After months of doing this feature, we started to wonder:  are we being Europhobic?  Are our America-centric viewing habits getting the best of us?  Are countless Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians snubbing our film blog because of our unwillingness to feature beloved character actors from the Continent in That Guy!?  Well, that ends today.  For today we feature, as the lead singer of Korn gracefully put it, "the man with the fucked-up eyes":  Mr. Udo Kier.  Wherever he goes, Udo (as is befitting a man named Udo) is a candidate for the strangest man in the country.  He has played a vampire or a zombie at least a dozen times, and he is likely the only actor in the history of the world to have appeared in films by Gus van Sant, Ranier Werner Fassbinder, Lars von Trier, Andy Warhol, and Rob Zombie.  Resembling nothing so much as a Helmut Newton photograph come to some semblance of three-dimensional life, Udo Kier -- who was born in Germany and almost died hours later when Allied bombers pulverized the hospital in which he was born -- cannot rightly be called a character actor so much as he can a cult actor.  Whether he's going to be a leader or a member of that cult depends on the role.  Truth be told, Udo isn't even one of the finer actors we've featured in this space; his presence in a film isn't so much a promise of a gripping performance to come as it is a dire warning that something very, very fucked up is about to happen.  He's appeared in a staggering number of films -- as many as 150 at last count -- and it is putting it extremely mildly to say that they range greatly in quality.  He was in Berlin Alexanderplatz; he was also in Spermula, a movie that we assure you we are not making up.  He was in Dogville; he was also in Barb Wire.  He has worked with some of the most talented American and European directors of the last half-century; he also put on a spanking costume and posed in Madonna's "Sex" book, and smeared fresh animal offal over his face at the behest of Paul Morrisey.  What will he do next?  Believe us when we say that a man who has been directed by both Quentin Tarantino and Uwe Boll within the last year is capable of anything.

Where to see Udo Kier at his best:

ANDY WARHOL'S DRACULA (1974)

Nowadays, Udo's reputation as an actor hinges largely on showing up on set and, when someone points a camera at him, very quietly acting like a creepy weirdo who manages to freak you out just by standing there.  Back in his early days, though, it hinged on getting in front of the camera and acting like a complete and utter lunatic, as he does in this campy, ridiculous, so-bad-it's-horrible Paul Morrissey production (the only thing Andy Warhol did for the movie was write a check).  Listen to him intone "The blood of these whores is killing me!" and you'll begin to understand why Udo Kier, in the first of his many vampire roles, is a very odd person. 

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

As he often does when left to his own devices, Udo, like some sort of exotic species of spider crawling across your dinner plate, practically steals the show out from under such powerhouse hitters as River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves by doing little more than showing up.  In Gus van Sant's daring modern-day quasi-Shakespearean drama of narcoleptic hustlers, Udo turns up essentially playing himself, a Euro-trash hustler who tools around town with his eyes bugging out and making bizarre things happen.  Udo doesn't even really have to act here:  he just appears on screen and the whole audience starts having a spasm.

SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE (2000) 

Udo Kier, as previously mentioned, has spent an awful lot of time portraying vampires, for reasons known only to himself and probably best kept that way.  In Elias Merhige's inventive retelling of the filming of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, Kier goes against type and actually plays off of the undead rather than playing them.  Seeming to conjure up a bizarre mix of Renfield and Gollum with a hefty dose of nitrous poppers thrown in for an extra frisson, Udo actually manages in a minor role to throw in some acting chops the likes of which we hadn't seen since Europa, just to prove he could do it.