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Nice effects though.

Just perfect...

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

This is being said with a very heavy heart, due to admiring Herzog hugely as a film-maker and to me Kinski gave some of his best work in his work with Herzog. Their previous collaborations ranged from very good to masterpiece status.'Fitzcarraldo' particularly is what cinema is all about, and 'Aguirre Wrath of God' is a ground-breaking achievement. 'Nosferatu', a visually stunning and quite riveting homage to the 1922 FW Murnau masterpiece, and 'Woyzeck', very powerful stuff, are not quite as good but still great. 'Cobra Verde' is certainly not an awful film and is watchable, but Herzog and Kinski's last collaboration is also their weakest to me and it's lesser Herzog overall too.'Cobra Verde' is certainly not without redeeming qualities. The best thing about it is that it's visually stunning, there is a sweeping majesty but also a stark but rich atmosphere making for some truly arresting images. The music score is suitably haunting and rousing.Kinski gives his usual intense and effortlessly charismatic performance, and there are some wonderfully sensual and surreal parts. Herzog has delivered more on the substance in other films of his but there is a little evidence of that here, and there is no denying that he delivers on the style.Sadly, the story is the least cohesive and involving of Herzog and Kinski's films together. 'Cobra Verde' is marred by a sluggish pace, that is not helped by having scenes that go on for too long, and by having storytelling that is chaotic and sometimes incomplete-feeling which doesn't make the film so easy to follow. It's not hugely lengthy (being under two hours), but this is the only film of Herzog and Kinski that feels too long and like the story was nowhere near enough in content to justify the length.Very little is done to make the characters interesting. The titular character is done in a way that's trademark Herzog (eccentric character in difficult environment) but too much of a pale shadow of far better developed variations of the same type of character in 'Aguirre' and 'Fitzcarraldo'. Some of 'Cobra Verde' also feels excessively overdone thematically and uninspired, good ideas for content but with not enough done with it.Dialogue here is the least thought-provoking and natural-sounding of their collaborations together, often sounding on the awkward side. None of the rest of the performances stand out in any way, practically lost amongst the wonderful images but messy storytelling.In conclusion, Herzog and Kinski's final, and weakest, collaboration together. 5/10 Bethany Cox

Watching a Herzog (or Kurosawa or Tarkovkiy among others) movie, gives you the feeling that awards and the critics reception don't mean a thing and the evidence or the reason why i start my review with these words is Herzog's "Cobra Verde" (1987). Francisco Manoel da Silva (Klaus Kinski) is a debauched Brazilian rancher who reluctantly goes to work at a gold mining company after his ranch is ruined by drought. When he discovers that he is being financially exploited, he murders his boss and goes on the lam to pursue a career as an outlaw. He becomes the notorious Cobra Verde (Green Snake), the most vicious bandit of the "sertao".The 5th of the five collaborations between HERZOG-KINSKI which by all means are on the same level as KUROSAWA - MIFUNE, MARTY - DE NIRO, HITCHCOCK - STEWART, FINCHER - PITT to mention some, is one of the finest and most underrated movie i've seen from the 80's."Master" HERZOG does his thing as we're used to his "freestyle story development" and style, while Klaus Kinski as Cobra Verde (Manoel da Silva) delivers a superb performance, to put it in a more conventional way, in this movie you'll meet the peak of KINSKI's acting.Cobra Verde is a controversial movie about slavery, perjury, madness, immorale etc. etc. This one belongs more on the group of Herzog's "FITZCARALDO", "AGUIRRE: THE WRATH OF GODS", "STORSZEK" than let's say "NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE" OR "VOYZECK" just to mention some. It's composed by a rich group of element starting from cinematography (The original cinematographer THOMAS MAUCH, had to walk out of the project due to KINSKI clashes) great acting by Kinski, great direction, the screenplay is on a level, but frankly it doesn't matter on a Herzog movie. It is really a misfortune that this movie went on unnoticed by the awards and it didn't end up where it belonged.It wasn't liked by Critics when it was released, probably due to its controversial subject (REMEMBER A 1969 MOVIE CALLED "BURN ! a.k.a. QUEIMADA starring the GREAT Marlon Brando).I HOPE that MORE PEOPLE WILL WATCH THIS movie AND NOT ONLY HERZOG OR KINSKI FANS.

