Category: Filmography

A genius, two friends and an idiot (1975)

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Dir: Damiano Damiani
Star: Terence Hill, Miou-Miou, Robert Charlebois, Patrick McGoohan
a.k.a. A genius, two partners and a dupe

geniusThis will certainly be one of the shorter reviews, partly because Kinski’s role in it is almost entirely trivial – his absence from the main cast list above, is entirely deliberate – and partly because there is not much else of merit or note. That might come as a surprise, particularly when you learn that some of the content was directed, uncredited, by Sergio Leone, making it his last Western. While his presence is particularly apparent in the opening scene, which has much the same spooky quality as often found in his more renowned works, that’s definitely the exception, rather than the rule. Even the score, by genre master Ennio Morricone, is far from one of his best, being never more than forgettable, and sometimes jars badly with the action which is being depicted, rather than enhancing it. I guess some credit is due for going to the effort of actually filming some scenes in the US, with Utah’s Monument Valley looking as majestic as in the far-superior works of John Ford.

As for the plot, it’s an over-long, complicated and largely tedious effort, about a con-artist and quick-draw gun Joe Thanks (Hill), who concocts a plan to defraud cavalry Major Cabot (McGoohan, definitely outside his usual comfort zone) of $300,000. This requires the help of half-breed pal Steamengine Bill (Charlebois) and his partner, Lucy (Miou-Miou), who loves both Bill and Joe. Joe is pretty much the only person who has a clue what’s going on, and every time his plan seems about to derail, he has a way to keep things moving. I don’t have a great deal of time for films where the audience is kept entirely in the dark like this, and once the pattern becomes clear, there’s virtually nowhere of interest left for the movie to go.

I do get the sense this was supposed to be a parody of the genre and its clichés, closer to Terence Hill’s Nobody series, rather than a legitimate Western, so I guess it should be cut some slack for its absurdist and slapdash approach, throwing elements in with far more enthusiasm than skill. Kinski’s contribution – one of his very rare appearances in a comedy – is typical. He plays Doc Foster, a gunfighter who becomes the butt of one of Thanks’ schemes early on in proceedings, the hero provoking Foster into a gunfight after wrecking his poker game. That goes about as well for the Doc as you’d expect, him being embarrassed in front of the watching town-folk. He ends up following Joe into another cavalry officer’s room, but is then dropped back out the window, landing astride his horse. Kinski yells out something along the lines of “Ow! My balls,” before he and his horse ride into the sunset, never to be seen again in the movie.

If you follow suit, you’ll be about ninety minutes or so better off. I can’t, in all honesty, recommend this to anyone except completists, be they of the Leone, Morricone or, in my case, Kinski varieties. Below is a clip from the German dub – it appears to have Kinski’s own voice – which covers most of his screen-time.

Churchill’s Leopards (1970)

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Dir: Maurizio Pradeaux
Star: Richard Harrison, Pilar Velázquez, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Klaus Kinski

Churchills_LeopardsCan’t complain about the poster, though the truth is that Kinski’s role, while pivotal, is more supporting than as front and center as it would have you believe. The true star is Harrison, who plays twin brothers, both lieutenants in the armed forces – only one is a Nazi, Lt. Hans Müller, the other a Brit, Lt. Richard Benson. The former is in charge of the defenses for a French dam, and with D-Day imminent, Winston Churchill comes up with a plan to blow up the dam, which would cause havoc to the German supply lines. The plan involves taking out Muller, and plugging in Benson, who will then be ideally placed to assist a group of commandos, led by Major Powell (Rossi-Stuart) parachuted into enemy territory with the tools necessary to destroy the facility, with the additional help of the local resistance, one of whose members (Velázquez) falls for Benson. Kinski plays the local SS commander, Captain Holtz, who grows increasingly suspicious that pseudo-Müller’s behavior is inconsistent with the real thing, and brings an old flame back from Paris to confirm these doubts.

The antecedents in this case are classic war flicks such as The Guns of Navarone (1961), The Heroes of Telemark (1965), and Where Eagles Dare (1968), depicting similar missions in which a small group of Allied soldiers are dropped behind Nazi lines, with the aim of taking out a key piece of local infrastructure. Obviously, this has nowhere near the same degree of star power, nor can it manage the same degree of spectacle. The latter is particularly obvious when – and I trust this isn’t much of a spoiler – the dam is blown up at the end, which is depicted in a mix of stock footage and painfully bad model work, that bears only the faintest resemblance to the landscape shown as its actual location. There’s more stock footage book-ending the film for its credits, though at least this does provide some appropriate scene-setting for what follows.

The rest of the story is largely a collection of well-worn war clichés, as the heroic Tommies (ironically, there’s not an actual Brit to be seen – you can hear a few, apparently doing the dubbing) escape discovery by the nasty Nazis, through a combination of luck, pluck and the timely intervention of pseudo-Müller. This all builds to the actual attack on the dam, after a delay caused by the discovery that they now need a quarter-mile of waterproof cable to reach the spot underwater where they’ll place their explosives. It’s never explained why they don’t blow things up from the dry side of the edifice, but presumably there were sound, structural engineering reasons for this, that the movie just chose not to share with the audience. Their preparations are interrupted when Holtz gets the proof he needs, and realizes what’s about to happen, leading to a massive gun-battle, with so much indiscriminate automatic gunfire, it felt like something I’d have re-enacted enthusiastically in my school playground, as a nine-year-old.

