Original title: La bestia en calore
Luigi Batzella’s contribution to the thankfully short-lived “Naziploitation” cycle of the mid-1970s has languished under the titles S.S. Experiment Camp 2 (cashing in Sergio Garrone’s Lager SSadis Kastrat Kommandantur (1976)) and Horrifing [sic] Experiments of the S.S. Last Days (that’s not a typo, it really is written that way on screen) but is perhaps best known as The Beast in Heat, a films so awful that Batzella chose to hide his shame behind the pseudonym Ivan Kathansky.
Whatever it’s called, what you get here is actually two terrible films for the price of one. Most of it follows the not-even-remotely interesting doings of a gang of partisans doing all sorts of tedious things to thwart the German troops occupying their village. This footage is culled from Quando suona la campana/When the Bell Tolls (1970) which Batzella directed under the name Paolo Solvay. The new material is notably a lot cheaper and follows the exploits of the sadistic Dr Ellen Kratsch (Macha Magall) who runs a genetics engineering program in a nearby castle. She’s planning to create a new “master race” but has so far only managed to come up with a sex-crazed Neanderthal (the extraordinary Salvatore Baccaro, credited here as Sal Boris) that she keeps in a cage and feeds on a diet of mega-aphrodisiacs. Female prisoners are violently raped by the beast while male prisoners are stung up and tortured, not just for information on the activities of the partisans but for the sexual gratification of the evil Kratsch.
The cheapest, most exploitative and most reprehensible of all of the “Naziploitation” films, The Beast in Heat plays like a vile, sexed up Monogram mad science thriller clumsily bolted onto a war film with lots of sex and violence thrown in. It’s chock full of gloriously awful dialogue, terrible dubbing (one young woman, subjected to the beast’s unwanted attentions, simply deadpans “stop, you’re hurting me…”), shaky science and mismatched footage – the scenes from the earlier war film were very clearly shot on superior film stock. There are also plenty of distracting narrative dead ends (where do all those villagers go when they’re rounded up by the Germans? Who threw that bucket of water at Irene?) and laughably over-the-top attempts to make the Germans look like unconscionable beasts that just makes them look like cartoon villains from a very bad comic strip (at one point they throw a baby into the air and machine gun it on the way down).
The partisan shenanigans pad out the running time between the excesses of the laboratory scenes which mostly involve Baccaro, mainly a comedy actor, gurning furiously at the camera in between eating pubic hair and brutally assaulting his hapless victims. Baccaro’s performance is quite remarkable, a no-holds-barred display of gibbering lunacy that one can only assume was fully encouraged by Batzella. We’re treated to repeated close-ups of him grimacing wildly in huge close-up but what any of this is supposed to mean is anyone’s guess. In fact it’s never clear what any of the new material is actually about. Things just happen for no good reason until Batzella gets bored and returns to his partisans.
It seemed for a long time like SS Experiment Camp was going to be the bottom of the squalid “Naziploitation” barrel. It still is. The Beast in Heat is the repugnant slime you’ll find growing beneath that barrel. It’s tawdry and odious but worst of all it’s dull. The partisan scenes ultimately go nowhere and the laboratory/castle scenes are so outrageously silly they too become tiresome very quickly. Dreadful stuff, even by the very low standards of this particular sub-genre. Batzella made a second “Naziploitation” film the same year, Kaput Lager – Gli ultimi giorni delle SS/Achtung! The Desert Tigers (1977) with Richard Harrison in the lead role.
When the UK market emerged for collecting original VHS copies of banned videotapes, JVI’s release of The Beast in Heat became one of the most sought after, thanks to its scarcity. Rumour has it that only a handful of copies escaped into the wild before the film was pulled from distribution and consigned to the “video nasties” list and copies were soon changing hands for ridiculous amounts of money, even after a fully uncut DVD had become easily available in the USA – in January 2019 one copy sold on eBay for £1,000! Some people really do have a lot more money than sense…
The EOFFTV Review 