Cobra Verde is the last time Kinski went mad for Herzog. He probably continued to be a raving lunatic to his end, but this was the last time something meaningful was siphoned through his madness. Herzog said that after the film was wrapped, Kinski was spent, he had given all he had to give. Kinski struggled with his delusions of grandeur in his own film Paganini, but for all intents and purposes this is the swansong. Strangely and fittingly this is reflected in the character he plays. There's colorful grim adventure in it but at its best Cobra Verde is a coming of age drama.This slavetrader incarnation of Aguirre has matured, the waters are stiller and run deeper, he's more ambiguous, as though the delusions of grandeur have been melted away by advancing age and we're looking at a broken human being who is probably past the point of being able to be made whole again, a man who went mad at some point or other but has made his peace with his madness.Here's a man who is a confessed criminal but not a raving monomaniac anymore like Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo; now he's the romantic who yearns "to cross over to another world". Perfect. Here's closure to a trilogy of sorts about different characters who could very well be the same person in different times.Cobra Verde does that, it crosses over to another world, it's a glance stolen over the bulwark of a boat off the African coast and through the bushes of the savanna and now we're peering at a small village of huts and cabins and wild black men are dancing a feverish dance around a fire, they're waving sticks around them, bodies shining with sweat, their movements odious and harmonical with some of the spasmodic suspended quality of a coiled spring, and then Klaus Kinski has his face painted black by figures with horned headpieces, his face is framed by unruly blonde hair so that he looks like a demon figure straight from Japanese mythology - for the black man the devil is white. Cobra Verde is all that, it's like an ethnographic document of something that may be even partly fictional yet feels wholy true in its savagery and otherworldliness, of something that was lost and now found again, it's not Discovery Channel's version of black Africa, it's like something straight from the pages of a Joseph Conrad novel, a bit sensationalist but also very mystical, with traces of something at once horrible and wonderful.We get echoes of Daniel Plainview at the beginning. Cobra Verde is digging for gold in Brazil, he's ruthless and vengeful. We enter an empty bar in a small pueblo owned by a midget and we get discussions about lost paradises on earth where the snow is light like feathers. Cobra Verde ambushes a palanquin and a mysterious black girl in a white dress gets out and dances a sensual dance.Now we're on a boat off the African shore looking at a deserted slave fortress through an eyeglass, inside the fort a tattered survivor of the black militia of the fort cackles mysteriously and we enter rooms filled with bats and crabs. The movie is very stylized so far, when Kinski makes an appearance in the plaza of the pueblo with his poncho and a rifle, he looks like he stepped back into a spaghetti western for a shootout. But there are also residues of mystery and nameless rage and violence that seem to come from a different place, destruction and abandonment, and the first hour of Cobra Verde is among Herzog's finest work, because all that is kept just out of sight.The African part of Cobra Verde is less, and maybe that is all Cobra Verde does wrong, that the mystery is peeled back and we're looking at things too much. We're looking at things too much like we're a visitor in a local tribe and the tribesmen are performing dances and chants for our benefit, they wave flags and stage fights, they crowd rooms and walk in lines. When the jungle showers down wooden arrows upon Kinski and his group in Aguirre, the attackers remain unseen. Here they're rushing out to meet us.It's all a bit like Herzog's tribal docu Woodabe - Herdsmen of the Sun with a Kinski protagonist and a little bit of plot.Another plot line is invoked at the last minute to make order out of the wild, something about the brother of the local king (one of the most fascinating movie characters of the decade, a man who constantly puts on a show for his people, he's parts cheeky badass, pompous buffoon, and stark raving mad) wanting to usurp the throne, and Cobra Verde leads his insurrectionist amazon army, but it's all a bit scattershot. The protagonist has matured but Cobra Verde the movie lacks Aguirre's the singleminded forward- pushing sense of a journey into the heart of darkness.Like with most of his movies, Herzog saves the best for last - another unforgettable image of a desperate Kinski, now the alonest of the alone, trying to tug a piroge into the ocean to get away from that godforsaken African shore. A crippled black boy afflicted with polio walks towards him across the shore, then pauses and turns. Here's a tragic man alone at his end now, an outcast beyond help or reprieve or even vengeance, and now he's truly ready to cross over to another world. This is heightened reality, it is Herzog's ecstatic truth, or in his words, sometimes truth comes out clearer out of fabrication.

