In 1983, the Director Of Public Prosecutions published its first list of movies which were tagged with the tabloid-friendly label of Video Nasties. These cinematic outliers were deemed to have to power to deprave and corrupt and, if the title in question had been successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, any dealer stocking it could be fined or jailed. In one case, involving Romano Scavolini’s Nightmares In A Damaged Brain, one of its distributors was sentenced to eighteen months in prison (eventually reduced to six months on appeal, but sheesh).
It was a heady time, driven by moral outrage, framed as a battle for the very soul of the United Kingdom, and the seventy-two films that appeared at one time or another on that DPP list attained a level of notoriety their filmmakers never expected (unless, arguably, you were Umberto Lenzi). Thirty-nine remained banned, thirty-three were dropped from the list. All of them became must see items, of course.
As the memory of those crazy days fades and those of us who lived through the Nasties era scratch our heads and wonder what all of that hysteria was about, did those movies actually threaten the fabric of society as we knew it? Let’s take a look at one of them…
THE BEAST IN HEAT (1977, dir. Luigi Batzella)
*** THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS ***
In occupied Italy during the Second World War, S.S. officer Doctor Ellen Krastch (Macha Magall) has created what she hopes to be a terrifying new weapon for the Third Reich: a half-man, half-beast hybrid which is attracted to the scent of fear. As various local, naked, unwilling women are thrown into the beast’s cage for experimental purposes, a group of brave resistance fighters plans to fight back against their oppressors…
Where do you start with this one? Ejecting the DVD and throwing it in the nearest bin, then having my brain scrubbed clean wouldn’t have been such a bad idea. However, it’s a nasty piece of work, it was deemed a Video Nasty and hence qualifies for That’s Nasty! It does deserve some form of coverage, if only to flag up what a repugnant piece of trash it is. I didn’t actually see The Beast In Heat until a few years ago and only because the disc was priced at a whole five bucks in the Severin sale. I wasn’t paying top dollar for what I thought would be garbage and my instincts served me well.
As to the actual name of this, you can take your pick. There’s a Spanish certificate “S” caption before it all begins, designating it as El Bestia En Calor before the opening credit run has the title as Horrifying Experiments Of S.S. Last Days. I remember seeing a trailer for Horrifing Experiments Of S.S. Last Days – the Severin release at least appears to have grabbed a version which is spelled correctly – but the UK VHS dropped the mention of the S.S. and focused on the most sensational element of the tale. The rendering of the Beast on the cover artwork is absolutely rubbish, by the way, looking nothing like what you see on screen.
It was unlikely that I would have stumbled across it in the UK’s Video Nasties heyday, as the JVI release of the movie didn’t run to that many copies (possibly as low as just a few hundred) and none of the local rental places stocked it. It’s no surprise that the British Board Of Film Classification had conniptions when they clapped eyes on this one, slapping it with a ban that has not been tested in the intervening decades. Even now, my feeling is that a new submission to the BBFC would almost certainly suffer a few cuts, even if the general tone of the move is now deemed unlikely to deprave and corrupt.
Directed by Luigi Batzella, hiding behind the pseudonym of Ivan Katansky, The Beast In Heat is a clunky mash-up of lumbering war movie and tasteless torture flick, riding the coat tails of Ilsa: She Wolf Of The SS by casting glassy-eyed Euro babe Macha Magall as the embodiment of evil. Yes, there is certainly girl power at work, but not the sort you’d hold up in any kind of positive light as Kratsch watches her stumpy, hairy creation gurn, grunt and claw its way through a handful of stupid but unrelentingly grim vignettes. The scenes of non-beast-related persecution are similarly inept, but it’s all filmed with such a bankruptcy of spirit that I can’t help but get very judgey about everyone who decided that involvement in this project was a good idea.
The dubbing does dim some of the disgust by being bizarrely inconsistent, with Kratsch’s cut glass RP tones colliding with accents that would have been perfect in the sitcom ‘Allo ‘Allo. Some of the early going hints at broad comedy, with Kim Gatti’s Captain Hardinghauser rushing to take a post-coital phone call from high command and having his trousers fall down as he salutes the latest plans of his Fuhrer. Still, the urge to snigger at someone being called a “half-vit” is almost instantly obliterated as Hardinghauser’s men storm the nearby village, throw a baby up into the air like a clay pigeon and use it as machine gun target practice. This is what we’re dealing with here.
Away from the censor-baiting elements, the war film side of things is both preposterous and stupefyingly boring, as John Brawn’s heroic type Drago aims to disrupt rather than destroy, choosing to blow up key resources as opposed to taking lives. These key resources include a strategically important bridge which appears to be guarded by a sum total of two – count ‘em! – of the German forces’ most unobservant recruits. Drago waits until a trainload of soldiers passes across the bridge before blasting the structure to pieces, because he doesn’t want the mass carnage on his conscience and there’s no money for that kind of special effect.
The villagers versus Nazis battles rely heavily upon badly matched, crudely inserted stock footage from 1970’s When The Bell Tolls, also directed by Batzella. The shootouts are not only haphazardly edited but they’re generally bloodless, occasionally confusing and often at odds with what’s going on in the other half of the story. However, you do get an extended bombing run perpetrated by a model plane on a string. This is what we’re dealing with here.
Away from the model plane induced carnage, the Beast itself is played by Salvatore Baccaro, credited as Sal Boris, and it’s fair to say that he launches into the role with gusto, committing to the bit even in the tale’s most revolting moment as the sex-crazed monster tears out and chows down on a victim’s pubic hair. Using the word “offensive” doesn’t do it justice – it’s prolonged, gloating and thoroughly repellent, desperately dredging up the worst excesses of its excuse for a script to cover for the fact that anything that doesn’t involve the machinations of Magall’s character is a snoozefest.
This particular act is part of a chaotic sequence in which multiple folks are being tortured while The Beast does his thing. I’ll admit, this does briefly hit the queasy heights Batzella may have been hoping for, but the pandemonium is undercut by some weird, although technically practical, decisions, the most glaring of which is the choice of guinea pigs, painted black, cosplaying as rats who are attempting to burrow through someone. The underlying intention is undeniably sick but the execution is lazy and ludicrous, which for me makes it all the more repulsive and irresponsible.
In keeping with the pervading “war is hell” message, The Beast In Heat ends with almost all of its cast having been killed, including Kratsch, who ends up on the receiving end of ironic revenge as the resistance storms her HQ and chucks her in the cage with her creation before Drago applies the coup de grace to both monsters with a machine gun. The downbeat coda which follows seems to be aiming for some kind of profundity, but when you stop to consider so much as a few seconds of anything that’s gone before it, that kind of closer seems utterly ridiculous and certainly unearned.
Oscillating between tedious and obnoxious, The Beast In Heat ends up being a little too clumsy to provoke a full sense of outrage, but is also far too vicious to pass off any of its more grotesque vignettes as high camp. Magall is unquestionably beautiful and possesses an interesting screen presence but, predictably, even she can’t escape the gratuitous nudity and pervy plot points as Kratsch gets her kit off for the flimsiest of reasons. It’s her particular way of interrogating a prisoner, apparently. Yes, of course it is.
Considering how surprisingly tame some of the Video Nasties are, at least in the case of The Beast In Heat it’s blindingly obvious what caused all of the consternation when unwitting viewers dropped this in their Ferguson Videostar. Its effects work may fall mercifully short in depicting the cruelty of an invading regime, but conceptually it’s vile and Batzella’s heavy-handed treatment of the material does it no favours whatsoever.