Lifespan (1976)

          An international coproduction shot in the Netherlands with a combination of American and European actors, this sci-fi mystery includes a provocative central concept and a surprising dose of edgy sexual content. The piece doesn’t work, partly because it seems as if all of wooden leading man Hiram Keller’s dialogue was looped by another actor during post-production, and partly because the story crumbles beneath the weight of too many bewildering plot complications. Nonetheless, Lifespan is beautifully photographed, enlivened by some interesting notions, and filled with arresting images of leading lady Tina Aumont trussed up on bondage gear. So, even though Lifespan is a mess, it’s never boring.  When the story begins, American doctor Ben Land (Keller) arrives in Holland to work with a European colleague, Dr. Linden (Eric Schneider)—but Linden kills himself before the two can start their experiments. Undaunted, Ben picks up where Linden left off, while simultaneously investigating the circumstances of Linden’s death. It seems Linden was working on a cure for aging, and that he had advanced to the stage of testing serums on lab rats. Predictably, Linden was something of a laughingstock among his peers, so Ben finds little encouragement among Dutch medical professionals. Instead, he finds Anna (Aumont), the late doctor’s sexy young lover.

          In one of the strangest seduction scenes in cinema history, Ben and Anna attend a party where the host walks to the roof of an apartment building and blows an African horn designed to replicate the wail of an elephant, thus triggering vocal responses from pachyderms in a nearby zoo. “That mating call was intended for the elephants, but I got the message,” Ben says in voiceover. “Anna wanted to be alone with me.” After Ben sleeps with Anna, he discovers photos depicting her S&M love life, and then begins using bondage gear with her. (What any of this has to do with the main idea of scientifically eradicating aging is a bigger mystery than the question of why Linden killed himself.) Amid the lab scenes and sexual shenanigans, Ben discovers that Anna is somehow connected to the enigmatic Nicholas Ulrich (Klaus Kinski), who was, in turn, involved with Linden’s experiments. The introduction of this character occasions another truly weird scene, during which Kinski wears a devil mask while going down on a lady friend—until the phone rings, at which point Kinski whines, “Now I’ve lost my concentration.”

          Lifespan is a very strange sort of conspiracy movie, meandering into carnal extremes and obfuscating central truths so completely that the actual narrative becomes opaque. Still, the picture has an abundance of skin and a certain amount of style—it’s a bit like the ’70s sci-fi equivalent of some ’90s erotic thriller. Better still, the crisp photography presents European locations well, and the electronic score by Terry Riley has an eerie quality reminiscent of Tangerine Dream’s music.

Lifespan: FUNKY

Count Dracula (1970)

The affection that horror fans of a certain vintage feel for Christopher Lee, the man who played Dracula in myriad offerings from Hammer Films, is such that even Lee’s lesser efforts with the horror genre are held in some esteem. Combine that with the admiration some people feel for the work of Spanish director Jesús Franco, a prolific purveyor of low-budget shockers, and you begin to understand why there’s a small but loyal following around Count Dracula. The behind-the-scenes story goes that Lee was tired of starring in repetitive Hammer movies about Bram Stoker’s most famous creation, so when Franco and co. approached Lee about starring in a “faithful” adaptation of Stoker’s original book, the actor saw an opportunity to do something more edifying than his usual fare. Unfortunately, good intentions only go so far. While Count Dracula hews more closely to Stoker’s storyline than most previous films, there’s a huge fundamental problem. Stoker’s book is written in the epistolary style, meaning that characters describe their emotions via diary entries and letters. Franco’s movie includes events without the accompanying nuances (there’s no voiceover), so the result is incredibly slow pacing. Characters walk around with flat expressions on their faces, speak in monotones, and react to startling sights with so little vigor that many scenes feel more like lighting tests with stand-ins than final footage with proper actors. Lee, whose reputation as a formidable screen villain is, ironically enough, predicated on the lurid excesses of his Hammer work, gives a genuinely boring performance here—glowering and stiff. Even costars Klaus Kinski (as Dracula’s mad accomplice, Renfield) and Herbert Lom (as the vampire’s rival, Van Helsing) deliver uncharacteristically drab performances. Clearly, there’s a good reason Hammer prioritized sensational thrills over loyalty to the source material when adapting Stoker.

