Fool's Views (6/16 – 6/22)

"If you could only see what I've seen with your eyes...."

Hello, fellow friends and fiends,

As Faithful Readers might recall, the last FV entry (covering a full four weeks) was still a fairly dry season. Well, the juice got loose over the following seven days, as the Doc burned through nearly a full score of flicks, with Severin’s recent release of The Definitive Video Nasty Guide (review coming soon) kicking off a weekend-long quest to “do the Nasty,” knocking out 9 of the remaining 10 (leaving only Jess Franco’s Women Behind Bars yet to be seen).

In the process, I also knocked out a trio of Naziploitation “classicks,” which in turn led to a few more filthy Fuhrer flicks in the week that followed. I was further blessed to witness a classic of Polish cinema – on the big screen, no less – and a couple of new offerings from regular festival faves Alex de la Iglesia and Ti West; one good, one…well, less good.

That’s what I call coming back from a slump with a vengeance! As always, feel free to leave your two cents worth – we’ll make sure you get some change back.

Enjoy!

THE GESTAPO'S LAST ORGY (1977) DVD Review

Gestapo's Last Orgy, The (1977) d. Cesare Canevari (Italy)

Often described as a remake of Liliana Cavana’s notorious art house classic The Night Porter, Gestapo’s Last Orgy is actually quite its own beast. Both films do feature a female concentration camp survivor reuniting with her Nazi oppressor years later, but whereas Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling’s S&M antics charted controversial waters, it’s clear that theirs is a consensual, if twisted, relationship. For Commandant Von Starker (Adriano Micantoni, billed here as Mark Loud) and Lise (Daniela Poggi, as Daniela Levy), the quirky relationship is forged in the fires of dominance and defiance. Von Starker seeks to crush the beautiful Lise’s will, but since she has already divorced herself from her emotions, he derives no satisfaction from torturing her. He must make her “love life” again, so that he may achieve the ultimate victory by depriving her of it. He ends up falling for her, while she in turn grows increasingly more powerful, more dangerous.