We know we’re still a few days away from the week’s finale, and thus from the joys of Bad Movie Friday, but we couldn’t resist posting the trailer above. We’re in the midst of watching Werner Herzog’s My Best Fiend, a documentary about his rather insane working relationship with Klaus Kinski. From what we’ve gathered (and previously posted about), Kinski had a couple of screws loose; Herzog describes him as a total egomaniac, whose idea of perfect beauty was his own face.
We wonder, then, what the shoot for 1982’s Android was like. Kinski doing a thickly accented Dr. Frankenstein bit aboard a spaceship? With plenty of robot-on-human sex thrown in for good measure? Our hunch is that Kinski had his share of total flip-outs while bringing that crazy vision to fruition.
By the clips we’ve seen, the end result hasn’t aged well, even compared to such early ’80s sci-fi fare as Sean Connery’s Outland. The dialogue exhibits a certain Lucas-ian woodenness. But perhaps we’re missing out on some hidden Kinski genius.
Jordan // Jun 10, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Reminds me a bit of Heinlein’s “Time Enough for Love” when the computer Minerva asks Lazarus:
“Will you teach me about… eros…?”
But then Lazarus Long manages quite an odd assortment of couplings in that one novel. From what I can remember off the top of my head there’s the aforementioned computer (after the genetically engineer her a body), his adopted daughter, genetically engineered twin female clones of himself (just swap in another X chromosome!) and to cap it all off, his own mother when he travels back in time. Intergalactic pimp fo’ sho’.
Brendan I. Koerner // Jun 10, 2009 at 4:28 pm
@Jordan: As always, I’m operating on the theory that most sci-fi auteurs were undersexed as adolescents, and so infuse their plots with far more bizarre fornication than is really necessary.
Jordan // Jun 10, 2009 at 9:41 pm
@Brendan
Oh, no doubt. The difference in my mind when it comes to Heinlein is that he tries to justify it all as being O.K., sometimes even as right and proper. In retrospect such justifications weren’t nearly as good as I thought they were at the time (that being somewhere between middle school and high school), but they still had a pretty significant impact on what I believed back then.
exitr // Jun 11, 2009 at 11:59 am
Probably not news to you, but 1984’s “Creature” is another late Kinski sci-fi gem. Also popping into my mind from that era, though sadly (?) Kinski-less is the actually genuinely delightful Demi Moore/Cheri Currie starrer “Parasite,” which I can’t recommend highly enough.
Brendan I. Koerner // Jun 11, 2009 at 12:44 pm
@exitr: Wow, just looked up Parasite on IMDb. It looks truly awful, in the best way possible. If only the DVD version came with 3-D glasses…
Amazed by the creative output of the film’s director, though. Check out his body of work–240 production credits! And every single one a doozy:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0023929/
Speaking of Currie, BTW, I’ve always thought that her former bandmate Joan Jett’s performance in Light of Day was a gem. Too bad her co-star was Michael J. Fox–don’t buy that guy as a rocker for a single minute.