Written and directed by David Schmoeller in 1986, Crawlspace (not to be confused with the made for TV movie of the same name) is a twisted thriller that once again found the writer/director working with producer Charles Band (then with Empire Pictures, prior to starting Full Moon). They'd previously worked together on the excellent Tourist Trap, a PG rated horror picture starring the inimitable Chuck Connors, but this second, R-rated collaboration found them working in much sleazier territory.

The film features the immortal Klaus Kinski playing Karl Gunther, an aging man of German descent who once worked as a doctor in Buenos Aries. That's behind him now, his past is complicated and sordid to say the least. These days Gunther runs a boardinghouse. He's quite specific about who he will rent to, however. He only boards beautiful young women who rent from him completely unaware that he's rigged up the air ducts to allow him to crawl around and peek at them. There's more to Karl than this, however. His father was an infamous Nazi surgeon responsible for all manner of reprehensible deeds and those ties run deep. Karl, it would seem, has inherited that taste for cruelty and murder, the latter being something he is able to use his home to get quite creative with, even going so far as to keep a woman named Martha (Sally Brown) captive in a cage, her tongue cut out, like an animal or some sort of pet.

And so we see Karl take out a few of his tenants in often times gruesome fashion and when he's done with each successive killing, he loads up a six shooter with a single bullet and plays a game of Russian Roulette. Karl's world gets rocked when he decides to rent to pretty Lori Bancroft (Talia Balsam), a cunning young woman who Karl would be foolish to underestimate…

At eighty minutes or so in length, Crawlspace is a lean and efficient horror pictures which Schmoeller keeps moving at a solid pace. Set almost entirely inside the building that Gunther owns, the film makes great use of its sets with Kinski working his way through the ventilation ducts secretly spying on the bevy of beauties he sees as both tenants and, of course, likely victims. Kinski is, it should go without saying, the chief reason to sit down with this one. Though he's not quite as manic here as he was in other, more over the top performances he definitely hits that right balance of unhinged and intense with his take on the character. Schmoeller has gone on record discussing how difficult Kinski was to work with on this film, he more or less played the part as he wanted to not as the director wanted him to, but for better or worse this is Kinski doing what Kinski does best. Notoriously difficult to work with throughout his career, he's absolutely the right type of actor, both in terms of his physical appearance and his ability to create characters, to play a demented German lunatic with Nazi ties, an addiction to murder and a fondness for Russian Roulette.

The rest of the cast are decent enough, but this is Kinski's show all the way. The female borders are all attractive and likely all cast for that reason and that reason alone but they do fine with the material. Talia Balsam is decent as the women who proves to be Gunther's foil to a certain extent while the others do decent enough work acting scared whenever Gunther does something horrible to them: unleashing rats into their room, torturing them, using a switchblade menacingly… you get the idea. Sally Brown is also very good and completely sympathetic as poor mute Martha.

Ultimately this is a little predictable and definitely on the dark and sleazy side, but Kinski delivers the goods here. It's quite well made and genuinely creative at times (it would seem to have been an influence on the Saw franchise) and it builds to a sufficiently twisted conclusion. There's some great imagery here, particularly in the last half of the film, and on top of that we get a great, if slightly dated, score from the one and only Pino Donoggio.

Video:

Crawlspace is transferred in AVC encoded 1080p high definition and framed at 1.85.1 widescreen. Detail is solid and color reproduction is nice. Black levels are pretty solid and thankfully shadow detail looks good here as well. Some minor crush and compression artifacts show up in some of those darker spots but for the most part, the movie looks very good in high definition. Texture is quite strong, you'll pick up on fibers in the different outfits that the characters wear and not it in some of the items used to decorate the sets, while skin looks nice and natural. There are no obvious instances of heavy filtering, artificial sharpening, edge enhancement or overzealous noise reduction. All in all, the movie looks very good here, fans should be pleased.