Gang rape, anal gang rape, animals being killed, drills going into people's legs and heads and arses, three year old boys having sex, heads exploding, a guy's chest opening up and biting another guy's hands off, Christopher Lambert's Scottish accent and
Mannequin 2: Mannequin on the Move. A short list of some of the things I've seen on celluloid that some would see as offensive, disgusting and immoral. They would be as well if it was real life but it isn't. Infact
The Accused, Irreversible, Apocalypse Now, Rest Stop, The Tin Drum, Scanners, The Thing, Highlander and even
Mannequin's god awful sequel have been released uncut by the BBFC. With the recent explosion of "Gorno" as a genre and some of the horrific gore scenes involved in
Hostel,
Saw and the like what does it take to have a film banned by the censors? Enter
La Bestia In Calore.
La Bestia In Calore (
The Beast In Heat) is also known as
SS Hell Camp, Horrifying Experiments of the S.S. Last Days, Holocaust Nazi, The Secret Armies of the Third Reich and
SS Extermination Camp 2. Not exactly a Disney film then. Depending on your viewpoint it's hard to see what can be bad/what can be good about a film with a plot revolving around a female SS officer who creates a beast to rape women in the concentration camp. There's boobies and gore and nazis and lesbians and other variations of your usual euro-gore cinema themes.
When the famous "video nasty" list came out a total of 74 were named at one point or another by the DPP (Department of Public Prosecutions) as obscene and anyone selling or buying one was likely to be prosecuted. Of the 74 only 39 were ever successfully prosecuted by the DPP. So how did all this come about?
Well when VCRs and Betamax first started appearing in the late 70s there wasn't much call for specific rules regarding home videos. The BBFC covered cinema releases and the only thing to cover what people watched at home on video was Obscene Publications Act. The problems arose when the definition of obscene provided by the DPP was applied "
[anything which will] tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it". It's fairly blurry in it's guidelines. It was also up to the chief constable for each force to take it as he saw fit. So whereas the head of the Met may see nothing wrong with
The Evil Dead his Kent counterpart may see it as an abomination. Films could be sold not five minutes from where someone else was being heavily fined. An example of this confusion was in Manchester where, at one point, the Dolly Parton classic
The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas lifted from a shop by one zealous officer and most officers hadn't seen
Zombie Creeping Flesh or
The Toolbox Murders and the grisly covers and titles were all they were going on.
There was mass confusion. If you were a video rentals shop and were making money from
The Burning you were also living in the fear that the film may come into the attention of the powers that be and you could be fined without any warning just because your interpretation of obscene was different from another person. In order to get around this the DPP created the video nasty list. Eventually the BBFC were given the job of classifying videos as well a cinema releases and they were, in general, a bit more conservative when it came to what could fall into the hands of children so films that had been released in the cinema, such as
Straw Dogs and
The Exorcist, were not given video releases. A total of 12 films are still banned outright to this day.
The Beast In Heat is, perhaps, the best known of them all.
The first thing that strikes you about
La Bestia.. is the production values. They're pretty good. Better than most Italian horror films of the time and good for genre. To be honest a lot of this film reminds me of one of Leonne's spaghetti westerns.
True to form within three minutes a pretty little red head is picked by the female officer, who clearly wants a bit of the subject for herself, to be flung in the cage with the beast. Who looks more like a hobbit than a rampaging sex beast.
Although we see The Hobbit rapist's wang on a few occasion's it's as limp as a cheese string fresh out the microwave, we don't see any penetration and, for all the screaming and thrashing about it's fairly tame. The camera mostly viewing the reactions of the officers and scientists in the room. I suppose the fact he keeps going after the girl has died is a little weird but his facial expression make this funny more than anything else. A female scientist and SS officer have a wee winch as well while watching. Eight minutes in we have rape, death, a little blood, nazis and lesbians and I'm enjoying it. That's all we get for another hour tho' as the "plot" develops.
It then continues to a story about Italian partisans, one who looks like Howard Moon, who are fighting a guerilla war against the Germans in the area. It's full of xenophobic stereotypes about Germans only wanting to fight wars and Italians only wanting to make love. Much to my own surprise, despite the poor dialogue, awful acting and the usual mix of dubs voices with accents from all over the globe I am interested in the story for some reason. It's far better than it should be. It should be truly awful and a chore to watch. It isn't. Alright guns are fired without any bullets coming out them or hitting anything, people who get shot sit down rather than die and as soon as any of the actors think they are off-screen they do the most hilarious things like look at the camera, talk to someone in the crew or start laughing. It doesn't matter. It's a nazi gore movie and I'd be disappointed if this wasn't the case. Of particular mirth to me is the Italian guerilla who appears to have had his lines dubbed by Basil Rathbone.
Eventually the Germans get sick of the partisans and start kidnapping the young women of the town. Leading to some interesting questions the director tries to raise about the human costs of the people they are fighting for who are left to face the oppressors while they sit safe in their hideouts. Perhaps the director wanted to make a film about the oft overlooked actions of Italian resistance during WWII and could only get funding if he turned it into an exploitation film, perhaps he thought he could honestly combine the two, it just seems out of place. Infact many of the scenes are from an older film of the directors called
When The Bell Tolls which might be worth looking out as it has the review on IMDb has the title "one of the worst movies ever made". The Germans need the incarcerated members of the resistance to talk and the lead officer uses her striking good looks to titilate her captors and then make the most of the situation with a big knife. They then unleash the beast on the women folk for a similar reason. The beast isn't the only item of torture in their arsenal and all the devices are aimed right in the baby maker for obvious reasons.
It's at this point, an hour into the film, the first scene to make me wince appears, The Beast rips off a clump of pubes and eats them leaving a bloody mess behind. It's pretty nasty but nowhere near enough to get the film banned.
The film was banned in a flurry of hysteria from the Mary Whitehouse Brigade and it's the complete and utter lack of point to the torture that does it. It's here only for the sake of showing torture and rape which is nothing to be proud of but neither is it worth being banned for it. It should never have been banned in the first place. So why is it still banned?
Purely because it's never been reassesed like other films have. Distributors have put forth other Video Nasties in the last decade to make some extra cash out of it but this one has been left behind. It's a slight shame for fans of Nazi exploitation films as it's pretty good for the genre. However even the classics in this genre are a big pile of crap. For 99.9% of the population, however, the fact it's still not available in the UK will have little to no impact in your cinematic choices. Get a copy from somewhere, get a few pals round with pizza and beer and you'll probably fucking love it.
As well as the title above the following films are still banned after appearing on the "video nasty" list:
Blood Rites, Devil Hunter, Forest of Fear, Frozen Scream, Gestapo's Last Orgy, Love Camp 7, Mardi Gras Massacre, Nightmare Maker, The Werewolf and The Yeti and
Women Behind Bars all of which have also went under a number of titles.