Churchills_Leopards2Kinski’s character is, to some extent, a reprise of his role the previous year in Five For Hell. However, it’s actually among the more interesting aspects of the film, because he does succeed in being more than the typical, jackbooted stereotype. The first time we meet him, he seems positively cheerful, and is clearly a smart slice of Schwartzwalder kirschtorte, to the extent that his leading the charge into battle, literally firing the opening shots against the Allied forces, seems out of character and foolhardy. However, make no mistake: he’s an SS officer. There’s no room to question that, after two German soldiers are killed, having come too close to discovering the undercover group. He takes 20 locals – including the love interest – hostage, and lets it be known that he’ll execute them if those responsible for the deaths don’t come forward and admit it. This leads to the film’s tensest and best scene, where the hostages are lined up on the edge of a ravine, gazing down the barrel of a machine-gun. What will the anti-Nazis do? And even if they do come forward, will Holtz honor his side of the demand?

If only the rest of the film could have tried to generate the same level of enthusiasm. The problem here is that, while the spaghetti Westerns often succeeded in bringing something new to the genre, this spaghetti War film seems content to follow slavishly in the well-trodden path of other, better movies. As a result, it’s neither fresh, nor interesting, and outside of Kinski, you’d be much better off watching the Hollywood examples mentioned above, which are superior in just about every way.

Android (1982)

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Dir: Aaron Lipstadt
Star: Don Keith Opper, Brie Howard, Klaus Kinski, Norbert Weisser

“I thought it was a clever little movie. It is the first movie I’ve done that children might like. The greatest thing in the world is to do something for children.”
– Klaus Kinski

Hmm. Not sure I’d entirely agree with Kinski on its suitability for a younger viewing audience, but I can kinda see where that’s coming from. This plays almost like a sci-fi reworking of Pinocchio, centered on an artificial boy, who wants nothing more than to be truly human, with all that entails, both good and bad. However, with Kinski in the role of Gepetto, you won’t be surprised to hear that the results are rather darker. There’s no Jiminy Cricket here to provide a sense of conscience; instead, it’s all morality through circuitry. I did read one review that suggested it was a sci-fi version of Rebel Without a Cause, calling it “a game fantasy about children rebelling against their parents,” though Opper is obviously much more well-mannered version of James Dean. Indeed, having helped bring two children through their teenage years to adulthood, the slight backtalk we see here hardly registers as rebellion (our general rule of thumb was, if the police weren’t involved, it didn’t count!).

Coming out a few months after Blade Runner, this covers a similar theme – what does it mean, to be “human”? – albeit in a much smaller, low-key way. Like Runner, it’s set a little way into the future, in a corporation-controlled world. The location is a space-station, formerly a busy hub, but now reduced to a skeleton crew of Dr. Daniel (Kinski) and his android assistant, Max (Opper – though credited in the movie as “introducing Max 404”). Android research has been banned on Earth after some unfortunate incidents, hence their re-location beyond the reach of planetary laws. What disturbs this idyll is the arrival of a trio of escaped criminals, Maggie (Howard), Keller (Weisser) and her lover, Mendes (Crofton Hardester). When Max also realizes that his creator is working on a new, improved (and female!) android called Cassandra, that will lead to Max being terminated, he opts to throw his lot in with the criminals and assist their plan to escape back to Earth. But the good doctor has his own plans for Maggie, involving the transfer of her sexual experience in to Cassandra.

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Shot in 20 days – 19 on set, plus one on location in an arboretum –  and edited in three weeks, this was originally a production for Roger Corman’s New World studio, test screenings led Corman to shelve it, but producers Barry Opper (Don’s brother) and Rupert Harvey bought the rights back, and took it on the film festival circuit, where it was fairly well-received. It certainly isn’t a typical Corman production, even though it does recycle some production elements such as sets and props from his earlier space operatic works like Battle Beyond the Stars – as an aside, James Cameron worked on this, as a design consultant in the art department! However, it’s much more restrained and thoughtful rather than exploitative: you can’t imagine many other Corman films which would have a montage of clips from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, played out to a soundtrack of James Brown’s It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World.

It’s also fairly cynical in its view of humanity: while it’s difficult to provide specifics without spoiling the film’s big surprise, let’s just say that neither mankind, nor their creations, exactly come over as paragons of virtue. I found Maggie the most sympathetic character; she’s a white-collar criminal, as opposed to her more psychopathic colleagues. Kinski’s doctor is more creepy than anything else, and he’s clearly operating in mad scientist mode, virtually bereft of all human interaction skills. Initially, this seems a result of his being isolated, with no-one to communicate with, except an android he himself programmed; subsequent events, however, put a different spin on things, though you could certainly argue they raise as many questions as they answer. Apparently, Kinski refused to block out scenes or even rehearse with the other actors – and rookie director Lipstadt was probably in no position to argue, though it has to be said, it’s a decision which likely enhances the feeling of disassociation between the doctor and everyone else.

