User reviews

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

"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.

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!

Basically here we have just another tasteless, dull, haphazardly and carelessly slapped together Euro-sleazefest cheaply made to capitalize on the drive-in success of the ILSA films. This time, Dr. Helene Krast (Macha Magal), a blonde Nazi torturer, uses her gothic torture chamber to pump secrets out of innocent European villagers during World War II. Oh yeah, there's also a fat, naked, hairy, grunting guy (played by the same "Boris Lugosi" cat who portrayed "Ook" in FRANKENSTEIN'S CASTLE OF FREAKS) who paws, rapes and kills women thrown into his cell.

Endless nudity and violence are mixed with badly incorporated (and dull!) stock war footage, choppy editing and cheap, tasteless sadism. This is available on tape under various titles like S.S. HELL CAMP, THE BEAST IN HEAT and NAZI HOLOCAUST. The version I saw was entitled S.S. EXPERIMENT CAMP 2 (which was the original US video version and is probably missing some of the more explicit scenes). Even if it was heavily cut, I think I'll pass on the 'full' experience of LA BESTIA IN CALORE.

Score: 2 out of 10

Many revisionist historians have discussed the Nazi era, with fake claims of weasel pointing and duck larceny... at last! a film that manages total historical accuracy. On first viewing i mistook this fine film for the works of Goddard and Fellini, but on closer inspection realized it is far better. An allegorical tale about mad German women and hairy men who enjoy eating pubic hair. This is a lot of fun, especially for people in the baking or hunting industries. My uncle Phil claims he was the beast in the film, but he also eats live dogs so his opinions are not always valid, Bad films come and go, this one lasts forever, like most Andy Warhol films. Maybe i'm sarcastic or maybe i'm genuine. Watch this film and find out for sure because you will never see another film like it. If you have, phone up the guy who made it and swear very loudly.

SS Hell Camp AKA The Beast in Heat, an infamous (due to its inclusion on the Video Nasties list) Nazisploitation film by director Luigi Batzella, not only has a great title (or titles) but also features quite a lot of camp nastiness and glorious sleaze. Unfortunately, it also has more than its fair share of painfully dull moments, which means that the film is ultimately rather disappointing.

Nasty Nazi Dr. Ellen Kratsch (Macha Magall) is conducting experiments on a half-man/half ape creature (Salvatore Baccaro) as part of her research into creating a genetically perfect master race. Female prisoners are taken from a nearby village (which is also the hiding place for a bunch of Italian partisans that the Germans are keen to apprehend), tortured for information about the enemy, and then thrown into a cage with the sex-mad beast, who proceeds to rape and kill the poor girls.

As with a lot of other films in this genre, most of the violence is either too silly or over-the-top to really be that offensive; highlights of the film include a Nazi soldier who uses a baby for shooting practice, a woman who is eaten by a couple of ravenous guinea pigs (I think they're supposed to look like rats!), some torture via electrodes to the genitals, and, of course, Salvatore Baccaro's rampant slobbering sex-crazy creature (who, in one amazingly tasteless scene, bloodily tears the pubic hair from a victim's crotch and stuffs it in his mouth!).

Between these delightfully silly and outrageous moments, the film is padded with loads of unimpressive war footage from other films and a very tedious plot thread about an Italian priest (Brad Harris) and a beautiful female villager who are helping the resistance..

If you are a fan of the genre, and think you can manage to sit through quite a bit of boring fluff in order to get to the 'good bits', SS Hell Camp is just about worth giving a go.

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.

La Bestia in Calore (also known as SS Hell Camp, SS Experiment Part 2, The Beast in Heat and Horrifying Experiments of the S.S. Last Days) is one of the 74 video nasties banned in Britain. This film was not re-released and remains banned, as it should be.

