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Cult film review by The Film Scientist
Cast typically as a suicidal physician with a dark past and a bloody future, Kinski sinks his teeth deep into the role of Dr. Gunther, mixed-up vigilante advocate of torture and euthanasia. Never convicted of any crime, but stripped of his license, he's settled into a new life as the manager of a modern upscale apartment. He only rents to pretty girls, who he spies on from the eponymous crawl space -- a labyrinth of Klaus-sized ducts and passageways built into the walls of the apartment. He likes to watch, loves to kill. Most residents are lucky to finish out their leases alive. The movie opens with a kind of eviction. A female tenant looking for the manager walks into what must be the Doctor's lab or study ... the door locks softly behind her. She looks around, unaware of the danger. Light suddenly fills the room, and Gunther appears, another tenant by his side -- in a cage. "She can't talk," the doctor notes matter-of-factly, "I cut out her tongue." He points to the jar containing it. The Doctor presses what looks like a remote control. Then a steel spear swings down from the ceiling, skewering her through the back. Later we cut to the mad doctor sitting alone in an empty kitchen, a single bullet and a pistol before him. The floor is checkered black-and-white, its pattern echoing the doctor's deadly chess game with himself. Bullet in the chamber. A quick spin. The hammer cocked, ready. He holds it to his head and squeezes the trigger. Click. "So be it," says the doctor wearily. The "FOR RENT" sign goes back in the window.
As Lori gets to know the building a little better, so do we, thanks to the doctor's hidden surveillance -- and it turns out the tenants are mostly sleazebags bent on carnal gratification. Lots of eye candy here for both the doctor and the discerning viewer, myself included. One tenant likes to sing, loves to fuck. Her song is awful, reminiscent of a Barbara Streisand tune; never a good sign. If she's not singing chances are she's putting on a dirty little striptease for her lame-ass boyfriend. When her stud goes soft during one coupling, Klaus, with a cold, passionless scorn, delivers a judgment upon him that seems almost more for the audience's gratification than his own. Like most of the doctor's victims, the boyfriend is so annoying you can only cheer as he ends up losing more than just an erection. Dr. Gunther spends the rest of his time in his study, writing in his journal and talking to himself, or the lady in the cage. She might've been any number of things before the doctor got his hands on her, but all that's left of her now is the wish to die -- and, naturally, her hatred of Gunther. In one climactic moment she passes the doctor a tiny crumpled-up note that reads, "Please kill me." With a faint, sickly smile and a fondly scolding tone he refuses, asking her, "Who would I talk to?" In his journal Dr. Gunther labors at a detailed account of his grisly history. Is he wrestling with his guilt or celebrating it? Hard to say. Through flashback and voice-over we revisit his first murder of a patient. He describes his excitement, and how this "thrill" slowly overtook his life. Later he reveals more of his sinister background -- the son of an SS officer, his father ran a concentration camp, and as a boy he watched dad's "death experiments" with a love and admiration directly related to the pleasure he takes in his own.
In the jaw-dropping finale, Gunther drops any pretense of sanity or control, and Kinski turns his full-throttle performance up to 11. After a last, blood-soaked killing spree, he dons his father's SS uniform, applying liquid eyeliner and smearing on lipstick, and goose-steps around his study as Nazi propaganda films flicker across the walls. He raises his arm in salute. "Heil Gunther!" he shouts in a fierce, hoarse voice. "Heil Gunther!"
This is hardly the most famous Kinski movie, but it's my favorite. Critics attacked it as a poor man's Peeping Tom, and there are similarities, but Kinski takes the basic story over the edge of sanity. While there's always a classiness to his persona that's almost hypnotic -- no matter what the role -- I can't think of another part that allowed him be so flat-out twisted and coolly reserved at the same time. His Gunther has a strange, quiet dignity no other actor (with the possible exception of Jeremy Irons) could maintain in the midst of such a fever-pitch performance. And it's great to hear Kinski's real voice, not some annoying dub (most Kinski films, in fact, are overdubbed -- poorly). Crawlspace is in my opinion also David Schmoeller's (Puppet Master, Tourist Trap) best work. Producer Charles Band went on to make a number of cult films -- notably Meridian with Sherilyn Fenn -- but no one else in the cast or crew seems to have amounted to much; it really was, after all, a one-man show. Made in 1986, in the twilight of Kinski's career, and boasting a sleaziness quotient that's off the scale, Crawlspace is an always entertaining evening of sin. -- The Film
Scientist The above graphics are snapshots from the film Crawlspace. |
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first experience with Klaus Kinski was in 1980 when I saw Android
in its first run. His remarkable turn here left a deep impression on
me, but it'd be years before I fully realized his genius. It was Werner
Herzog's Nosferatu that got me hooked -- Klaus made perhaps
the perfect vampire. Unlike Christopher Lee's stylish, seductive Count,
Kinski's pale skin, strange lips and weird Polish/German accent made
for a creepier, grotesque performance more faithful both to Stoker's
Dracula and the eastern European folktales it was based on. For
Nosferatu In Venice, Klaus reprised the role, this time with
long white hair. In Venice Klaus stalks sexy women and hangs
out with gypsies; an exciting sequel to be sure. But nothing could prepare
me for the depravity of Crawlspace. 
pretty young coed (Talia Balsam, playing the heroine, Lori Bancroft),
appears at his door not long after, eager to take the place. She seems
a smart cookie as well as a tasty one but somehow doesn't notice when
Gunther, possibly to rein in his excitement, purposely burns his hand
on the stovetop. Composing himself, he offers her the apartment. Gunther
leers at her with a knowing grin as she signs the lease. 
ventually
what passes for the plot machinery shows up in the form of Josef Steiner,
a bitter reminder of the past whose brother was "euthanized" by Gunther
a decade earlier. He's determined to expose his secrets, but the doctor
has other plans. While allowing Steiner to piece together his story
and make his way to the doctor's lair, he constructs a chair with a
special feature custom-fit to his boringly self-righteous pursuer. Steiner
eventually finds all the answers he's looking for, but only to get jackknifed
by Gunther's "Chair of Death" in a scene that proves there's nothing
worse than getting a blade in the ass. 