(1977)

 

 

aka: Horrifing Experiments of the SS Last Days (sic); SS Hell Camp; La Bestia in Calore; SS Experiment Part 2; Nazi Holocaust

 

Directed by Luigi Batzella (as Ivan Katansky)

 

Starring Macha Magall, John Braun (aka Gino Turini), Kim Gatti (aka Edilio Gatti), Sal Boris (aka Salvatore Baccaro), Xiro Papas, Brigitte Skay (aka Brigitte Johanna Riedle), Mauro Mannatrizio

 

Reviewed by Michael Bolvary

 

    Why is this my personal favourite entry in the glut of nasty Nazi exploitation movies?  Macha Magall, first and foremost.  As Dr. Ellen Kratsch, a lieutenant in Hitler's Third Reich, she commands the screen with every appearance--she is a Sadean mixture of a pretty face and an evil mind, and second only to Dyanne Thorne's Ilsa as queen of the cinematic SS dominatrixes.  Wasted in a throwaway role as a madam in Bruno Mattei's SS Girls, Magall makes the most of her role here a kinky, jackbooted, black-clad, sneering, sadistic SS officer experimenting with human physiology.  Her prize creation is a Neanderthal ape man played with totally unrestrained gusto by Salvatore Baccaro.  He is the first specimen in "the creation of an artificial master race," we are told, but all he ever does is beat and rape several unfortunate young women who are thrown into his hay-strewn iron cage.  Groaning and grunting barbarically, furiously pumping away like a human jackhammer, manhandling and throttling the women to death, Baccaro gives one of the most unbridled performances in the history of cinema.

 

    "What are you screaming for, you silly fool? After all, my creature's only showing you a little tenderness," Kratsch sneers sarcastically as she, her colleagues and several Nazi soldiers watch the Beast assault a naked girl in the film's opening scenes.  "Tell me, do you find the spectacle exciting, Private Schultz?" Kratsch asks a young soldier, unbuttoning his shirt.

    "Yes, of course.  Who wouldn't be excited?"

 

    He gets a slap in the face.  "Spineless fool!  A soldier of the Third Reich isn't supposed to get excited at any spectacle!"  Kratsch makes a spectacle of her own as she approaches one of the sexy female Nazis.  When she tells Kratsch that she thinks the experiment is excellent and that "I think you're a genius--you're wonderful," she gets a slow, passionate kiss on the lips from the good doctor.

 

    Had the entire movie proceeded with the same mixture of sadism and salaciousness of this opening sequence, The Beast in Heat would be one of the most deliciously hideous horror films ever made. Unfortunately, director Luigi Batzella spends far too much of the film dealing with a boring suplot involving the struggles of a group of Italian partisans.  Their leader is named Drago, and they spend most of their time running around the countryside committing acts of sabotage, trying to contact each other, engaging in mediocre battles with the Nazis, and exchanging lines of dull, unnecessary dialogue.  Only when Dr. Kratsch returns does the film regain its fervour: she is assigned by General von Kreuzen to assist Captain Harlinghauser in the capture and interrogation of partisan prisoners.  Her methods are exquisitely sadistic. Strutting before a group of half-naked POWs suspended from the ceiling, she calls out, "You're still able to look upon me as a woman, eh?"  Turning to Stefano Palermi, one of the captured partisans, she sneers, "Would you like to see your lovely wife again?  Or do you find me more attractive?" as she peels off her jacket and shirt and rubs her breasts against him. "You're just a bitch in heat!" he cries.  One of the men hanging next to Palermi gets excited: "Don't waste time with that boy!  I want you!"  He gets castrated instead.

 

 

    More horrors are in store for the prisoners.  In a hellish torture chamber, Kratsch and Harlinghauser oversee an orgy of atrocities: one woman is shocked with electrodes attached to her genitals; another has live rats put onto her bare, bleeding stomach; a naked man in hung upside-down, whipped and dunked head-first into a tub of water--and all the time the Beast is raping another woman to death in his cage.  In what has to be one of the most tasteless and pathological images ever put to film, he tears out clumps of her pubic hair, along with the skin--exposing the raw, bloodied flesh--and gobbles it down with ghastly relish.  The Marquis de Sade would have been proud to see that.

