Cobra Verde

1987 crazy man movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Notorious outlaw Francisco Manoel de Silva takes a job overseeing slaves on a sugar plantation. After he knocks up the plantation owner's three daughters, he's sent to Africa to get the slave trade rolling again. The plantation owner and de Silva both know the job will likely end in death, but de Silva decides to go anyway.

"Herzog does not know that I give life to the dead scenery." --Klaus Kinski

You can see the production problems soak through the lush scenery and chaotic and intense scenes that take place in that scenery. The narrative's unbalanced, almost like the story had to pieced together from hours of messy footage. I had trouble following what was going on some of the time. And Kinski's character is wildly uneven. Sure, the titular chap was a crazy bandit, but I'm not even sure Kinski's performance makes much sense in that context. Still, Kinski's his usual electric self, and watching him on the screen is always an experience. In Cobra Verde, the goings-on around hiim are anarchic. Herzog fills the screen with extras and constant movement in a lot of the scenes. Yet Kinski always manages to stand out, like a deranged Where's Waldo? where Waldo jumps up and down and wildly waves his arms and then tries to stab you in the eye with a comically-large pencil. That performance, along with Herzog's eye for filming in exotic and often dangerous locales as well as the inhabitants of those locales, make this an intriguing movie experience despite its imperfections. And Herzog's run of brilliant movie endings continues with a jaw-dropping scene in this involving a boat and a deformed man. Add the Krautrock Popol Vuh soundtrack and you've got yourself another Werner Herzog narrative that is definitely worth watching.

"Arrgh! You don't understand my genius, Werner!"

Spider Baby

1968 creepy comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Also titled The Maddest Story Ever Told, this concerns the Merrye children and their caretaker Bruno. The Merrye children all suffer from the Merrye disease which keeps them in a mentally regressive state. He keeps them away from society in a rickety mansion, and there aren't any problems unless you count the murder of a postman as a problem. One day, some relatives come to check out the place, and Bruno has to try to keep things together.

Saw this title on a "50 worst movies ever made" list, and since I'm working on achieving Bad Movie Aficionado status, I thought I'd check it out. It's disappointing that it's not really a bad movie (that and gems like Manos: The Hands of Fate and The Beast of Yucca Flats not making the top 50 make me trust this list a lot less) but it was still worth watching as one of those examples of a movie that does quite a bit in a very short time and with a very limited budget. It also works as an intentionally funny dark comedy. Note that I typed "intentionally funny" because this isn't one of those movies that is funny because of the filmmaker's ineptitude. Well, Lon Chaney Jr. does play Bruno. His screen presence is typically oafish, like a giant doddering and destructive hobo who's wandered onto the set, crashing into the set and accidentally ruining the picture. I can't tell if his drunkenly unsure "Wallah!" sound he utters when he pulls the lid off a platter of fried rabbit is intentionally comical or just because he's Lon Chaney Jr. and that's what Lon Chaney Jr. does. He does get one of the best lines when he says "How many times have I told you it's not nice to hate?" right before the camera pans to the postman's legs hanging out a window. That postman scene, the opening bit of macabre cartoon nonsense, is nutsy. Following really goofy animated opening credits, you get to watch him stumble around for about five minutes, wondering whether or not anything is actually going to happen in Spider Baby. But by the time he loses an ear, you're hooked. My other favorite moment is this little growl thing that horny Ralph does when he spots a woman. Ralph, the lone Merrye boy, is played by Quinn Redeker (The Young and the Restless), and it's a good, physical performance. The most bizarre thing about these shenanigans is that one of the characters is sporting a Hitler mustache. So this might be the only movie out there where you get to see Hitler kill a spider. Spider Baby has a nice soundtrack, ranging from noodly guitar to avant-garde dinks and donks, and I love the very cool "Itsy Bitsy Spider" variations used during some of the more suspenseful moments. A lot of this (a scene with a cat, the one boy/two girls, the mental regression) reminded me of Dogtooth although it was nowhere near as weird. I can see somebody putting this on a "50 greatest cult classics" list, but it doesn't belong anywhere near a "bad movies" list.