He's a voyeur's delight, this Kinski chap, smearing his thick lips with lipstick and watching Adolf Hitler speeches in his attic, where he has assembled a good number of torture instruments and weapons. He watches a lot of Hitler's filmed speeches on a screen in his attic, even saluting once in awhile--that is, when he isn't busy slithering around the crawlspace to watch his pretty tenants through the vents or distract them with noises they might attribute to mice or rats.
His fondness for being a voyeur takes up most of the running time of this brief thriller and the payoff is only a few scenes of real horror in between long stretches of minimal suspense. But the last fifteen minutes are the most suspenseful, as his chase through the crawlspace begins in earnest when one of his tenants (TALIA BALSAM) discovers his favorite hiding place. The final confrontation scene, however, is a distinct letdown and ends much too abruptly.
Good for a few chills, but really not satisfying enough as a thriller to please most horror fans. A scene involving a man seated on a special kind of chair has a certain stabbing effect, but most of the killings occur off screen and only the results are shown in brief shots.
Fans of KLAUS KINSKI will probably want to see this. Others beware. He's quite a menacing character and could easily have followed in the footsteps of Conrad Veidt if he'd chosen to do films in the U.S.A., playing Nazis and other villainous types as Veidt did.
His fondness for being a voyeur takes up most of the running time of this brief thriller and the payoff is only a few scenes of real horror in between long stretches of minimal suspense. But the last fifteen minutes are the most suspenseful, as his chase through the crawlspace begins in earnest when one of his tenants (TALIA BALSAM) discovers his favorite hiding place. The final confrontation scene, however, is a distinct letdown and ends much too abruptly.
Good for a few chills, but really not satisfying enough as a thriller to please most horror fans. A scene involving a man seated on a special kind of chair has a certain stabbing effect, but most of the killings occur off screen and only the results are shown in brief shots.
Fans of KLAUS KINSKI will probably want to see this. Others beware. He's quite a menacing character and could easily have followed in the footsteps of Conrad Veidt if he'd chosen to do films in the U.S.A., playing Nazis and other villainous types as Veidt did.