This is Naziploitation taken to the extreme. The doctor (Macha Magall) creates a love machine to use in torture. This is a beastly looking chap that is hopped upon drugs and can have sex non stop. Maybe this is the stuff they advertise on TV today for sexual dysfunction. The idea is to get captured locals to reveal the location of the partisans, but nobody ever seems to get a chance to talk before they are f*cked to death.

There are many other methods used by these Germans including ripping fingernails, some nasty business with hamsters, and lots of whipping.

In between the sexual torture, there is a war going on between the Germans and the partisans. I believe this is some stock footage taken to fill out the film. It is not very good stock footage as they appear to use toy planes.

This film is strictly for those who like the Italian exploitation films of the 70's. All others will be repulsed at the extremely violent rape.

Another Italian sex-prison romp.

Naked and buxom women tossed in jail to be raped by a half man/half subhuman deviant. The title said it all.

As far as it goes, it told the truth. If one like naked savagery, see this. If you like beauty, avoid it. Reality? Ditto. None of that here. The women look OK, but in a seedy way.

Sal Baccoro (spelling?) plays the beast perfectly. He really looks like a cross between a gorilla and a rabid pit bull so it was no stretch. His look made him perfect for any monstermen the Italians may have needed. He had a blink and miss it cameo in Goddess Gemser's "Emanuelle In America" too.

If you must...here it is. But I don't think I'll watch it again.

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.

Beautiful and sadistic Nazi officer Dr. Kratsch (Macha Magall) has created a horrific mutant beast who she keeps locked in a cage, offering it POW's to rape and feast upon. She aims to use her experiments to eventually win the war, but first must deal with the Italian resistance. After blowing up a bridge that was one of the keys to the Nazi's strategic positioning, the resistance plans to move into action as a few of their army are caught and are being subjected to the brutal experiments.

Also known as SS Hell Camp or, more laughably, Horrifying Experiments of SS Last Days, this is one of many Nazi exploitation movies released in the 70's and 80's (commonly known as 'nazisploitation'), and was only made notorious due to its placement on the Video Nasty list. Otherwise it would have become as forgetful as the likes of Hitler's Lust Train and SS Girls. Inspired by movies such as Pasolini's Salo and Cavani's The Night Porter, both European art-house films, the nazisploitation sub-genre commonly consisted of brutal experimentation, degrading masochistic sexual acts, dominatrix female wardens, and generally being very, very s**t. The Beast in Heat does not disappoint in this department, although it is one of the few to truly live up to its 'nasty' title.

Not to say the film is effective in any way, but sitting through torture scenes such as a woman having electric shocks applied to her vagina, someone having their insides eaten by guinea-pigs, and a woman being raped by the 'Beast' who rips off chunks of her pubic hair and eats it, is rather unpleasant. This is repulsive film-making at its most desperate. It is so devoid of ideas or artistic flair that it must try to amp up the shock factor to the max to render itself memorable. The beast itself is actually just a pretty ugly guy with big lips, a stunted stature, and a boil on his arse. It's a film full of memorably awful moments, and it's unnerving to see a director so blasé about his work that he would allow a panning shot that clearly shows the shadows of himself, the camera and half his crew to remain in the film. Almost as bad as the Nazi party itself.

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A beautiful, nefarious senior female SS officer/doctor (Macha Magall) 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.

This film really has no redeeming qualities. A knockoff of "Ilsa", it tries to up the ante with more torture, nudity and general excess. Arguably, it succeeds in this attempt, but that does not make it a better movie. Director Luigi Batzella offers nothing interesting, and even has to pad the 86 minutes with footage from another of his films, "When the Bell Tolls".

Salvatore Baccaro (the "beast" of the title) has the perfect body for a character actor. He was in Dario Argento's little-seen "Five Days", s well as "Deep Red". Though his role in this film is reprehensible, this is really the fault of the script an those involved... in fairness to Baccaro, he is spot-on as far as being a crazed beat goes, so well played.