The production values are pretty clunky. We’re now closer to the setting of 2036 than we are to the film’s release, and there are aspects of the “future” it portrays which will simple seem woeful [half a century of progress has not, apparently, moved us past green-screen monitors]. The small budget – variously reported as from half a million to a million dollars – is somewhat disguised by the fact that there is a very small cast and only a handful of sets, but the spaceship effects are so bad they probably would have been better off not bothering. Random factoid I want to drop in here, for want of a better location: one of the landing party which arrives on the station near the end is Rachel Talalay, who’d go on to direct Tank Girl, in her only acting role.

Still, it’s an interesting concept, albeit one that’s largely derivative of its ideas from previous, better movies. It was also the film debuts of both Opper and  Howard – can you imagine your first movie role being to star opposite Kinski? She had been a drummer in an all-girl rock band, while he had previously worked as a carpenter for Corman, and between them, they succeed in holding the film together, with the bulk of the screen time. In particular, he carries out the shift from a wide-eyed innocent, curious about sex, to ruthless killing machine, obeying the instructions of his revised programming, with some deftness, and the themes the movie covers have also stood the test of time, rather better than the effects. If it’s no Blade Runner or Metropolis, certainly nor is it the Plan 9 I feared this might be.

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Death Smiles on a Murderer (1973)

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Dir: Aristide Massaccesi
Star: Ewa Aulin, Sergio Doria, Angela Bo, Klaus Kinski
a.k.a. Death Smiled at Murder

Director Massaccesi is better known under one of the forty-plus pseudonyms he used, Joe D’Amato, being one of the most infamous grindhouse directors of the seventies and eighties. He was a pioneer of the “mockbuster,” a similarly-titled movie with the same themes as a successful mainstream film, e.g the 11 Days, 11 Nights series inspired by 9 1/2 Weeks, or Ator the Invincible, which came out soon after Conan the Barbarian. But he’s probably best know for such titles such as Erotic Nights of the Living Dead and Porno Holocaust. Those are more or less exactly as they sound: a mix of sex and violence which could be both soft- and hard-core. Having seen some of these, his reputation as the “evil Ed Wood” seemed largely justified.

This, however, dates from early in his career – so early, in fact, he directed it under his own name! – and is largely competent, made with more care than later examples of his work which I’ve seen. Perhaps it was from before he adopted a more jaded and cynical approach, as voiced by a character in Emanuelle’s Revenge [note the mis-spelling of the first word!], who appears to echo D’Amato’s own frequently-expressed thoughts, “We’re not making artsy-farty crap for intellectual faggots. We’re out to make money!” Instead, there are certainly no shortage of “artsy-fartsy” elements, even if it also contains its fair share of nudity and sex. In terms of style, it’s somewhere between the giallo and Gothic genres, combining the more in-your-face and whodunnit aesthetics of the former, with the dreamlike mysteries of the latter.

It’s a period piece, set around 1909, and begins with Franz (Luciano Rossi) bemoaning the death of his sister, Greta (Aulin). The next thing we see is a coach accident outside the house of Walter and Eva von Ravensbrück (Doria + Bo); the driver is killed, but the passenger is Greta, and is knocked unconscious. She recuperates in their house, under the eye of the local physician, Dr.  Sturgess (Kinski). but a couple of problems soon arise. The maid, apparently knowing something, hands in her notice and leaves, but  on the way out takes both barrels of a shotgun to the face. Then, both Walter and Eva fall in love with the new house-guest. When Eva realizes her husband is winning the battle, she takes drastic action, luring Greta to the basement and walling her up there. Problem solved, right? Nope – as anyone familiar with classic horror will know, it’s never a sound solution. Eva soon starts seeing both the hale and hearty Greta, alternating with a decayed version, and when she tears the bricks down to make sure she is seeing things, discovers the body is no longer there.

deathsmiles3You’ll notice that Klaus’s character only receives a passing mention. That’s because, despite his co-star billing with Aulin, his role is largely incidental. He has a sideline, working to discover the secret of life in a basement laboratory with his mute assistant, and a medallion worn by Greta appears to have provided a breakthrough. One imagines he sensed something was up when he was able to stab her in the eyeball with a pin, and not even receive a blink; that, along with the odd scar on the side of her neck where the IV tube of elixir went in. Anyway, he successfully revives his own test subject, only to be offed, along with his assistant, by (presumably) the same person who killed the maid. Exit Mr. Kinski, before the half-way point has been reached, though he’d return for another Massaccesi movie later in the year, Heroes in Hell.

To this point, the film hasn’t so much been playing the cards close to its chest, as leaving the table entirely, and looking at them from a locked room in the next building. Even by the end, it’s far from certain that all the questions raised have even potentially been answered, and indeed, it seems more are raised. Walter’s father shows up, and appears to have had quite the relationship with Greta himself: yet he didn’t make any connection between her disappearance and the sudden arrival of a beautiful blonde at his son’s house? The film also treats us to an entirely incomprehensible moment, where a bunch of flowers thrown by Greta turn into a cat, which then scratches someone’s face off, over a period of what seems like several minutes. [Look, it’s a freakin’ cat: you outweigh it by a factor of about twenty, and gravity is on your side] “None of this makes any sense,” says an investigating policeman at one point, and by the time the final credit roll, you’ll almost certainly be agreeing wholeheartedly.

