WARNING: Some content in this review may be offensive to the squeamish. You have been warned!

A passage from the autobiography of the insane German thespian Klaus Kinski:

“After Cannes I go to Hollywood to make a mindless flick for Golan. I’ve gotten my entire salary in advance, and so I have to swallow the repulsive pill – like it or not. There’s also some other American crap, with Ornella Muti as my wife, and directed by James Toback. But at least Jimmy gets me girls.”

And another, this time about Werner Herzog, the only director who worked with Kinski more than once, and whose films (including Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, and Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht) are the ones that Kinski is best remembered for:

“Herzog is a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, cowardly creep. His so-called “talent” consists of nothing more than tormenting helpless creatures and, if necessary, torturing them to death or simply murdering them […] He should be thrown away alive to the crocodiles! An anaconda should strangle him slowly! The huge red ants should piss in his lying eyes and gobble up his balls and his guts!”

Kinski Uncut (originally published under the priceless title All I Need is Love) is about as hideous a show business autobiography as you’re likely to read. It alternates between rage, pornography, and sloppy attempts at self-analysis. The book is written in the present tense, with no dates to clarify when these events are taking place. There isn’t much order or shape to the book – no rising interest or coherent sense of structure, just a long, foul ramble. But this is one fascinating document.

The book begins with Kinski as a poor child in Berlin, described by Kinski in a way that would rival Dickens. Early in the book, Kinski has his first sexual experiences…with his sister. But the kid’s a quick study and pretty soon, to use his immortal phrasing, he “fills every hole” he can. The book goes on to cover Kinski’s time in the army, his early stage and screen work, his subsequent fame, and, unintentionally, his increasing misanthropy.

The most startling thing about the book is the sheer amount of sex. Kinski devotes so many pages to detailing virtually every one of his conquests that one can only wonder what in his personality supposedly attracted so many women towards him. He goes into such agonizingly clinical detail that it gets fairly nauseating, and the majority of these encounters lack a certain ring of truth (such as…oh, I dunno…the part where he claims to have bedded Idi Amin’s daughter). Kinski, in his descriptions, doesn’t make sex sound terribly pleasant. But as the book progresses, it becomes clear by his preoccupation with the subject that his crude, angry version of the act may very well have been his only real medium of self-expression, or therapy.

Between everything else are the passages on Kinski’s fourth wife Minhoi and their child, Nanhoi. Kinski becomes embarrassingly emotional during these moments, saying how he only lives and works for Nanhoi and going on in great detail about the depth and scope of his love. These sections give the book a strangely schizophrenic feeling. Kinski also gives some attention to his daughter, the actress Nastassja Kinski, but not nearly as much as to Nanhoi. Gee, I wonder if she minded.

Surprisingly, Kinski spends very little time on his films – probably just as well, considering how bad the majority of his 200+ movies are. The production of Aguirre is the one that is given most attention, and the rest of his Herzog collaborations are written about to some extent except for the last one, Cobra Verde (on which Herzog and Kinski had their much-discussed final falling-out). Kinski talks about Venom (the film he turned down Raiders of the Lost Ark for), and there’s a really vile section about Fruits of Passion, a film in which Kinski performed unsimulated sex, but he skips over most of his filmography, usually referring to a film as “some piece of shit.”

The book was originally published in 1988 under its original title, All I Need is Love, but was quickly pulled from store shelves after many potential libel suits were brought up, including from Kinski’s family and from Marlene Dietrich, who at one point Kinski refers to as a lesbian. The book was re-released in 1997 after both Dietrich and Kinski’s deaths as Kinski Uncut, and has become something of a cult favourite among fans of Kinski and the types of people who would drive slowly past traffic accidents.

In various interviews and even his own Kinski documentary (My Best Fiend), Werner Herzog has dismissed Kinski’s autobiography as essentially fiction, with lurid details added to pump up sales. Kinski, according to Herzog, grew up in a comfortable middle-class environment, and his sexual misadventures were grossly exaggerated. And the bile directed towards Herzog? Herzog claims that he helped Kinski look up particularly nasty words and phrases.

What does this prove? Herzog would probably like us to believe that it means the book is a fraud – 336 pages of cruel lies and distortions. That it is essentially a work of fiction is probably true. But in a weird way, the very fact that an actor of Kinski’s stature would fabricate these events, write them down, and put his name on the cover makes Kinski Uncut more painfully revealing than any other celebrity tell-all I can think of.

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To read Kinski’s last interview, click here. You’ll be glad you did.