Rabbit holes can be fun.  They can also leave you scratching your head.  David Schmoeller directed some third or fourth drawer horror films, among which is Crawlspace.  Having fallen down the Schmoeller rabbit hole, I found it streaming at the cost of frequent commercials.  Hey, that’s how I watched movies as a kid, so why not?  I was drawn to the movie by Klaus Kinski.  He is arresting on camera and directors knew it.  He was also famously difficult to work with.  Schmoeller apparently tried to get Kinski fired from Crawlspace, but without him it would’ve been a nearly complete waste of time.  That’s because Schmoeller’s story (he also wrote it) doesn’t make a ton of sense, even if it introduces some fascinating themes.  So Gunther (Kinski’s character) is a landlord.  He rents rooms in his house to young women that he murders, after spying on them through the eponymous crawl space.

Why does he murder?  Because his father was a literal Nazi and Gunther has tendencies in that direction.  He’s conflicted, though.  A medical doctor, he saved lives.  He also killed.  Caught up with the God-like power of determining life and death, he explores it at the expense of young women.  And their erstwhile lovers.  And occasional visitors.  Kinski pulls off this double life persona, making him believable.  Even so, the story doesn’t have much other depth.  There’s a lot of crawling around HVAC vents and inventing of insidious ways of murdering and tormenting people.  When Gunther finally loses it and puts on make-up and dresses as a Nazi it’s clear that this is the endgame.  I won’t spoil the ending, but I can say there’s a bit of irony there.

I first became aware of Klaus Kinski through his mesmerizing performance in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre.  His is one of the best vampire portrayals in all of cinema, in my opinion.  I wonder at the confidence of someone so difficult to work with and yet who appeared in more than 130 films.  I’ve been fired for doing a good job at least three times.  But then, I’m not a professional actor.  At least two of the directors Kinski worked with (Herzog and Schmoeller) made documentaries about how difficult he was.  There were rumors that both wanted him killed.  And yet he made a living acting.  (He was also married, and divorced, thrice.)  I’ve seen him in a handful of films and he does, in what makes it through to the final cut, command attention.  Without him Crawlspace would simply be a hole in the ground.