However, for all the questionable plot elements, I can’t deny that Massaccesi does a good job of generating a dreamlike atmosphere, where even the more dubious moments have a certain plausibility. The first return of Greta from the tomb is particularly well-done, and delivers a fine wallop [I didn’t see it coming, that’s for sure], while there are also a couple of other sequences that are well-put together and directed with finesse. Aulin is undeniably lovely to look at, and it’s entirely credible why both husband and wife would fall for her. This isn’t one to watch if you’re in a demanding mood; I’d probably recommend laying off the caffeine instead, and watching it just before bedtime, when your critical faculties are dulled toward sleep. Seen through that prism, it’s a lusciously-shot exercise with the air of a lesser story from Edgar Allen Poe, and provides a more than pleasant way to pass 90 minutes.

My Name Is Shanghai Joe (1972)

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Dir: Mario Caiano
Star: Chen Lee, Piero Lulli, Carla Romanelli, Klaus Kinski

joeSpaghetti Eastern? Noodle Western? I’m not quite sure what to call this combination of two genres, which probably counts as among the oddest mash-ups – quite saying something, in a decade that also gave us horror/kung-fu crossbreeds such as Dracula and the Seven Golden Vampires. In this case, it’s a kung-fu Western, with the titular Joe (Lee), coming to the United States to make his fortune, only to find just about every American is a racist. He ends up innocently involved in a scheme to smuggle Mexicans across the border as slave labor, but when he witnesses a massacre, he realizes the truth, and embarks on a mission to take down the man responsible, Spencer (Lulli). Needless to say, Spencer is unimpressed, and hires a pack of thugs with names like ‘Pedro the Cannibal’ and ‘Scalper Jack’ (Kinski) to make sure Joe doesn’t interfere with operations.

This brings home one of the delights of Project Kinski. If it hadn’t been for Klaus’s presence – and he’s only in it for a few scenes, amounting to little more than a glorified cameo – I’d almost certainly never have bothered watching the little gem. Oh, don’t get me wrong: in conventional terms, this is not a “good” movie. Far from it. But if you’re not braying with laughter when the hero karate kicks an obviously stuffed bull’s head into unconsciousness, then you clearly do not share my sense of absurdist humor. Put it like this: if someone had sent me the script, I’d have been more than happy to show up and do a cameo, for the sheer lunacy of it. Maybe that’s why Kinski is in it, though I suspect it was more the usual financial inducement than the attraction of the surreal lunacy it contains.

joe2Given the era, one suspects Chen Lee is trying to channel Bruce, though he actually looks more like a young (and pre-plastic surgery) Jackie Chan. I liked the way he was dubbed into impeccable English, almost BBC pronunciation – it really enhances how dickish the locals are being. Lee does have some decent moves, though any sense of reality is severely eroded by the obvious use of tricks like slightly off-screen trampolines and reverse footage. Were those ever convincing to an audience, even back in the seventies? The best bit, is probably where he pokes one of the killers in the eyes and yanks out the eyeballs.  The main problem is the stretching the film requires to get around the issue that kung-fu isn’t exactly bulletproof: with the exception of Kinski’s character, if the other killers sent after Joe behaved with moderate intelligence, the film would be over. As is, it’s only at the end, where he goes up against a colleague from the same school (or “boss level”), that there’s anything like a reasonably fair fight.

Kinski plays the penultimate boss, and is in the film for eight minutes, tops. He discovers Jack’s whereabouts after interrogating a doctor whom Joe called to tend to Cristina (Romanelli). the Mexican lady who has been helping him. As mentioned, Jack the Scalp Ripper is the only one to displaying some common sense, starting off by shooting Joe in both legs. He then terrorizes Cristina for a bit, draping the doctor’s scalp over a doll to ghoulishly effective result, it must be said, before setting his sights – and the portfolio of knives he keeps inside his coat – on the lovely senorita’s locks. Of course, Joe won’t stand for that kind of thing. Mostly because he was shot in both legs, remember? Hohoho! Let’s just say, it ends with Spencer receiving a gift that made me wonder if David Fincher, the director of Se7en, had seen this [I’m also fairly sure Quentin Tarantino has, since I was reminded more than once of Django Unchained – not for the first time in a spaKinski Western]

Despite my cynicism, and an amount of Kinski which belies the font size of his name on the sleeve, I was definitely entertained by this. It may be ludicrous – actually, there’s not much “may” to be found – and hardly counts as anything more than a Frankenstein’s monster of moviemaking, sewing together elements from different genres, regardless of their suitability or coherence. However, it’s certainly never dull, and makes up for in loopy inventiveness, what it lacks in more traditional cinematic qualities.

