SF – Klaus.Kinski.us

El caballero del dragón (1985)

Posted on February 25, 2014 by Jim McLennan

Dir: Fernando Colomo
Star: Harvey Keitel, Maria Lamor, Miguel Bosé, Klaus Kinski
a.k.a. Star Knight

Well, it’s certainly different, that’s for sure. Not least in its casting. Kinski as an alchemist, I can get my brain around – it’s really just a Spanish, historical variant on the mad scientist role he has played often enough. But there was apparently once a world in which the producers thought, “We need a medieval knight. I’ll tell you who we should get: Harvey Keitel.” Admittedly, this was during the eighties, when Keitel was largely floundering in obscurity; the previous year, in Nemo, he had basically played Zorro, so I suspect he was operating in “Don’t send me the script, just send me the check” mode. Not that he’s terrible, it has to be said. Just that watching the Bad Lieutenant riding around in armor on horseback in a film which occasionally teeters into Holy Grail territory, is not what I expected. Chalk up another of the odd pleasures I’ve experienced, courtesy of Project Kinski!

Note the use here of Kinski taken from ‘Aguirre’!

This is not exactly a common genre either, that of medieval sci-fi. A “dragon” is pillaging the land, culminating in it stealing away the king’s daughter, Princess Alba (Lamor). The king’s leading knight, the presumably ironically-named Klever (Keitel), goes off to try and rescue her, having been promised her hand in marriage and half the kingdom if he succeeds. But the only person who has kinda worked out what’s going on is alchemist Boecius (Kinski). He has taken a break from his research towards an elixir of eternal life, along with his work as the king’s physician, and knows that the dragon is a UFO, piloted by a humanoid and telepathic alien, Ix (Bosé), possessing a haircut which positively screams “mid-eighties.” Ix’s armor is actually a space-suit, protecting him from earth’s atmosphere, but that hasn’t stopped him from falling in love with Alba, and vice-versa. Will this tale of inter-stellar love have a happy ending?

Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and that’s one of the concept at the heart of this film. I like the idea that people would interpret extra-terrestrial phenomena, in a way which fits their existing world view – in this case, in terms of dragons or demons. Boecius’s capacity to grasp the situation leads him to be accused of being in league with the devil, leading to his arrest – though curiously (albeit fortunately for the plot), rather than being burned at the stake for witchcraft, he is still allowed to accompany Klever as he heads off on his mission. It’s not often that Klaus gets to play a character who is easily the sharpest tool in the box, and it’s a shame that he isn’t given more to do, such as interface with Ix to a greater degree. Instead, he literally sits around with his hands tied for most of the second half.

But there is a fair bit to enjoy in the rest of proceedings, though it’s hard to be sure how seriously we are meant to take proceedings. I mentioned the Holy Grail above, and its most obvious influence is the Green (rather than Black) Knight character, who guards a bridge, refusing to let everyone pass – but in reality, is completely incompetent and incapable of stopping anybody. While I understand the aim was comic relief, he seems to have strayed in from a completely different film, and instead does a pretty good job of destroying the “magical realism” atmosphere which is otherwise being built up nicely. Helping that out is Jose Nieto’s score, which is genuinely impressive and evocative – like the Green Knight, it appears to have strayed in from another movie, only in the soundtrack’s case, it’s a much better one.

To be honest, the climax of the film is implausible, even by the low standards set over the first 80 minutes. It relies on Boecius having developed an elixir which, never minding working on humans, is also capable of affecting aliens to whom our atmosphere is lethal, and presumably have a radically different physiology. But I can’t say I minded too much, being willing to cut the film some slack due to its original approach and theme. Still, it’s shaky enough that I was surprised to discover it reportedly received an American theatrical release in 1986: I guess standards have dropped significantly over the last two decades. This is fairly readily available now, having apparently fallen into the public domain, and as a result shows up on some of those big box sets, with titles like Sci-Fi Invasion 50 Movie Pack. You can even find the full thing on YouTube, albeit in a version which isn’t just dubbed, it’s also slightly out of synch. However, I can’t claim with a straight face that this impacted my enjoyment of it too much!

Android (1982)

Posted on November 5, 2013 by Jim McLennan

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.

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.

Timestalkers (1987)

Posted on September 19, 2013 by Jim McLennan

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

This 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.

This 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)

Posted on July 22, 2013 by Jim McLennan

Dir: 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.

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.