Count Dracula: LAME

Woyzeck (1979)

          Iconoclastic German director Werner Herzog was outrageously prolific in the ’70s, generating eight narrative features and five documentaries. Given this frantic pace, it’s inevitable that some of his projects got short shrift, and Woyzeck is an example. Herzog sped into production on Woyzeck literally just days after completing the filming of his soulful horror film Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), using the same leading man, Klaus Kinski, and the same crew. As such, there’s a temptation to view the spare visual style of Woyzeck as a casualty of crew fatigue, especially since Nosferatu the Vampyre is one of Herzog’s most aesthetically lush films. Furthermore, the pacing and tone of Woyzeck lack Herzog’s usual lyricism, although his singular cinematic voice surges back to the fore in a climactic murder scene, which Herzog films with disturbingly ecstatic slow-motion. In any event, the themes of Woyzeck fit neatly into both the director’s grim filmography and the special body of work that Herzog and madman actor Kinski created together.

          Adapted from an incomplete play by Georg Büchner (which the author began writing in the mid-1830s), Woyzeck tells the sad tale of a soldier from a low social class who suffers humiliation at the hands of cruel superiors, a meddling doctor, and an unfaithful lover. On a deeper, metaphorical level, the protagonist also falls victim to the caprices of fate, God, or whichever force is responsible for his life of ignominy. The gist of the piece is that a basically good man can be driven to madness and violence by the emasculating machinations of society—exactly the sort of fatalistic material that Herzog and Kinski excelled at exploring.

          Set in a tiny German town in the 19th century, the picture tracks the myriad travails of Freidrich Woyzeck (Kinski). Belittled by his commanding officer (Wolfgang Reichmann), an aristocrat who considers Woyzeck virtually sub-human simply because Woyzeck is poor, Woyzeck is a scandalous figure because he raises a child out of wedlock with Marie (Eva Mattes). Later, the long-suffering soldier seeks aid from a doctor (Willy Semmelrogge), who prescribes nonsensical treatments such as eating a diet consisting solely of peas. Already prone to peculiar behavior, such as rushing through life at a hyperkinetic pace, Woyzeck succumbs to bleak delusions and eventually hears voices that give him instructions; this thread of the story culminates when Woyzeck receives “orders” to kill Marie, whom he learns is sleeping with a handsome drum major (Josef Bierbichler).

          Herzog never quite fully translates the allegorical, episodic nature of the source material into pure cinema, because much of the movie unfolds in long takes defined by a nearly stationary camera. Nonetheless, vitality of performance compensates for the lack of visual panache. In particular, no one plays crazy quite like Kinski. With his bulging eyes, flaring nostrils, and gleaming teeth bared like those of a jungle predator, Kinski is a vision of dangerous insanity in every frame, even when his character attempts to enjoy “normal” moments. The single act of casting Kinski gives Woyzeck innate credibility, even if Herzog’s script is mechanical and slight. This actor/director combination went to the same well many times, and most of their other efforts to chart the outer reaches of lunacy were more effective than Woyzeck. Nonetheless, whether it’s taken as a minor part of the Herzog/Kinski oeuvre, as a worthy attempt to complete a literary fragment, or simply as a bizarre study of one man’s descent into a sort of psychological hell, Woyzeck is a unique experience.

Woyzeck: GROOVY

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)

          Nearly a decade after their astonishing first collaboration, 1972’s historical allegory Aguirre, the Wrath of God, German director Werner Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski reteamed for this audacious remake of a silent-cinema classic: F.W. Murnau’s 1922 frightfest Nosferatu. In addition to being one of the titanic works of early German film, the Murnau picture is infamous because the filmmaker didn’t get permission to adapt his story from Bram Stoker’s classic novel, Dracula. To disguise the source material, Murnau ditched Stoker’s character names and replaced the suave bloodsucker of the book with a ghoulish spectre whose pale skin, pointed ears, and talon-like fingers added up to a horrific vision.

          Herzog’s remake retains the look of the 1922 vampire, but by adding dialogue and a script filled with weirdly humanistic nuances, he transforms the monster of the original film into a pathetic creature. As played by Kinski with a beguiling mixture of pathos and villainy, Count Dracula (Herzog reverted to Stoker’s character names) is a desperately lonely being doomed to outlive everyone he knows and fated to survive on the blood of the very people whose company he craves.

