La bestia in calore

SS Hell Camp (1977)

** (out of 4)

Naziploitation film has a wacked out female German doctor performing experiments on beautiful naked women. This is considered one of the more graphic naxiploitation films but I've seen a couple that are a tad bit worse. Like the others this one here is full of naked women, rape, violence, some blood and various "Hail Hitler's". The biggest problem here, much like the others, is that there isn't enough camp and there's way too many disgusting scenes including one where a baby is taken from its mother, thrown into the air and then shot.

"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.

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.

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'.

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!