. I suppose in 1986 this would have seemed fanciful, however in the UK, and after the revealed murders of Dr Harold Shipman, it is somewhat less so now.Gunther has however got bored with these less graphic murders and has now taken to polishing off his all female tenants who he spies on through vents connected by a network of crawlspaces.One of the most disturbing things about this movie is that Gunther keeps a young lady in a cage in his room. He's cut her tongue out and cut most of her hair off, who knows what else, she looks very sallow. Her position is that she is there as someone for Gunther to talk to. She appears not to be frightened that Gunther will torture her any more. Rather she is simply suffering from seeing the terrible things he does to others, she passes him a note at one point begging him to kill her.Her character is seemingly a perverse reference to Maria Falconetti's performance as Joan of Arc in the silent movie The Passion Of Joan Of Arc. Like in the silent movie she is voiceless and expressing deep sorrow and anguish solely via facial movements. One thing that I love to see in movies is excellent interior design. Rooms can have extremely potent psychological effect if done right. The interior design of an apartment can reveal a lot about the personality of the character living there if it's done properly, and can be an excellent short cut in setting up character development. The apartments in this movie are done very well. Gunther seems to enjoy draping everything, cutting out the straight edges, even a cage of rats is draped in tasselled velvet. He seems fastidious and prissy, a coolly observant psychopath.Gunther almost seems to see himself as a scientist, he has no real vendetta against women, and he writes a journal exploring his addiction. It's a calm movie at points, even though he's turned his apartment into a trap complete with models of torture devices and a mutilated woman in a cage.My favourite spectacle in the movie though is a chocolate party that a bunch of the female tenants have. Chocolate and tequila milkshakes chocolate, chocolate cakes, chocolate biscuits, basically they turn the apartment into a chocolate bordello. How great for all us male voyeurs to see such a bizarrely grotesque feminine ritual!The big thing the movie has though is Klaus Kinski's acting, it's rare that a director will focus on an actor's face closeup for any substantial amount of time and let an actor show their talent. We see Klaus Kinski play Russian Roulette, seated on a chair on a chequerboard floor, the facial nuance is brilliant.

Maybe I'm having a relapse or something but I happened to catch this recently and vice versa. By God, this piece of mind-numbing garbage swept me away, partly because I was curious to see how low it could go. That wouldn't have been motive enough, agreed, but the photography was lurid and quite nicely done, all at the same time. And Klaus Kinski! First of all -- that face, unequaled in its unequability. Second, what is "Aguirre: The Wrath of God" and "Fitzcarraldo" doing in this junk? Then there is Talia Balsam, Martin's daughter, whose appearance rises just far enough above mediocrity to pass "prettiness" without achieving "glamorous." She always looks somewhat startled and frightened, regardless of what's going on around her. I like that in a woman. Her range as an actress, judging from the three films I've seen her in, is moderate but appealing. Then there is the set dresser. Now, the temptation in a bloody and insane shocker like this must be to construct a set, supposed to be a middle-class apartment building, to look like the house in "Psycho." Instead, what we see is an ordinary middle-class apartment building. Relatively speaking, anyway, since Kinski as the landlord is anything but ordinary.The musical score is by Pino Donaggio, done by the numbers, and if you've heard one Brian DePalma imitation of Hitchcock, you've heard Donaggio's score before. The plot almost defies description because it is so far beneath it. Kinski is a maniacal doctor, an ex-Nazi, who discovered by accident that he happened to love killing patients while in South American exile. For his amusement, he breeds rats, plays with a big pistol against his skull, peeks in on his few attractive tenants (no sex, so don't worry, just mutilations and blood all over). When he really wants to relax he runs newsreels of Hitler's speeches and sports a Wehrmacht officer's cap. People are killed by being nailed to furniture, impaled by a steel spike while sitting innocently in a chair (ouch), and being blasted by that hand-held cannon.It's a thought-provoking movie though. The thought it provokes is this. How can two ugly men like Klaus Kinski and Martin Balsam produce two such toothsome daughters?