For the last time, and not without likely good reason as evidence from Werner Herzog's own documentary My Best Fiend about his most frequent leading man Klaus Kinski, as well as from this specific production (the original cinematographer left after some vicious fights), Herzog put his trust into Kinski as a force to be reckoned with as far as leading an epic film where atmosphere and the nature of the society trumps plot. As with Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, the other Herzog/Kinski films in exotic locales with a character absorbed by the environment around him, Cobra Verde ends up being just as much about the extras as it is as its protagonist (or antagonist as it was with Aguirre). The visuals for Herzog, and capturing this African coast as the documentarian he is, are as original and strikingly designed as ever, and this time he even puts in the theme of class into the picture, with satisfactory results.Kinski plays the title character a little different than in the past films, because, perhaps, Cobra Verde, real name Francisco Manoel da Silva, isn't (as) crazy or after some mad obsession like building an opera house in the jungle. He's a peasant in Brazil who gets fired from his work in a gold mining company, and becomes a bandit after killing his boss. He goes from there to work for a sugar baron (Jose Lewgoy), who hires him as a supervisor, but soon finds out he's really a bandit, and impregnated his three daughters. The baron has a meeting with a few others and a plan is hatched- send da Silva to re-open slave trading in West Africa, a seaside village with many potential slaves (not tapped in ten years since none white have come back) still under the rule of a native king. Da Silva, of course, doesn't know what he's in for, and soon he's captured by the tribes-people, almost killed following being black-faced with mud (because, according to tribe law, they cannot kill a white man), and narrowly escapes the King's grasp, then after leading hundreds of women trained for battle for the slave trade, becomes the king himself.As one can imagine, this is another tall tale from Herzog, albeit this time from a novel, and it's supplanted in the filmmaker's interpretation of nature as something wonderful and very cruel (Herzog once was quoted as saying that he loved nature, but "against his better judgment). First it's the nature of a gold mining area, with lots and lots of mud, then with the exotic areas of Brazil where there is a lushness that inform the moral abandon Cobra Verde has in having his way with any woman he wants (one just randomly in a village early on, a little awkwardly). Then, most crucially, with the African tribe, and the castle that is meant to be da Silva's hold-up is in shambles when he arrives. The tribe itself first gets represented by an ex-slave that accompanies da Silva around, almost like a ghost with stories to tell, and then through showing physical things being done like the procession of carrying objects, sacks, in very long lines. Also the manifestation of madness in a civilization, even as small as this West African tribe, by how the king runs things, chopping off heads whenever, and with one slave who's own eyes are reminiscent of Kinski's. Then even more madness comes as Kinski's seemingly calm, observant stare is broken as he trains the women against the king- many, many topless natives who become as bloodthirsty as humanly possible- but then into one last movement of madness that da Silva comes to realize, which is slavery itselfAll of this is presented with Herzog in intriguing form, especially visually in symmetry: a line of slaves on a beach waving flags or in seeing the red head-covers the women wear during training crossing paths, or in just getting an intense close-up of Kinski's face. And Kinski takes on this somewhat complex character with the gusto he's famous for (his eyes, of course, are part of it with, who acts just as much if not more intensely with them than Pacino). Yet there's also a lack of urgency, unlike where it could be felt in almost every frame of Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo or Woyzeck. The message about slavery towards the end becomes preachy, except maybe for how it relates to da Silva with him not being able to escape his own fate. It also doesn't help that Herzog's focus from documentary form on the natives to narrative on da Silva doesn't work because of the storytelling-shift based on Herzog's interest in one side or another as opposed to coherency. This said, there are many haunting moments in the film that rank up as the director's best, especially the final images, which speak to not only the closing of one of the most unique collaborations between actor/director in cinema, but one that calls back Fitzcarraldo, as da Silva tries to push a boat out to sea, only this time without any dreams or madness.