I’ve been sick for the last few days. Not really sick, just a cold. No big deal. It did get me thinking, however, about the last time I was
sick. Back in September, just before
Netherworld started, I got sick.
Profoundly sick. Fever, chills,
hacking up chunks of lung, can’t breathe, can’t hold food in either end,
praying for death kind of sick. It’s a
miserable state of affairs, but an interesting situation that can arise only
out of such illness sometimes rears its head.
There is a phenomenon that I like to call the Fever Dream; and while it
may not be nearly as enjoyable, it is far more powerful than any psychedelic
drug experience known to man. This is
what happens when lack of sleep, a high fever, and copious amounts of
medications combine. It’s a condition
where you slip back and forth between being awake and dreaming vividly without
knowing where the boundary lies or being able to distinguish which one you are
doing at the moment. I’ve only been
sick enough to experience it a handful of times. If you think I sound crazy or don’t know what I’m talking about,
you’ve never truly experienced the flu.
Just wait. Captain Trips is
coming. M-O-O-N, that spells Super Flu.
Well, on this particular day my fever kept bouncing back and
forth between 103 and 104. I hadn’t
slept in two nights because every time I dozed off, I would cough myself
awake. I was full of Mucinex DM (which
for some reason f**ks me up worse than a fifth of anything), that prescription
codeine cough syrup (sizzurp – as in sippin’ on some - for my ghetto readers),
and both the Daywalker and Nightbreed varieties of the mighty –Quil. I was out of my mind. There was no hold on reality. In short, I was more or less tripping my
balls off.
It was in this state that I decided that I should delve into
my screener pile, in particular a killer stack that Wild Eye Releasing had sent
me. These guys really hooked me
up. They sent me a box of flicks
including Hack Job and I Spill your Guts (which I’ve already reviewed here on
SOC), a cool documentary about Rock and Roll Comics, a XXX Thriller parody from
the 80’s that I’ll review when the time is right (meaning I’m holding onto it
for viewing in Jimmy Bickert’s backyard drive-in), and the four flicks that
would comprise my hallucinatory journey through low budget Nazi-sploitation,
sexploitation, goths-ploitation, and ape-sploitation nirvana. What follows is a chronicle of this whacked
out odyssey as best as I could reconstruct it from my nearly illegible and
incoherent notes. Let the “ploitation”
begin!
I started off with Blitzkrieg:
Escape From Stalag 69. Hell yeah,
Nazi time! For the record, “Hell yeah,
Nazi time!” is an exact quote from my notes.
It took up half of a page. I
worry about myself sometimes. This is
the flick I initially contacted Wild Eye about. As I’m sure you Cellmates are aware, I love me some
Nazisploitation. I’ve waxed poetic
about my love for Third Reich cinema before, so I’ll spare you. With a few notable exceptions, however, it’s
a subgenre that is sadly neglected these days, so I was truly stoked to
discover a new addition to the annals of Nazi nastiness. The first thing that struck me about
Blitzkrieg was actually on the back of the box. This movie is 2 hours and 15 freakin’minutes
long. To the best of my knowledge, that
makes it the longest Nazisploitation flick of all time. Yes, Schindler’s List was longer, but that’s
not the kind of exploitative, offensive Nazi flick we’re talking about here.
Synopsis: Enter Stalag 69, where torture is just the
Beginning for this bloody band of Nazi Butchers! Germany, 1945. Stalag 69, a
POW camp ruled by the sadistic SS commandant Helmet Schultz, is nothing but a
blood-soaked playground for this perverse Nazi monster who uses his American,
Russian, and British prisoners in cruel and ghastly biochemical weapons
experiments. When a group of young, wanton USO girls are captured and fall into
the hands of Schultz and his battalion of butchers, the brutality is turned up
and the unsuspecting girls are gored, gouged and ground up - all for the
pleasure of Schultz and his SS brothers and sisters. Now it's up to the rag-tag
survivors of the camp to strike back against their captors and Escape from
Stalag 69, alive or on a slab!
I came into the flick expecting all of the hallmarks of
Nazisploitation, meaning nudity, torture, sleaze, and bad taste. I definitely got all of that. There are multiple castrations, flogging,
nipple-ectomies, branding, humiliation, and various other tortures. It also contains one of the greatest
cinematic sequences of the past decade.
I won’t spoil it all, but it begins with an I Spit On Your Grave
homage and ends with a bare ass naked woman running through the woods with a
machine gun mowing down Nazis. Read
that sentence again. If that isn’t
enough to sell you on a movie, then the way your mind operates is completely
foreign to me. Violence and sleaze;
check.
What I wasn’t expecting from this film was an actual
story. A lot of story. A whole freakin’ lot of story. This movie is HEAVY on the dialog. For the most part it’s pretty well written,
but it’s also pretty long winded. As
the movie progressed, however, I noticed something happening. I was getting more and more into the
story. I knew exactly where it was
going, but I couldn’t help but get swept up in it. I don’t know if it was my altered state of mind or the deliberate
way of building the plot, but I never had the urge to hit the fast forward
button once in two and a quarter hours.