**SPOILERS** With his old man, a Nazi concentration camp doctor, being executed after the war for crimes against humanity junior or Doctor Karl Gunther(Klaus Kinski), now in his fifties, had become fascinated with the German Third Reich. Watching in his attic hours of newsreels of Hitler's Germany at the zenith of it's power when it was both both feared and envied all over the world. Gunther is also fascinated with young women whom he rents out apartments in his rooming house and loves to watch them in all states of dress and undress. From the safety of the crawlspace that leads from his dumpy attic apartment throughout all the apartments in his building.You can see right away that actor Klaus Kinski is just itching to break out of his restrained role as the meek and soft spoken Dr. Gunther. As he's given a chance later in the movie by director David Schmoeller, who does an Alfred Hitchcock cameo early in the film. When Kinski finally strut his stuff he leaves absolutely nothing to chance. Going so out of his skull that for a moment you think that he's not really acting at all but just being his own wild crazy and creepy self.Collecting body parts of his many victims Gunther also keeps this woman mute Martha White(Sally Brown), who's tongue he cut out, in a cage in his attic. Just to have someone to talk to and at the same time not give him any arguments over what he's talking about. Gunther also has a number of young women living in his building whom he constantly spies on and whenever they have their boyfriends come up to see and have sex with them. Gunther end up not only murdering the gentlemen but also cutting out some of their body parts, two eyes and a ring finger, and putting them in jars of alcohol as souvenirs.The movie takes a turn for the worst, for crazy Karl, when his past finally catches with him in the person of young Josef Steiner, Kenneth Robert Shippy, who's been tracking him down for over three years. It turns out that during his five year tenure as the top surgeon at the National Hospital in Buenos Aires Argentina 67 patients who were under his care died mysteriously, one of them being Josef Steiner's brother.Gunther has this obsession with death that he picked up from reading his late fathers lurid writings about concentration camp life. That soon has him going completely wacko with Gunther constantly trying to blow his brains out,by playing Russian Roulette. As well as trying to murder, with much success, his female tenants. Later by letting rats loose all over the apartment building Gunthers has his tenants, all four of them, go into hysterics. At the same time he murderously finishes most of them off for being, what I think, late with the rent.Leaving no stone, or body, unturned Gunther making sure that nobody can finger him as the killer has him also knock off, with a poison arrow, Steiner when he got too close to the truth about his murdered brother. That as well as the other 66 victims that Gunther left behind, at the National Hospital, back in Argentina. With only one of his tenants still alive the plucky Lori Bancroft, Talia Balsam, Gunther chases her all throughout the crawlspace with an army of hungry rats. Only in the end to get himself blasted by Lori with the last remaining bullet of his .44 magnum that he played Russian Roulette with himself.This is an all star Klaus Kinski movie with him being the only reason to really watch it. Going from hot to cold as well as being dressed in normal mens clothes or in drag, with lipstick smeared all over his face. Kinski is the glue that keeps the movie together and makes it both weird and entertaining at the same time. The violence in the film "Crawlspace" was more or less standard in movies like itself but its star, the late and off-the-wall Klaus Kinski, gave what amounted to a unique one of a kind performance. That of an out of control nut-job who goes off the deep deep end in an utterly mind boggling performance that only the great Kinski could, and did, successfully pull off.

This movie is good/bad and there are two reasons why this movie is good and the two reasons are:1.The main character in this movie is called Docter Karl Gunther (Klaus Kinski) and i think that he is so dam freaky because every thing he does in this movie is so strange.2.All of the ways people die in this movie are great and the best way someone dies is how a man is sitting in a seat and he accidentally presses a button and a big metal spike comes out and kills him.Over all if u like good suspense horror movies u should watch this movie and my rating for this movie is six out of 10.