N - Nasty Nazis
Probably the most outrageous sub genre on the DPP 72 list, a lot of people feel a great deal of discomfort with Nasty Nazi movies due to their sensitive subject nature. A lot of them are lame (as we saw with SS Experiment Camp) and some of them are very offensive. The first Nasty Nazi movie on record is RL Frost's 1968 effort Love Camp 7. This film follows in the tradition of American sexploitation films before hard core porn came along. It is what would have been called at the time - a kinky. The cycle of Nazisploitation didn't really kick off until the mainstream commercial success of Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter and Tino Brass's Salon Kitty. The Night Porter followed the sadomasochistic relationship between a concentration camp inmate and a camp guard. Salon Kitty followed the antics of a high class Nazi brothel. And then there was Ilsa - She Wolf of the SS featuring the pneumatic Dyanne Thorne who portrayed a ruthless, sadistic, sexually insatiable camp commandant. Italian directors got incredibly excited and began to spew bilge - SS Girls, Red Nights of the Gestapo are examples of some of the Nasty Nazi movies excreted at this time. The films that made the DPP list are: SS Experiment Camp (directed by Sergio Garrone who went on to direct the far nastier Deported Women of the SS Special Section), The Beast in Heat (directed by Luigi Batzella) and Gestapo's Last Orgy (directed by Cesare Canevari). SS Experiment Camp is pretty tame and inoffensive. The Beast in Heat and Gestapo's Last Orgy are somewhat stronger. The Beast in Heat is mainly very boring and only enlivened when the beast gets some poor girl in his clutches. The Gestapo's Last Orgy is a glossy production compared to most Nasty Nazi pics but possesses an offensive ideology and upsetting cannibalism sequences. To sum up, there is not much to recommend Nazisploitation movies. Only perverse curiosity.
O - Outrageous Gore
I recently wrote a feature about tame video nasties which nearly made me forget about why Video Nasties became infamous in the first place - outrageous gore. It is fitting at this point to pay homage to Godfather of Gore - Herschell Gordon Lewis - and to examine his seminal Blood Feast which managed to both forge new cinematic territory in terms of explicitness in 1963, and end up a Video Nasty two decades later. The film was a pioneer in terms of blood and guts cinema. Lewis wanted to make a cheap film that would bring in the bucks and he spotted a hole in the market: there was no portrayal of gore in mainstream cinema. Aha! Blood Feast had a fairly dopey plot about an Egyptian caterer who wanted to make a sacrifice to the Egyptian God Ramses. This involved removing the body parts of several young ladies. A tongue is yanked out (an unfeasibly large tongue), a woman is scalped and has her brain taken out, limbs are removed, a heart is excised - all in graphic detail for the camera. The gore is cheap and lame but the camera is remorseless in its depiction of dismemberment which gives the film a vicious feel. The grainy low budget vibe gives the film a seedy and grimy atmosphere. After Blood Feast, H G Lewis went on to direct more bloody and vicious films culminating in the extreme Wizard of Gore and the Gore Gore Girls. He retired to make millions in the advertising business but his legacy lives on in the Video Nasties. For example - The Toolbox Murders. Graphic violence against women with nail guns, power drills etc. the cannibal films are chock full of outrageous gore, as are the zombie films. A special mention goes to Don't Go in the House for its amazing burning corpse sequence. I personally find it bloody hilarious - ho ho! - that Blood Feast, the progenitor of the gore movie, was tarred with the Video Nasty brush.