Ognuno per sé (1966)

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Dir: Giorgio Capitani
Star: Van Heflin, George Hilton, Klaus Kinski, Gilbert Roland
a.k.a. The Ruthless Four

Thruthlessis certainly lives up to its title, beginning with a literal bang, as Sam Cooper (Heflin) blows up a goldmine and his partner, after the latter tries to double-cross Cooper out of his share. He struggles back across the desert to town, where his return without said partner lead to suspicious gossip. Needing a new partner to get the gold out, he calls up Manolo (Hilton), who was almost Cooper’s foster son. However, Manolo then brings his friend, Brent the Blond (Kinski) in as another participant, much to the chagrin of the original owner.

Worried he is outnumbered and likely to meet an unpleasant fate in the mountains, Cooper tries to even the odds by turning to Mason (Roland), who deserted the army alongside Cooper, but now holds a grudge against him, believing he turned Mason in to the authorities. The four new stake-holders head out on the long journey back to the mine’s location, known only to Cooper, and it’s not long before they are attacked by a group apparently keen on jumping their claim. Once they arrive, it soon becomes clear that everyone seems to have their own plans, with alliances forming and melting as each of the participants maneuver for superiority and the upper-hand.

This is a solid one, with a script that keeps the viewer entertained as it twists and turns. There’s a creepy vibe, fairly daring for the time, hinting at an unhealthy, possibly homosexual, relationship between Manolo and Brent [there’s also a rather odd scene in a bath-house which also seems rather out of place], though Hilton is probably the weakest of the four actors. There’s one scene in particular – you’ll know it when you see it – where he isn’t so much chewing the scenery as gnawing on it like a rabid beaver.

On the other hand, Kinski is very restrained: he’ll go into a bar and ask for a glass of milk, and for no particular reason, he’s dressed in priest’s garb. But any doubt whether this is a fraud is dispelled by the scene where someone greets him as a cleric. It’s entirely clear who is the dominant partner (emotionally, if not necessarily sexually), particularly in one scene where Manolo is gabbling away, trying to convince his partner that they don’t need to kill the “old and harmless” Cooper, and if they take care of Mason, then Cooper will be “no problem.” Brent does little more than stare back, as Manolo pleads his nervous case, before dismissing the argument: “You think too much. Just take orders from me. If I want you to kill Cooper, you’ll kill him, won’t you – because you’ve always taken your orders from me. Isn’t that right?” There’s also a cool shot in the mine, where a cloaked Brent looks like a pick-ax wielding incarnation of the Grim Reaper.

Heflin, a supporting actor in classic Westerns such as 3:10 to Yuma, was once famously told by Louis B. Mayer, “You will never get the girl at the end.” His character here certainly looks like he has a story to tell, just based off a face which looks like a granite outcrop. Heflin was already in his late fifties, and would only make a couple more movies, before his death from a heart-attack in 1970 – it’s nice to see a hero who isn’t an obvious leading man type. But it”s the constantly-shifting dynamics between the quartet that are most engrossing, with a real sense of underlying violence, never far away. The gun-battle at the burned-out mission on the way to the mine is particularly well-handled, and I also appreciated Capitani’s creative use of silence – most notably, the early sequence where Cooper struggles back from the mine, with little or no water and increasingly exhausted.

Despite undeniable similarities to John Huston’s classic Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the overall result is a solid piece of work, that works within the standards of the genre, yet still manages to generate no shortage of new wrinkles. Most of which appear to have found a permanent resting place on Heflin’s face. The Italian title translates as Everybody for himself, and seems perfectly appropriate – but even more so would have been the title originally planned, Ognuno per sé (e Dio per nessuno). That one translates as: Everybody for himself (and God for nobody).

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Lo chiamavano King (1971)

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Dir: Giancarlo Romitelli
Star: Richard Harrison, John Silver, Klaus Kinski, Luciano Pigozzi
a.k.a. His Name was King

kingThis movie achieved something of a spike in popularity after Quentin Tarantino included Luis Bacalov’s title song, His Name was King on the soundtrack for Django Unchained. That, along with the naming of Christoph Waltz’s character as King Schultz, suggests it may be a genre favorite of Tarantino. It’s hard to see why, as it’s a muddled and confusing piece, with little to recommend it. The aim appears to have been to set up Harrison’s character, bounty-killer John ‘King’ Marley, alongside the likes of Django or Sabata, but the lack of any subsequent sequels suggests it met insufficient commercial success to justify proceeding.

It was, however, a reunion for Harrison and Kinski, as they had both appeared the previous year in the war film, Churchill’s Leopards, respectively playing an Allied soldier and his German twin, and a Nazi officer. Here, at least initially, they’re on the same side, Kinski’s Sheriff Foster first appearing alongside King, celebrating the marriage of the latter’s brother. However, the newlyweds find themselves captured by the Benson gang, who have a beef with King after he killed one of their members in an earlier encounter. As revenge, they kill the brother, rape his wife and sent her back to town. Needless to say, that provokes King into heading after them, leaving the widow in Foster’s care. However, complicating matters is a document implying King was involved in a shipment of weapons which is now being used against the army, which makes him a wanted man, being hunted himself by federal agent Mr. Collins (Pigozzi).

