La bestia in calore

Luckily by the time I put this film on I'd drank about six cans of Stella, which meant that when the shaky video to DVD transfer came on screen my brain was perfectly tuned to the trembling, wavery image that greeted me.

The Beast in Heat is a sleazy video nasty of the Nazi-sploitation type, which means lesbian action, pubic hair, rape, torture and all sorts of crap, poorly executed so much that it begins after a while (and several cans of Stella) to look like an episode of You've Been Framed.

The story? I can't really remember, but I'll describe the first scene. Some Nazi chick (I first thought her name was Dr Crash, then Dr Crap, but on the back of the DVD box it says that her name is Krast) throws a local Italian woman to some freaky pig-like creature, who begins to rape her. We get loads of close ups of his buttocks gyrating about two feet away from her body. And she has her legs closed. Dr Crap asks a German soldier if he's excited, to which he replies yes, and gets a slap for his trouble. Then Dr Crap asks this German chick if she's excited, and the chick says she's excited for the progress of the experiment, and she gets a kiss. Meanwhile, the Italian chick dies because she's begun to realise how this film will turn out.

This is classic exploitation stuff, and I mean classic in the sense that it follows the usual pattern these films do - you get some sleaze and violence at the start, then some boring bits, then more sleaze, then more boring bits, then the end of the film. In this film some partisans are brought in to pad out the story, along with a bumbling German officer. Not much of this is of any interest to anyone. In fact it seemed to me that my Stella-addled brain was switching off each time these guys were featured in a scene.

What I gathered was that one of the hookers who has really badly-staged sex with the German officer is a spy, and lets on to the partisans that there's some bad doings going down over in Nazi town, which involves all those Italian partisan chicks that keep disappearing. Things like being eaten by rats, tortured by Dr Cramps (did she have to do that topless?), and best (worst?) of all, having their fake pubes ripped off by the beast and eaten. Later I was lucky enough to wake up in time to see Dr Craptastic getting thrown to beast, and get her comeuppance before one of the crew got fed up making the film and machine gunned everyone on set, or something.

Crap acting, crap direction, crap transfer. Another video nasty that doesn't live up to it's name, and basically all it boils down to is another Italian hack aiming purely to make cash through some crap genre or other. I had a hangover the next day...or was it this film? I recommend that this film be played at every Church in Britain instead of mass. Every Sunday.

"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.

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

Luigi Batzella's "Beast in Heat" is a hyper sleazy and hyper hilarious and just plain sick nazi exploitation turkey that beats every other film of the questionable genre.The film rips so many other films and documentaries off it makes you laugh alone.There are many scenes of some war documentaries that have extremely bad picture quality.The same thing is with Bruno Mattei's "Hell of the Living Dead" that rips also everything possible off,including the Goblin score from "Contamination" and "Dawn of the Dead"."Beast in Heat" is also very graphic with its violence,mainly towards naked females that get abused and sexually violated as we can expect.Plenty of nudity and pubic hair ripped off and then eaten by the monster and so on.The film doesn't even have a credits in its beginning;I've heard that every member of the crew,including the director,wanted to take their names off from this film.Overall,"Beast in Heat" is surely wild,so fans of Italian exploitation won't be disappointed.

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.