I consider myself a fairly open minded film fan, and don't tend to shy away from any particular genres or subgenres; but even though this is only the second Nazisploitation film that I've seen, I've got to say that it's a really useless sub-genre. The reason I saw this film is down to the fact that it's a proud member of the DPP's Video Nasty list, and just as was the case with SS Experiment Camp; I really shouldn't have bothered (and just to show how bad the aforementioned film is; it's not as good as this one!). It took five minutes for me to start clock watching, and I didn't stop until the boredom finally ended. The Beast in the Heat blends several uninteresting plot lines with a load of repetitive scenes of sex and shooting, and it's always clear that if there is a point to this film; it is simply to satisfy fans of extremely graphic and absurd cinema. The dual plot follows a female SS Warden who pumps a midget full of aphrodisiacs, and then performs 'experiments' with him and a load of naked women. The other plot follows some sort of rebellion.

The first thing that caught my eye about this film was, of course, Macha Magall. Even though she's in and amongst an infestation of disgusting and truly vile sleaze, she still manages to be supremely sexy, as she teases her officers and gets it on with several of her 'test subjects'. As you might expect, the stocking clad experimenter is the only positive element of this film; as the rest is incredibly dull. When I heard about the sex-craving dwarf, I was expecting some kind of cinematic monster; but the film even disappoints on that front, as all we have is a rather hairy man. To his credit, at least if the Nazi's decided to sack him - he wouldn't look out of place collecting bins or selling fish at market. The other plot which handles some sort of rebellion is even less interesting than the sex between the dwarf (more of a short man) and the buxom women. Even worse, Luigi Batzella didn't even have the decency to cast attractive women as sacrifices to the 'beast'! Overall, this film is crap whichever way you look at it. Nazisploitation fans (you know who you are) may find something here; but for the rest of us, this is worth missing out on.

I only wanted to see "SS Hellcamp, only because it's was on the infamous "Video Nasty" list. Yes indeed it's still banned in England, why I don't know it's all very Repelling, that SS Hellcamp is banned and "Spice World" isn't however. I wasn't at disappointed at all with this. I found it good and its thought provoking. There is some humor. If viewers find this offensive, then get a life and don't watch this. If you are into strange films than you'll love this. There is lots of sexy parts and action.

The Nazi's experiments on a half-man and half-beast. They also find female prisoners to have sex with the beast. The only problems once the half-man half- beast is that he kills them. The rebels get to fight the good fight and the Nazi's get. Karma is a bitch.

Some very watchable graphic scenes of full frontal sex and brutal violence have to compete with war footage from other movies, crap dialogue (as the third finger nail is removed: 'Hey, that hurt') and a nonsensical structure. It has to be said that Macha Magall is one of the better looking female Nazi leaders and her idea to inject men to make them rampant at least affords us of the opportunity to see the freakish Sal Boris raping his way through the entire film. The film is unredeemable and at times (attempting pathos!) plain stupid but undeniably it certainly doles out large portions of that good old S and V!

"SS Hell Camp" is just another exploitation flick of the late 1970s that combines naked women, torture and Nazi war crimes. It seems that exploitation directors of the 70s thought that SS experiments were good fodder for sleazy films and an excuse to torture beautiful naked women. A classic in this genre was "Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS." After "Ilsa" it seems that quite a few exploitation directors caught the Third Reich buzz and started making movies about the depravity of the Nazis.

The plot is simple (as is the case with most exploitation fare), Dr. Kratsch is conducting secret experiments to create a new race of people using a Neanderthal man and injections to arouse his passions. She routinely has her experiment rape young women, I'm not really sure if the man is supposed to impregnate them or what because most of the time they seem to end up dead afterward. However, the Italian partisans are making an inept German army officer's life miserable, so Dr. Kratsch is called in to assist him in finding out the partisans' hiding place. All in all the plot is really not important anyway.

The film was mostly unremarkable because about all that happens is some torture, some sex and some explosions and fighting. If you're not a hard core exploitation viewer don't even bother.