          In this context, an existential love triangle develops between Dracula, the German real-estate agent who travels to Dracula’s castle, and the agent’s beautiful wife. Dracula subsists on the agent’s blood, and then he falls for the wife, who in turn risks sacrificing herself to the vampire’s bite as a way of releasing her husband from supernatural servitude. Herzog captures this bizarre dynamic in an appropriately odd style, employing lyrical montages of the European countryside and long dialogue scenes to convey a sense of otherworldly ennui.

          Yet Herzog’s most extravagant flourishes are the scenes depicting the terrible pestilence that arrives with Dracula when the ghoul relocates from his native Transylvania to Germany. According to the lore surrounding this movie, Herzog let thousands of rats loose into the town where he was shooting because he wanted “real” shots of vampire-loosed vermin stalking the streets; in addition to irking animal-safety experts, Herzog was reportedly chased from the town.

          Whatever the circumstances, there’s no question that Herzog captured something truly singular with his cameras: Nosferatu somehow manages to be one of the coldest vampire films ever made and also one of the most emotional. Kinski’s eccentric performance dominates, but New German Cinema stalwart Bruno Ganz provides a stalwart presence as the real-estate agent, and fearless French leading lady Isabelle Adjani (playing the wife) nearly qualifies as a special effect. In addition to providing offbeat soulfulness, she’s so beguiling that it’s easy to understand why she drives Dracula batty.

          Take note that Nosferatu is widely available in two versions, which were shot simultaneously. The incrementally superior German-language version is called Nosferatu: Phantom Der Nacht, and the English-language version is a decent alternative for the subtitle-averse.

Nosferatu the Vampyre: RIGHT ON

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)

          Fearless filmmaker Werner Herzog and madman actor Klaus Kinski began one of world cinema’s most unique collaborations with the German film Aguirre, the Wrath of God, a hypnotic masterpiece that explores titanic themes of ambition, fate, lust, and the savagery of nature through Herzog’s singular prism. Although both men have allowed myths about their on-set friction to fester—Kinski went to his grave cursing Herzog’s name, and Herzog named a documentary about the actor My Best Fiend—the work they created is just as interesting as the apocryphal story about Herzog holding Kinski at gunpoint until the performer completed filming an Aguirre scene.
          Based on an obscure historical episode, Aguirre takes place in 16th-century South America, when a gang of conquistadors broke off from Pizarro’s legendary expedition to search for El Dorado, the fabled city of gold. Although an ineffectual nobleman is nominally in charge of the gang, the real power is psychotic soldier Don Lope de Aguirre (Kinski), who ascends to supremacy through attrition and treachery.
          Woefully unprepared for a long journey deep into the unforgiving rainforest, the conquistadors wear heavy battle armor and drive their native bearers to such extremes that several bearers flee into the wilderness every night, eventually leaving the Spaniards to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, Aguirre’s dreams of glory become more and more insane, until he imagines himself a living god destined to form an incestuous dynasty with his beautiful young daughter, Flores (Cecilia Rivera), as his bride. The story delivers Aguirre to a poetic fate, which Herzog presents in one of the most haunting final images of modern cinema.
          Although it’s imperfect from a technical perspective, Aguirre, the Wrath of God has undeniable power thanks to the relentless commitment of the director and the leading man. Herzog drove his crew nearly as hard as Aguirre pushed his people, and the auteur’s maniacal drive to film the visions he saw in his head produced startling results. Among the unforgettable moments in the film are the spellbinding opening shot, which features a seemingly mile-long train of men and women navigating a treacherous mountain path, and the heartbreaking scene in which a raft filled with explorers gets trapped against a rock wall by brutal whitewater rapids.
          Herzog’s storytelling is idiosyncratic and unpredictable, so he regularly stops the forward momentum of the narrative to linger on beguiling natural wonderments or peculiar human faces. Adding to the movie’s strangeness, Herzog recruited the adventurous German band Popul Vuh to record the score. Their overwhelming washes of choral sounds and electronic patterns give the film an elemental quality.
          While the bulk of the supporting cast delivers utilitarian work, Kinski more than compensates with a raging performance that’s genuinely frightening. His deep-set eyes and high cheekbones giving him a cadaverous mien, Kinski looks like a supernatural creature set loose on a sinful earth, destroying everything in his path. He becomes a living metaphor of hubris, and thus a perfect vehicle for Herzog’s nihilistic statement about the destruction wrought by man’s pointless war against nature. Herzog and Kinski returned to this thematic well many more times in their respective careers, but they never matched the raw incandescence of their first conflagration.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God: OUTTA SIGHT