Subscribe to watch - 14-day free trial, then £4.99 a month

Cobra Verde PG rating

Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog’s final collaboration is a typically wild and adventurous story of a bandit who trains an army of women to topple a slave-trading king

Drama 1987 110 mins

Director: Werner Herzog

Overview

The final collaboration in that most combustible of cinematic partnerships - director Werner Herzog and leading actor Klaus Kinski - is a typically wild adventure. Kinski plays ‘Cobra Verde’, a fearsome South American bandit hired to negotiate a new slave route with an African tribal king. Once there he inspires a mutiny, enlisting and training an army of female natives to overthrow the despot.

A typically fraught and challenging production, filmed in Brazil, Columbia and Ghana, was accentuated the now legendary explosions of Kinski’s volcanic temper on set, one of which led to the replacement of cinematographer Thomas Mauch with Viktor Růžička. The air of ever-present conflict and mania marks a fitting conclusion to the series of collaborations between two of cinema’s great eccentrics.