Bestia in Calore, La |
Italy • 1977 • 86m •
  • Directed by: Luigi Batzella. • Starring: Macha Magall, Gino Turini, Edilio Kim, Xiro Papas, Salvatore Baccaro, Charles Borromel, Russel Case, Giuseppe Castellano, Brad Harris, Benito Pacifico, Alfredo Rizzo, Brigitte Skay. • Music by: Giuliano Sorgini.     A beautiful, nefarious senior female SS officer/doctor creates a genetic, mutant human Beast (half man/half beast). The Beast is a rapacious, squat, mongoloid sex fiend which she uses to torture and molest female prisoners while the Nazis watch. The vertically challenged beast is kept on a diet of mega-aphrodisiacs. There is plenty of sadistic titillations, gore and nudity in this Nazi sub-genre exploitation flick.
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Review:
"The Beast in Heat" (to use its more famous title) seems to be a low budget clone of "Ilsa She Wolf of the SS", but without a single ounce of the talent or budget present in any aspect of even that film's production. It's basically a very boring war movie in which we watch grumpy (and very obviously un-German looking) Nazi soldiers trade insults with civilians and members of resistance groups in some anonymous European village. Every so often some very obvious stock footage kicks in of planes and tanks attacking, which, apart from being obviously filmed completely separately, is also in a different aspect ratio to the main feature footage!! Yes it's that bad! This dull state of affairs drags on for 85% of the films running time and is enough to have you reaching for the fast forward after just a few minutes. Everything is awful - the acting, the script, the dubbing, the sets...one hilarious moment occurs early on when a railway bridge is blown up. I guarantee you've never seen anything so lame. I swear they had the camera zoom in wildly on a STILL PICTURE of a very small detonation and even added extra hand drawn flame effects directly onto the celluloid. If it wasn't for the unbearable tedium of the rest of the film, you could at least spend a few happy minutes laughing at this type of stuff.
But of course, somewhere in this mess lurks the reason for the film's true appeal - the scenes of SS officers torturing naked women prisoners. I'll give this film one (just ONE!) compliment - it does star a very foxy leading lady in the shape of Macha Magall, as the sadistic "Doctor Kratsch". Sadly no match for Dyanne "Ilsa" Thorne in the charisma stakes, but it's impossible to tell if she's any good as an actress due to the inept dubbing she is saddled with (along with the rest of the cast).
That aside, the "cruel" experiments that she is in charge of are real bottom-of-the-barrel trash. Making most shock value in the cheapest way possible is easy - have everyone naked. Right, what next? Well from there the flaws really start to pile up. The central "experiment" of the film is a sex-crazed dwarf that Dr Kratsch keeps in a cage, and whom she occasionally whips up into a frenzy of over-acting by throwing a naked woman in with him. What follows each instance of this is a montage of the worst possible face-pulling and general pantomime style rape attacking from the dwarf, and plenty of screaming from the hapless naked actress while she tries to look as though she is being overpowered by the crazed mini monster (rather difficult, as he is so small!) The camera zooms in wildly on splashes of too-red tomato sauce being liberally splashed about, as the beast carries out his assault. In one sequence, the dwarf even ups the outrage stakes by lifting his cross-eyed face from woman's lap to show a mouthful of torn-out bloodied hair...ugh! Don't worry, there's not even a hint of realism to any of this. All the while, Dr Kratsch and her attending guards watch silently, occasionally licking their lips in apparent arousal at the gruesome sight (I don't know where all the unusable footage of them laughing their heads off is, but there must be loads of it).
Realism fares no better in other scenes as still more naked prisoners are tortured, eaten alive by rats (yes they are gerbils), or have stuck-on fingernails pulled out, The dubbing in these scenes is the worst synched dialogue you have ever seen. "Stop it...you're hurting me..." the soundtrack burbles while a bored looking actress's lips move in completely unconnected directions. Even throwing a baby in the air for rifle target practise or shooting a naked woman directly between the legs can't raise a gasp with production values as low as these.
Due to the sparse placement of the torture scenes within the rest of the generally boring war and resistance action, it's rare for anyone to manage the feat of sitting through this rubbish to the bitter end, so should you fail, I'm sure you can guess the well deserved fate that awaits our cruel SS lady doctor...have a guess where she ends up. Sadly it's presented very half heartedly...you'll be only too happy to see the end of the film roll up on your TV. To realise that such a waste of space as this has been given a DVD release is more entertaining than actually watching the thing. They could at least have kept the original cover ( a hint of which can be seen in the lower left corner of the sleeve), it was a masterpiece of trash cinema promotion.
The irony is that the British politicians and press who campaigned for films like these to be banned have ultimately succeeded in prolonging their shelf life far beyond that which the films deserve. This should go back to the obscurity in which it belongs.
Review by adriangr from the Internet Movie Database.
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