 

    What eventually happens to the hideous creature and his hideous creator?  That's the best part.  At the climax, Drago and his partisans invade Kratsch's outpost.  We see the Beast beating and raping another young girl while Kratsch watches in joy, screaming out, "That's it!  Go to work, my beauty!  Show us your stuff! Rape her! Show her no mercy!  You and me, we're going places!  With that dong of yours, we'll conquer nations!  Continents!"  But the girl somehow escapes from the cage and the Beast grabs Kratsch!  Now it's her turn to get stripped, raped and beaten--the ultimate in poetic justice.  Her agony is ended by Drago, who shoots both of them dead, in a mercy killing that's all too merciful.

 

    It's a shame that Kratsch and the Beast aren't given more screen time--all too often, Batzella cuts away to his redundant partisan subplot, further padding out the film with stock war footage lifted from his 1970 film When the Bell Rings.  These sequences are best viewed at fast-forward.

 

    Still, The Beast in Heat retains several strong elements: the score, by an uncredited Giuliano Sorgini, is especially memorable and distinctly disturbing--if more than a little anachronistic.  As a red swastika comes into focus in the first scene, we hear a piercing scream and a bombastic boom that sets off the theme music. (Incidentally, Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead begins exactly the same way, with a loud shriek introducing the booming, creepy musical score over the titles.  Did the opening of The Beast in Heat inspire the opening of Fulci's film?)  The bizarre electronic music creates a unique sense of dread, with the echoing synthesizer blasts packing a punch.  You'll want to hear this music, so don't advance through the opening credits--which only consist of the title, production company, four cast members and Batzella's pseudonym.  It appears as if more credits were going to be included, but they all got removed for some reason, leaving only the image of the stationary swastika as the music plays for a couple of minutes.  (This score can also be heard in Jorg Buttgereit's 1989 film Der Todesking, during a scene from a Nazi exploitation movie that a guy watches on TV.)

 

    We also get a healthy dose of the unintentionally hilarious dialogue that we all know and love in Italian exploitation.  Although we never hear anything as jaw-droppingly bad as "You bastard!  What have you done with my balls!?" in Sergio Garrone's SS Experiment Camp, we do get a couple of memorably ludicrous lines: "The Lord won't betray you--He's the best!" Don Lorenzo, the parish priest, says to Drago at one point.  Later, when Harlinghauser asks Irene, the village whore, where Don Lorenzo is, she says he's giving the Last Rites to a dying man.  "At this time of the day?" the Nazi asks, not believing his ears.  The best line comes in the torture chamber, as we see a young girl getting an obviously-fake fingernail yanked out with pliers.  "You're hurting me," she says with an absolute minimum of agony.

 

    Hilarious dialogue aside, we're also treated to some embarrassing examples of bad filmmaking.  My favourite? The scene in which the camera tracks up to a car pulling up in front of a Nazi mansion, and the shadows of the camera, the operator and an assistant are all plainly visible right in the foreground.

 

    I'll admit that The Beast in Heat isn't the nastiest of the nasty Nazi exploitation movies--it's not as sadistic and disturbing as Cesare Canevari's The Gestapo's Last Orgy or Sergio Garrone's SS Camp 5--Women's Hell, nor is it as well-made and lubricious as Tinto Brass's Salon Kitty or even Rino Di Silvestro's Deported Women of the SS Special Section.  Here, most of the Nazis are depicted as bumbling, incompetent fools (you'll laugh out loud as Harlinghauser takes a call from General von Kreuzen and lets his pants drop as he salutes).  Had Batzella made all the Nazis as vicious as Dr. Kratsch, and eliminated the partisan subplot, The Beast in Heat could have been a masterpiece of exploitation.  Instead, it's only occasionally disturbing (I was particularly disappointed that we never see Kratsch get it on with the female Nazi whom she so obviously had the hots for).  

 

    As it is, skip through the subplots and stop whenever Macha Magall or Salvatore Baccaro hit the screen--The Beast in Heat is one of the most unforgettable entries in all of Italian exploitation because of Kratsch and her creature.  The title could easily apply to both of them.

 

 

                                               3.5 Bitch-Slaps

 

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