#hamster with camp half blood shirt

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aparently nico doesnt appear until the son of neptune :(

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Viddying the Nasties #35 | Love Camp 7 (Frost, 1969) & The Beast in Heat (Batzella, 1977)

Most notable for being the first Nazisploitation film, Love Camp 7 follows a pair of Allied spies as they go undercover to rescue a rocket scientist. The rocket scientist is imprisoned in a brothel used to service German army officers during their downtime, so the spies, experts in memorization, karate and a bunch of other things I didn’t bother to note down, will have to fuck and suck their way to victory for the Allies. As one character puts it succinctly, “I can't guarantee you will love Love Camp 7, but I can guarantee you will love in Love Camp 7.” What follows is an hour and a half of rape scenes where flabby men keep their pants on, shot with twisting cameras for visual interest, punctuated by the occasional bit of torture. The prisoners are violated by a butch lesbian-coded doctor, one of them is forced to sit on a wooden wedge (the “seat of honour”) for several hours, the rest of them are forced to hold up buckets, a bunch of beatings and other fun stuff. In contrast to the last movie in this genre that I watched, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, this feels more like a women-in-prison movie with different set dressing than something really exploiting the Nazi regime for thrills. The tortures, while not exactly pleasant, are a lot more mundane in conception, which also means that it makes for a pretty bland viewing experience.

There’s also the problem that many of the actors have similar appearances, including two Nazis who resemble Dom DeLuise and seem to have studied Dick Shawn’s line delivery in The Producers, so it’s hard to follow along with any reasonable level of engagement. One could argue that this makes a statement about the banality of evil, but I’m not sure the filmmakers here intended for their movie to be entirely free of excitement. There are shreds of interesting ideas here. An early scene finds the prisoners hosed and attacked by dogs, borrowing the imagery of police brutality against civil rights protesters. There’s a sympathetic guard whose motivations directly reference the following orders defense. But these are explored basically for the amount of time it took me to write out these sentences. The bloodbath of the climax is directed halfway effectively, but otherwise this is a thoroughly dull affair. I associate older Canadian productions with a certain coziness (evident in such classics as Black Christmas and Rock’n’Roll Nightmare and nicely subverted in David Cronenberg’s early films), but this movie just looks dingy and frugally made. Might be worth a viewing for curiosity’s sake or completist interest in producer David F. Friedman's career, but those looking for a remotely engaging viewing experience should steer clear.

The Beast in Heat follows the Ilsa template fairly closely. There’s a sexy Nazi scientist/torturer played by Macha Magall who subjects her prisoners to cruel experiments to create an “artificial master race”. These experiments mostly consist of the prisoners being raped by the “beast” of the title, a monstrous mutant created through her experiments who just wants to fuck and do little else. The beast is played by Salvatore Baccaro, an actor who had a distinct look thanks to his acromegaly, so I realize it’s probably a bit insensitive to comment on his character’s appearance, but the combination of make-up and wide-angle close-ups maximizes his character’s repulsiveness. The rape scenes are shot similarly, and a pan over his buttocks made me suddenly thankful that the rapists all kept their pants on in Love Camp 7. There’s an especially unpleasant scene where he tears off and eats a victim’s pubic hair while the female guards watch and lick their lips, and folks, I gagged a little. Other tortures include the pulling of fingernails, the electrocution of genitals, and a scene where a bunch of hamsters crawl over a victim’s bloody stomach. (I think they are supposed to be rats.) At one point Magall takes her shirt off and feels up a prisoner to try to get him to talk, and folks, this is a torture I could probably withstand. She also castrates another prisoner right after, so that I could probably do without.

While all this is going on, Italian partisans are rising up against the Nazis, and truth be told, these scenes are halfway engaging. The shots of the Italian countryside and the use of what looks like an actual castle (or a decent enough set standing in for one) gives this movie a level of production value absent in the other films I’ve seen in the genre. This resistance footage is recycled from another film from the same director, and as can be expected when trying to combine two unrelated movies into one, there’s very little narrative momentum to be found. As exceedingly vile as the tortures depicted in the movie are, they also become exceedingly dull quite quickly, devolving into a cacophony of badly dubbed screams in the climax, which features a numbing amount of nude bodies and fake blood. I was not unmoved by the scene where a topless Magall rubs up against a prisoner, and as a straight male I won’t deny that she’s easy on the eyes, but frankly, she’s no Dyanne Thorne and lacks the presence to carry this movie to any level of watchability. At one point her character chews out a guard for enjoying the proceedings, but that’s not a problem she would have with most viewers. Easily skippable, unless you want to see how unpleasant a movie can get while being boring as shit.