The last time a movie that long kept my attention that well was I Saw
The Devil, and that was my #1 flick of last year.
The acting is all over the place in fact. Some of the performances are
outstanding. Special credit goes to
Tatyana Kot as Natasha. She spends 90%
of her screen time naked and being tortured. This shoot had to be grueling for her, and she handles herself
with a great intensity. I enjoyed Steph
Van Vlack as the sadistic Dr. Zuber a lot.
The very sexy Tammy Dalton was pretty good as Candice. I sure do wish director Keith Crocker could
have talked her into a nude scene, but I digress. Then there are the others.
Charles Esser as Helmet Schultz fits in both the good and, um…”other”
categories. Sometimes he is so over the
top that it seems like he thought he was in a comedy. Other times he’s got such earnestness in his delivery that it’s
obvious he’s playing it seriously.
It’s a really bizarre dichotomy that works…sometimes. I’m not gonna name names, but aside from
those I’ve mentioned, most of the actors and actresses in this flick either seem
to be half asleep or are trying to chew straight through the scenery. There’s no middle ground. The mixture of the “upper and downer” acting
schools makes these scenes the cinematic equivalent of a speedball. Well, that may be stretching it. A Jagerbomb perhaps. Some of the best entertainment in the whole
flick is watching them struggle with the various accents of this
“international” cast of characters.
There is definitely some dopey moments here. A 70’s style soul mama with a tramp stamp is
doing in a WWII concentration camp comes to mind. There’s also enough torture and sleaze to satisfy the prurient
interests, enough of a story to engage those interested in plot, and enough
camp appeal to make it all just plain fun.
Blitzkrieg is ambitious as hell in scope, and it succeeds to a
point. Yeah, it’s long, but it never
stops being entertaining. It’s dirty,
sick fun with a little respectability thrown in; and it’s a worthy addition to
anyone’s Nazisploitation collection.
Next up I popped in The Disco Exorcist. Right away I was torn on this flick. On one hand, I’ve had just about enough fake
film grain filters to last me for the rest of my natural life. This flick is awash in digital attempting to
look like analog. It manages better than many, but I still could do
without it. One strike. On the other hand, it is a longstanding
cornerstone of SOC film theory that, 9 times out of 10, boobs within the first
minute of a movie means that I’m gonna like the flick. They actually occurred
at 1:14, but let’s not get technical here.
At this point, my brain decided to argue with itself about what my
expectations were for this film based on these two divergent facts. Do boobs supercede fake grain, or vice
versa? This continued until the counter
on the DVD player suddenly informed me that I was 20 minutes into the film and
my brain was too busy debating with itself to register anything I had just
seen. Dammit. Time to take more medicine (my mind can’t argue with itself if it
can’t form coherent sentences) and restart the movie.
Synopsis: Suave swinger and womanizer Rex Romanski loves
and leaves evil black magic priestess Rita Marie. Naturally, Rex incurs Rita's
lethal wrath by spurning her. Can Rex figure out a way to stop Rita's
subsequent rampage of revenge, murder, and destruction as well as reclaim the
soul of his new porn starlet gal Amoreena Jones before it's too late?
Despite my not liking the fake grindhouse look of the flick,
it didn’t take it long to win me over.
Whereas Blitzkrieg tried to at least put up a front of playing it
straight, Disco Exorcist gets down and revels in its cheese and sleaze. There is copious nudity, some fairly messy
gore, and some truly inspired references to classic 70’s horror and
exploitation cinema. They honestly
didn’t need the filters, because the art direction is spot on in capturing a
70’s low budget feel.
Many of the cast
members come from stage acting backgrounds, which would explain why the acting
is of a much better quality than probably any other film in this little
marathon. Ruth Sullivan steals the show
as the evil and vengeful Rita Marie.
That scene of her writhing around naked and bloody in the center of a
pentagram is a thing of beauty. I found
myself wishing that this flick had backed off of the laughs a little at times
and gone for some more actual horror moments; but she is genuinely creepy,
pulling off the whole Fatal Attraction meets Witchcraft thing beautifully. I’d love to see her in some straight up
horror flicks.
Basically, this movie is an exercise in bad taste, humor
that is goofy without being too stupid, tits, gore, and lots and lots of
sex. Ladies, for those of you who
complain about the female to male nudity ratio, there is a lot of swinging meat
on display for you in this one. I can
see this being a great party movie. I
would have enjoyed it a lot more if they had left out the fake grain and those
goddamn “scene missing” gags that I loathe so much, but that’s just my personal
preference. Disco Exorcist is fun. That’s the best word I can think of to
describe it. Fun. It feels like the filmmakers had fun making
it, and I had fun watching it.
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