There are a couple of scenes where Foster is entranced with a pocket watch and the tune in plays. These seem obvious nods to For a Few Dollars More, where Gian Maria Volontè’s character, leader of the gang in which Kinski played a member, was similarly obsessed. Here, neither the execution nor the payoff is as impressive, though it does lead to probably the movie’s best scene, where Foster discovers a transgression by his deputy, and takes punitive action. Otherwise, there isn’t much of Kinski early at all: his role becomes a good deal more important over the course of the second-half, and is positively pivotal during the climax. It’s just a shame they didn’t let Klaus do his own dubbing, or at least find someone more appropriate, because the voice they use just doesn’t work.

The main problem, however, is a script that seems to specialize in obscurity, with what you’d think were important facts – such as Foster being the sheriff – apparently being concealed, or at least, made insufficiently clear. As a viewer, you’re left watching scenes whose relevance and importance is obscure, in the hope that, eventually, it will all make some kind of sense. To the film’s (bare) credit, it does end up coming together, with a moderately decent one-on-one face-off in the streets that’s preceded by an impressively rapid-fire evacuation by everyone else, people literally diving through windows to get out of the way of the upcoming gun-fight. While amusing, it’s definitely incongruous, playing more like something out of Blazing Saddles than a serious spaghetti Western.

Outside of Kinski, there isn’t much point to seeing this: Harrison’s career was spiralling down, though he hadn’t yet reached the Grade-Z Philippines and Hong Kong schlock he’d make in the eighties. None of the other aspects are in any way memorable, and even the theme song, apparently beloved by Tarantino, is forgettable musak. I do note that the film, according to the IMDB, has a running time of 90 minutes, while the version I saw clocked in at a brisk 76. It’s possible that there may be an alternate version out there which is more coherent and/or interesting. I’d be lying, however, if I said tracking that down was in any way a priority.

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Timestalkers (1987)

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Dir: Michael Schultz
Star: William Devane, Lauren Hutton, Klaus Kinski, John Ratzenberger

timestalkersThis TV movie first aired on CBS in March 1987, and more or less combines two standard Kinski tropes: mad scientist and black-hearted gunslinger. Things kick off when history professor and Western enthusiast Scott McKenzie (Devane) buys an old photo, and realizes that the 1886 image contains a man wielding a .357 Magnum – a gun which dates from almost a century after the photo was taken. He writes a paper on the picture, challenging his class to come up with a solution, and is subsequently visited by Georgia Crawford (Hutton).

She reveals that she is a time-traveler from 600 years into the future, and is hunting the man in the picture, Dr. Joseph Cole (Kinski). He worked with her father inventing the time-travel device, but when Crawford tried to stop him from changing history, Cole stole the device and vanished – it now appears, going back to 1886. What exactly was his purpose? Bipping back and forth in time, Scott and Georgia try to figure that out, and how to stop Cole before he can carry out his plan to alter the future by changing the past.

As with most films about time-travel, it’s best not to stare too closely at the plot, because the paradoxes that result are almost insurmountable. [Spoilers follow, as a necessary result] If Cole is going back to kill the ancestor of the man who helped invent the time-travel gizmo, doesn’t that mean it won’t be invented? If that’s the case, how could Cole then go back in time to begin with? Also, why bother going back 700 years? That’s like trying to stop Hitler by finding his ancestor in 12th-century Germany. Why not just pop back a week and poison Crawford’s coffee? And don’t even get me started on the ending, which can only by explained by a complete and willful ignorance of the works of Ray Bradbury. Let’s just say, I doubt it turns out well.

That’s a little disappointing, considering this was written by Brain Clemens, who is quite a renowned figure in genre media. He wrote the original pilot for The Avengers (younger readers: the seminal 1960’s TV series, not the PPV comic-book franchise) and also wrote and directed Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, one of the more under-rated entries in the late Hammer horror canon. Here, he may have been limited, since he’s supposedly working from a source story – Ray Brown’s The Tintype, though I add the caveat since I’ve been unable to find out any significant information regarding it, or indeed Brown, who has no Wikipedia entry or even other IMDB credits.

timestalkers2This definitely appears to have been influential on a number of later, larger works: the most obvious are Timecop, with one batch of time-travellers, trying to stop another from screwing up the timeline, and Back to the Future, Part III, which also focused on time-travel to the Old West. However, those wouldn’t be released for another seven and three years respectively, so let’s give Timestalkers credit where it’s due. On the other hand, there are a few elements that are horribly dated: most obvious is a sequence where they visit another Old West collector, seeking information. He hauls a song out of his database, and plays it for them, accompanied by 16-bit graphics that may have been cutting-edge in 1987, but are now wrist-cuttingly awful.

Casting Kinski in a TVM is a bit like the cops sending a battalion of tanks to handle a domestic dispute: it’s simply overkill, considering the amount of restraint required for the medium. Whether by chance or design, Kinski doesn’t actually get to interact much with the other main characters. There’s an argument with his colleague Crawford that certainly demonstrates Klaus’s fire, but for much of the rest of the time, he’s roaming the 19th century on his quest, all by himself. However, he does get to do a decentish Travis Bickle impersonation, staring into the mirror, and in story terms, I liked how he gets into an army base, by traveling back to before it was built, passing through where security will be, then coming back. I also enjoyed the scene in which Cole pulls off a carjacking that would look impressive in Grand Theft Auto V, shoving the owner out the door as it whizzes along, with a cheery “Thanks for the lift, mister.”

