Crawlspace

R 5.3
1986 1 hr 20 min Horror , Thriller

A man who runs an apartment house for women is the demented son of a Nazi surgeon who has the house equipped with secret passageways, hidden rooms and torture and murder devices.

  • Cast:
    Klaus Kinski , Talia Balsam , Barbara Whinnery , Carole Francis , Tane McClure , David Abbott , Sherry Buchanan

Reviews

Alicia
1986/05/21

I love this movie so much

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Jeanskynebu
1986/05/22

the audience applauded

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Beanbioca
1986/05/23

As Good As It Gets

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Fatma Suarez
1986/05/24

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

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Michael_Elliott
1986/05/25

Crawlspace (1986) ** (out of 4) Klaus Kinski plays the son of a Nazi who rents out his apartment rooms to pretty women so that he can spy on them and then kill them. This could have been a rather interesting film but absolutely nothing happens here. I mean zero, zilch, absolutely nothing. I'm really not sure what the point of the film was, although it's clear the director was trying to get into the mind of a killer yet we never know what the hell Kinski is thinking or why he's doing what he is. Kinski is quite amusing in this role but it's a wasted opportunity.

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Robert J. Maxwell
1986/05/26

Maybe I'm having a relapse or something but I happened to catch this recently and vice versa. By God, this piece of mind-numbing garbage swept me away, partly because I was curious to see how low it could go. That wouldn't have been motive enough, agreed, but the photography was lurid and quite nicely done, all at the same time. And Klaus Kinski! First of all -- that face, unequaled in its unequability. Second, what is "Aguirre: The Wrath of God" and "Fitzcarraldo" doing in this junk? Then there is Talia Balsam, Martin's daughter, whose appearance rises just far enough above mediocrity to pass "prettiness" without achieving "glamorous." She always looks somewhat startled and frightened, regardless of what's going on around her. I like that in a woman. Her range as an actress, judging from the three films I've seen her in, is moderate but appealing. Then there is the set dresser. Now, the temptation in a bloody and insane shocker like this must be to construct a set, supposed to be a middle-class apartment building, to look like the house in "Psycho." Instead, what we see is an ordinary middle-class apartment building. Relatively speaking, anyway, since Kinski as the landlord is anything but ordinary.The musical score is by Pino Donaggio, done by the numbers, and if you've heard one Brian DePalma imitation of Hitchcock, you've heard Donaggio's score before. The plot almost defies description because it is so far beneath it. Kinski is a maniacal doctor, an ex-Nazi, who discovered by accident that he happened to love killing patients while in South American exile. For his amusement, he breeds rats, plays with a big pistol against his skull, peeks in on his few attractive tenants (no sex, so don't worry, just mutilations and blood all over). When he really wants to relax he runs newsreels of Hitler's speeches and sports a Wehrmacht officer's cap. People are killed by being nailed to furniture, impaled by a steel spike while sitting innocently in a chair (ouch), and being blasted by that hand-held cannon.It's a thought-provoking movie though. The thought it provokes is this. How can two ugly men like Klaus Kinski and Martin Balsam produce two such toothsome daughters?

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Silent_Abstraction
1986/05/27

I saw this one back to back with "Cobra Verde" and, surprisingly, actually liked it better. It's an inexpensive little serial killer film, rather low on violence on the contemporary "Saw" scale, but with excellent camera-work and music (composer Pino Donaggio worked with Brian de Palma and Dario Argento, and cinematographer Sergio Salvati shot some of Lucio Fulci's best movies). Kinski gives a very beautiful performance here: He's in almost every scene, and his characterization of the evil nazi/doctor/landlord is restrained, faceted and balanced, meandering between the light-hearted and ugly. I didn't know that his acting in the mid-eighties still had such quality. If you get a chance, watch director David Schmoeller's (he wrote all the Puppet Master movies and directed the first one) hilarious short movie about his collaboration with Kinski, aptly titled "Please kill Mr. Kinski" (1999). Making the movie must have been hell for the poor guy, but the result is quite rewarding.

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monkey-man
1986/05/28

This movie is good/bad and there are two reasons why this movie is good and the two reasons are:1.The main character in this movie is called Docter Karl Gunther (Klaus Kinski) and i think that he is so dam freaky because every thing he does in this movie is so strange.2.All of the ways people die in this movie are great and the best way someone dies is how a man is sitting in a seat and he accidentally presses a button and a big metal spike comes out and kills him.Over all if u like good suspense horror movies u should watch this movie and my rating for this movie is six out of 10.

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