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These days, Dr Gunther (Klaus Kinski) runs a small boarding house, and
he plays the role of the caring landlord to perfection. So ok, he uses the
airducts of his apartment building, the crawlspace, to spy on his tenants,
all pretty ladies, but one has to have some hobby, right? Oh, and he keeps
a woman without a tongue (Sally Brown) in a cage in his attic, but ...
well, ok, that is beyond eccentric, but that's not even what's actually
wrong with him. You see, Dr Gunther is the son of a concentration camp
doctor who was especially ruthless when it came to human experiments, and
who was executed as a war criminal in 1945 - and while Gunther was not old
enough to take part in his dad's experiments himself during the war, he
took inherited his dad's convictions, and later, when he was a prominent
doctor at an Argentinian hospital himself, he started killing people he
was supposed to save, just for the fun of it. And now, he only runs this
boarding house to never run out of people to kill, be it the girls who
live here or their boyfriends, or a certain Mr Steiner (Kenneth Robert
Shippy), who has followed him all the way from Argentina because Gunther
has killed his brother. But Gunther has chosen Lori (Talia Balsam) to be
his ultimate victim, a woman for whom he has redecorated his house like a
chamber of horrors, with dozens of death traps, and the corpses of the
other tenants serving as decoration. However, Lori isn't one to go down
with a fight, and she is rather resourceful, too, is able to anticipate
Gunther's death traps, manages to free the girl in the cage (who will
later repay in kind), and ultimately manages to kill Dr Gunther, who has
by that time gone properly insane ... This movie could have
been really good: The premise is great in a twisted way, Kinski is great
playing what he plays best (the psycho that's about to burst), and the
camerawork is great. The sets are quite nice, too, and several scenes are
quite atmospheric. And yet, Crawlspace is not essentially a good
film: Basically, the premise is not translated into a good plot, the
characters apart from Kinski's remain disappointingly pale - with isn't
helped by rather mediocre actors -, and while several scenes in themselves
are quite atmospheric, this is not enough to translate into a proper
overall mood. Add to this a finale that despite the best efforts isn't
quite exciting enough, and you've got ... well, not a trainwreck of a
movie, rather a missed opportunity.
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