Actually, that quote provides a fairly appropriate summary of the film as a whole. It whizzes along, zipping from century to century in such a way that the flaws are somehat hidden, before coming to a moderately-exciting climax as the US President heads through the desert, and right into an ambush. This is where McKenzie’s Western-style training – none too subtly foreshadowed early, while the plot is ambling its way towards significance – pays off, though I do have to question his convenient, Annie Oakley-esque accuracy while on horseback, which is not addressed during the previous going. That’s the main flaw here: a script definitely in need of at least a couple more rewrites before being ready from prime-time, particularly occupying such a logically dangerous area as time-travel.

But by the low standards of made-for-television movies, I’ve seen much worse, and the performances are better than you normally get in such things. Devane sells the concepts involved with enough enthusiasm to convince the audience, if they’re prepared to squint a little bit, although former model Hutton is less than entirely convincing as A Scientist. Kinski is perfectly fine as an evil antagonist, but you certainly don’t get the sense he was taxed or challenged by anything here, although at least I could locate no reports of issues or problems during filming. The film is currently on Youtube. I can’t say how long it might last, but it has been up since February this year, and would seem to have a decent shot as surviving, so here you go…

Creature (1985)

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titanfindDir: William Malone
Star: Stan Ivar, Wendy Schaal, Lyman Ward, Klaus Kinski
a.k.a. Titan Find, The Titan Find

“Klaus Kinski is dead now, and the world is a better place for it.”
— William Malone

This combines elements from both Alien (1979) and The Thing (1982) – and it wasn’t the first time Malone had gone to the former well, a couple of years previously having put together Scared to Death, about a monster that lives in the Los Angeles sewer system, coming up at night to suck spinal fluid out of people [as you do…] And in 2000, he’d complete the trilogy of Alien knockoffs with Supernova. But it’s Creature, whether under that name or Titan Find, with which most people are likely familiar.

The movie starts on Titan with the discovery of an alien in a capsule, which – to no-0ne’s surprise except the two poor slobs who find it – turns out not to be dead. One has his head explodes inside his spacesuit, and the other, apparently driven insane, flies back to Earth and rams his craft into an orbiting space-station. The final frontier has become the property of corporations in this future, specifically the American NTI and German company Richter Dynamics. The Americans send a ship out to Titan to find out what happened to the first expedition: there’s the captain (Ivar), corporate boss (Ward), engineering type (Schaal) and a “security officer” (Diane Salinger), who doesn’t speak to anyone else, even though they wonder why on Earth/Titan they would need one of those.

On their arrival, it becomes clear. Richter has also sent a ship, and have already landed. NTI’s craft sets down too, but it’s more of a “crash”, leaving their vessel crippled, running out of oxygen. Heading over, they discover a number of dead bodies, and their craft is visited by Hans Rudy Hofner (Kinski), the last survivor of the 20+ members of the German expedition. He informs them that what was discovered was an alien’s collection of life-forms, like a child’s butterfly collection, except a great deal more lethal. The particular creature they’re up against has the ability to take over the bodies of its victims and use them to lure in further prey, as well as generate visions that serve the same purpose.

You can probably work out the rest of the plot from there: the creature gnaws its way through the minor members of the cast, working his way up to the front of the credits, while they try to figure out a way to defeat it. Interestingly, the method eventually used is directly inspired – the film only stops short of mentioning its name – by 1951’s The Thing From Another World, based on the same source SF novel as The Thing. There are the usual false endings where the survivors are probably the only people who believe the creature has been killed (the viewer likely having checked their watch and realized there are still 20 minutes left), but to its credit, the story ties itself up more or less neatly, without having to resort to cliches like a final shot of an alien egg.

As a B-movie, this isn’t terrible: the main problem is that the two films from which it most obviously borrows, were both far superior in just about every way. Some of the effects crew supposedly went on to work on Aliens, and from a technical standpoint, it’s pretty respectable, considering the budget was less than three-quarter of a million dollars. There’s a very good exploding head scene, and plenty of prosthetic effects, but the creature is too blatantly a man in a rubber suit to provoke more than snorts of derision. The other performances are mostly forgettable: Diane Salinger, who played security officer Bryce, perhaps comes off best, simply because she has least to say, and the script is probably the film’s weakest link. Witness the thoroughly ludicrous explanation she offers for her absence toward the end, which is something an 11-year-old child would have rejected as implausible.

This is, extremely obviously, one of those roles which Kinski took for the money, but as usual, even if his motivation may have been mercenary, he’s good value in it. Particularly, keep an eye out for the scene, as noted and broken down by Du Dumme Sau in detail, where Klaus apparently acts and has lunch at the same time (below). Very considerate that, on a tight shooting schedule.

klaus_kinski_vs_sandwich

If Kinski’s role feels like a bit of an afterthought, that’s for the very good reason that it apparently was: “During the production they got more money – and the producers suddenly hired Klaus Kinski, even if there wasn’t a part for him in the movie, so Malone and screenwriter Alan Reed had to invent a character.” By Malone’s account, communication between director and actor largely consisted of screaming from both sides, which appeared to work best for both of them. The quote opening this review came from a 1999 interview Malone did with Fangoria, and it’s perhaps worth quoting some more of the director’s thoughts.

