La bestia in calore

This is one of many so called Video Nasties about fictionalised World War 2 Nazi POW camp atrocities. The film focuses on a senior female SS officer who has created a half man/half beast dwarf creature in a bizarre genetic experiment. She goes on to torture the female POW's in her care by giving them to the vertically challenged beast who subsequently "bonks" them to death. The SS officer has the tables turned on her at the films climax when the POW's get the upper hand and give her a taste of her own medicine. This film has a load of vile scenes and genital torture. Another video nasty that can actually be called 'nasty'.

"SS Hell Camp" starts of rather promisingly. In the opening scene we're introduced to an evil Nazi doctor (German actress Macha Magall, playing the role with gusto) AND a weird ape-man creature who has become extremely sex- crazed due to various unspecified experiments. So the idea is that they throw any girl who doesn't collaborate into his cage, so he can awkwardly hump her (without an erection, but why do I check?) until she somehow dies. To me that's a good enough gimmick for 80 minutes of Z-grade schlock, but writer/director Luigi Batzella is a lazy, lazy man. In 1970 he made a war movie called "When The Bell Tolls" that nobody saw, so he figured...why not splice it into this one, almost entirely? If you don't know that in advance, this is a really confusing mess. The war scenes come out of nowhere, but they end up making up more than half of this movie. It's so glaringly obvious that Batzella is just using these scenes as padding, while you just want to find out what's going on in the torture chamber (spoilers: torture). So you get fifteen minutes of terrible, yet delightfully cheesy fun and an hour of intensely boring "sub-plots" that barely pretend to be from the same movie.

The main saving grace of this movie is the aforementioned Macha Magall, an unknown actress that made her last movie in 1982. For shame, because she finds the perfect balance between attractive and freightening. She's certainly an interesting screen presence, but because of Batzella's penny-pinching our lead actress is actually barely in this movie. She deserved to be in much better projects than this, but somehow never really made it into the mainstream. Then again, I guess the lack of a real legacy or any other background information does give her some kind of mystique.

If one can overlook the gratuitous nudity, lengthy rape scenes, and nasty tortures, La Bestia In Calore does provide solid entertainment for those who enjoy particularly inept cinema. Muscleman Brad Harris stars as a priest involved with Italian partisans and provides the film's best line as he sends the resistance off to battle: "trust in the Lord! He's the BEST!" Stock footage from better films with decent budgets is easily discernible, as are toy planes that periodically bomb our heroic partisans--one of whom bears an uncanny resemblance to Saddam Hussein. The award for best torture device must surely go to the 'death by hamster nibbling' sequence, and of course all the actors--including those playing the Nazis--sport truly atrocious 70's hair. Unforgettable!

In theory, the Nazi-sex cycle of exploitation cinema should be an absolute winner. Not only are all these films based on spectacularly non-PC and offensive plot premises, but by their very nature they give plenty of opportunity for the film-makers to work in scene after scene of gore, nudity, sex, and combinations of the three. Of course, as any seasoned Euro-exploitation fan knows, it is very rare that ANY so-called "video nasty" lives up to the promise of its garish title and plot outline, and in practice, there is nothing that displays this more succinctly than this genre. The Nazi-sex films are ineptly made, dull, boring, and not nearly as offensive as they should be.

Saying that though, THE BEAST IN HEAT does at least enough to raise itself above other dross such as SS EXPERIMENT CAMP. Badly made and boring it might be, but the comedy of the caged "beast" is enough to keep you watching (even though its appearances are few and far between). The nastiest gore surfaces at the very end, and although it's all quite unpleasant in theory (particularly the moment where the "beast" tears chunks out of an unfortunate victim's mons pubis and gobbles them up), the absolutely dire standard of special effects leaves this whole affair more in the niche of BLOODSUCKING FREAKS than MEN BEHIND THE SUN...

Not really worth bothering with unless you are an enthusiast of this sort of thing. "Fans" of this particularly surreal thread of exploitation would be well advised to dabble in the seedy climes of the closely-related "Women In Prison" cycle, because the best of that genre beats this type of gubbins hands down.

