Crawlspace

Dir. David Schmoeller 80 Minutes

USA/Italy

1986

Starring: Klaus Kinski, Talia Balsam, Barbara Whinnery, Carole Francis, Tan McClure, Sally Brown, Jack Heller

**/***** According to several reports, Klaus Kinski was downright impossible to work with on the set of Crawlspace. He refused direction, charged clothing to the production and then kept the articles for himself, and tried to start a few fist fights (though a personal favorite of this lore is that he had a crush on someone working on the film, and so director David Schmoeller would try to ensure that he was on set where Kinski would be on his best behavior). When attempting to get Kinski off the project, it was refused because his name was too much of a draw for audiences. Whether or not these stories are truthful or not, the latter point is certainly clear: without Klaus Kinski, there is really not much to see here. 

Kinski plays Karl Gunther, the son of a Nazi surgeon, living in an apartment complex with a labyrinth of vents, secret passageways, and peepholes hosting a large rat population and plenty of opportunities for voyeurism. He lures in young women through a room for rent and eventually tortures them, playing small and violent games with himself on whether or not he should continue (such as a round of Russian roulette between victims). The film is primarily a quiet slog mistaking slowness for suspense, but for the bulk of the first hour there is not too much to uncover about Gunther that is not addressed. The film works best when it teeters in the absurd, and the final act tiptoes into a realm reminiscent of Schmoeller's far superior Chuck Conners vehicle Tourist Trap with Gunter donning a Nazi uniform and saluting a video of Hitler himself. Kinski is suitably daffy in the part, and while much of the entertainment comes from him doing his thing he even seems quite checked out. The final girl stalking sequence (here played by Talia Balsam) is nicely relentless and even occasionally claustrophobic (with lots and lots of rats to add to the mix), but by this point even the whisperings of some interesting style is not enough to rescue this tepid thriller from any kind of forgotten limbo.

October 19th, 2019