“Kinski was the craziest person I’ve ever met. I had him for a week on that picture, out of a seven-week shoot. I remember the first words out of his mouth. He put his arm around me on the set and said, ‘You know, Bill, when Nastassja was 12, I raped her.’ And things went downhill from there…. “

In the light of subsequent events – albeit involving Klaus’s other daughter, Pola – that’s an extremely unfortunate statement, though of course, Kinski was well known for behaving outrageously, purely  for shock purposes.  Malone’s opinion did seem to mellow subsequently, later saying: “He was a funny guy, and I think he would be happy I said the world was a better place without him. He reveled in that kind of thing.” Salinger also has some interesting stories of working with Klaus on the film, but overall, appears to remember him fondly, saying:

“Klaus taught me a great deal! We were wearing these padded, quilted space suits, and he taught me how to act [in them] with my back. I knew he was brilliant, but he would never hit his marks. He was basically ‘Fuck you, I’m the actor, you’re the camera. I’m not gonna follow you, you follow me.’ I remember Bill [Malone] saying to me that a lot of the great, brilliant footage that he had of Klaus he couldn’t use, because he was out of focus.”

The movie was re-released on DVD earlier this year, in a nicely letterboxed version: the copy I saw was streamed on Netflix, in a 4:3 ratio, and was probably too dark. The DVD comes with Malone’s commentary, as well as interviews with the surviving cast members, both of which I would be very interested to hear, so I’ll update this one if I get hold of it.

Cobra Verde (1987)

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Dir: Werner Herzog
Star: Klaus Kinski, Jose Lewgoy, King Ampaw, Salvatore Basile

In most of the other films, the character Kinski plays is out there: clearly orbiting a different star in terms of sanity. That’s perhaps less the case here, once the film hits its stride, at least. He plays the titular bandit, real name Francisco Manoel da Silva. He’s hired as a slave overseer on a Brazillian sugar-cane plantation, but incurs the wrath of the owner after impregnating three (!) of his daughters. To get rid of the outlaw, the owner ships Mr. Verde off to Dahomey to acquire more slaves, in the belief that it’s a suicide mission. Certainly, the ruined fort which he takes over on arrival does not bode well, or the story told by the sole survivor of the previous garrison.

However, once Francisco settles in there, it turns out he’s far from the most differently-sane person – not least the king, who is definitely a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic, taking advice from his invisible friend. da Silva finds success there, delivering the slaves, but after discovering the king’s insanity first-hand, teams up with the son who wants to take over from his father, even though he has not exactly fallen far from the tree. The Cobra recruits an army of women warriors and helps with the coup, only to find his new life shattered when Brazil abolishes slavery. Proceedings end, in typical Herzog/Kinski fashion, with a broken hero trying to drag a boat back into the water, and rolling around in the surf, howling hysterically.

To misquote a proverb, in the land of the bat-shit crazy, Klaus Kinski is king, and that’s the case here. His character fits the Dahomey society like a glove, whether it’s helping his slaves in their work – they adopt a remarkably casual approach to the shrieking madman in their midst – or training a battalion of topless female soldiers in the finer points of spear-chucking. It has to be said, there are probably more bouncing breasts in this than the entire cinematic output of Fred Olen Ray – or, more appropriately, of National Geographic news-reels.

But, in terms of performances, I liked this one better than some of his more renowned work: I’d probably put it above Nosferatu, for instance (which, as noted above, is an undeniable chore), almost entirely on the strength of Kinski’s facial expressions. These communicate as much in a single look, as many less talented actors struggle to put over with an entire Tarantino of verbiage, and it’s just captivating: there have been occasional “looks” in the preceding films, but here, they’re in full effect. and you could probably put together a great montage of clips from this alone, of Kinski staring at the insanity unfolding around him.

In wonderfully Herzog-esque style, the mad King Bossa Ahadee of Dahomey, is played by a real African monarch, the wonderfully-named His Honor the Omanhene Nana Agyefi Kwame II of Nsein – it’s a village in Ghana, and based on the performance here, is entirely aptly named. He’s so convincingly out of his gourd, that it’s a shame it appears to have been his only screen credit, though I suppose the market for lunatic monarchs of colour is probably a somewhat limited one. Still, if you manage to make Klaus Kinski look sane and normal with your acting debut, you’re clearly doing something right in terms of your performance.

This would be Kinski’s last collaboration with Herzog – he’d die four years after its release, having made only two films, both nearly unwatchable (Nosferatu in Venice and Paganini). It seems to have gone about as well as the preceding four, going by Klaus’s comments.

I wish Herzog would catch the plague, more than ever. He was even more helpless, more stupid and at the same time more persistent against me, than he was in the last four films, I shot with him. Although he urgently needed my help, and pretended, he would kiss my ass for that, he did the opposite behind my back. The people from Ghana are friendly and peaceful. Herzog knew, how to use them for his purpose. I knew his criminal and enslaving methods since Peru, where he always went for the most helpless and where I eventually called him Adolf Hitler. In Ghana he excelled himself.

Yep, Kinski just Godwin’s Law’d himself.