I jotted down some notes about Luigi Baztella's BEAST IN HEAT, which is easily the cumulative apex of both the Italian Nazi Exploitation idiom and Euro War sub-genres all wrapped up into one:

1) The movie is an exercise in applied bad taste ranking up there with Umberto Lenzi's CANNIBAL FEROX or maybe PAINT YOUR WAGON as one of the silliest movies ever made about a potentially serious subject. Anyone who is offended by it is too stupid for their own good, and I wonder how they might get through the day without hurting themselves or accidentally blowing something up.

2) During WW2 there was apparently an ultra-secret Nazi medical experiments division headed by outrageously sexy female bisexual dominatrix type Gruppenfuhrers (here personified by the undeniably arousing Macha Magall, in grave need of a proper spanking for being so naughty) who looked great strutting around in Nazi regalia and spent many hours perfecting the act of crossing & uncrossing their garter/hose encased legs, sexually harassing their subordinates, and sucking on phallic cigarette holders. We are lucky we won.

3) The star of the film is Monkeyboy (veteran character actor Salvatore Baccaro, who was able to convincingly play simian characters without any special makeup or costuming), a name given by one of my drinking buddies to the half ape half man crossbreed creature injected with a serum that enhances it's libido to the point where the thing just exists to hump whatever females are thrown into it's cage. The Nazis then stand around and watch the proceedings while taking notes. Just what they hope to achieve by this experiment -- and just how they cross bred an ape with a human so quickly -- is sadly never addressed during the film's duration.

4) The movie is actually 2 or 3 or 4 movies edited down into about 85 minutes of screen time. The most watchable segments of Mr. Batzella's truly awful 1970 Euro War failure WHEN THE BELL TOLLS with Brad 'Zambo' Harris are combined with newsreel and stolen war movie footage to pad out the approximately 40 minutes of stock exposed for the principal action of the film. Harris must have taken a swing at Mr. Batzella after being informed he was included in this film & viewing the results, and be sure to check out how one character's hair style and costuming changes between scenes taken from one or the other project. Seven years really is a long time.

5) Nazi storm troopers often amused themselves by tossing babies into the air for target practice with their Italian made Baretta machine guns. They may have been evil dirtbags but they knew a good time when they saw it and managed to find a few laughs in between extermination roundups, where the first thing they would do would be to separate out all of the young hotties to be molested by their lesbian dominatrix Gruppenfuhrers. Talk about rank having it's privileges.

6) The film is an extension of the Italian Euro War agenda of painting the Italians not as Nazi collaborators who eventually wizened up but as the Good Guys. This is done not by depicting their own story of coming around to the program of stopping totalitarianism, but by painting the Nazis as the most evil, vile, depraved menace possible with one War Is Hell sequence after the other. The Italians may have been bad but they weren't as bad as the Nazis, and this movie is part of their proof.

7) Guinea pigs will consume the intestines of attractive Italian B movie actresses when placed on their abdomens.

8) Monkeyboy totally rulez this movie, and his climactic encounter with Macha Magall has a kind of Hitchcockian inevitability to it that wraps everything up. The best way to watch BEAST IN HEAT is to glom onto the DVD version so you can fast-forward through the filler material and concentrate on the scenes of Nazi depravity -- which is the whole reason to watch it in the first place -- since the history being depicted is about as realistic as a Three Stooges short. A Cliffnotes version of BEAST IN HEAT should be executed, distilling the film down to it's core 40 minutes of nonstop hilarity.

9) The main reason that the Nazi Exploitation idiom is viewed with such disdain is due to the subject matter, which many have deigned to be "sacred". The Video Nasty label wasn't applied here so much for gruesomeness or sexualized content, but for the attitude of daring not to take the subject of Nazi war atrocities with the seriousness it is due. And it bears repeating again that anyone who is offended by this movie is probably a moron for having chosen to watch a movie called SS HELL CAMP it in the first place. If you want to watch something serious about Nazi atrocities dial up the History Channel next time for Pete's sake.

In closing, someone whom I discussed this film with asked me if I actually thought what was being shown really happened, and my immediate reply was of course it was all real. Just like FARENHEIT 9/11 or AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, here is one of the great documentaries of all time, proving once and for all that Italian genre cinema is a fool's paradise. It may not be very well made or pack a social wallop, but it sure is a hell of a lot of fun when consumed in the presence of your friends with plenty of beer.

3/10