Gestapo's Last Orgy
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| Gestapo's Last Orgy | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Directed by | Cesare Canevari |
| Screenplay by |
|
| Story by | Antonio Lucarella[2] |
| Starring |
|
| Cinematography | Claudio Catozzo[2] |
| Edited by | Enzo Monachesi[2] |
| Music by | Alberto Baldan Bembo[2] |
Production company | Cine Lu.Ce.[2] |
| Distributed by | Indipendenti Regionali |
| Country | Italy[1] |
| Language | Italian |
Gestapo's Last Orgy (Italian: 'L'ultima orgia del III Reich, lit. 'Last Orgy of the Third Reich') is a 1977 Italian Nazi exploitation film directed and co-written by Cesare Canevari and starring Daniela Poggi.
Plot
[edit]A man named Conrad von Starke is driving down a road, listening to a war crimes trial on the radio. He stops the car and exits at the ruins of an old death camp. There he meets Lise Cohen. It is revealed that Lise is a former prisoner of the camp and that the man, Conrad, is the former Commandant who has arranged to meet her several years after the end of World War II. He thanks her for the testimony that she provided at his war crimes trial, which saved him from certain death and helped him integrate into the new West Germany. After touring the ruins of the camp, Lise and von Starke make love.
Lise has a flashback to the time she spent at the camp during the war. A shipment of female prisoners arrives. Some are immediately sent to the gas chamber and some are burned alive. In a hall, other women are stripped naked before naked members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, aroused after watching a porn film which includes photos of rape, mother-daughter incest, bondage, coprophagia, urination and extreme sex. The female inmates are then raped, tortured, sodomized with bats, and sexually humiliated in an orgy while Commandant Starke and a visiting SS General watch.
Later, a woman has sex with an SS guard, who is himself shot when he speaks out against her rape by other guards. An inmate having her period is ordered to be thrown to the dogs by Alma, a female SS guard and the commandant's lover. More sex scenes between guards and inmates take place. Meanwhile, Starke and his SS staff debate Nazi theories at the dinner table, and an SS Guard tells them of his hopes that there will one day be farms so the Jews can be eaten as a food source. The staff become aroused by this and practice both cannibalism and infanticide, eating a stew made of unborn Jewish infants. When one of the female prisoners passes out in shock, they douse her body in brandy and set it alight, before eating her corpse as well.
Starke becomes interested in Lise, finding himself obsessed by her unbreakable spirit. Since whatever he does to torture her does not demoralize her, Starke grows angry and drops her only friend at the camp into a pit of quicklime as Lise, stripped nude and hanging from her wrists, is forced to watch. The Commandant threatens to drop Lise into the pit as well. Unfazed by this, Lise is whipped, has her head lowered into a box filled with rats, and raped, but still she does not cry out. She goes to the hospital and is treated by a pacifistic young Doctor, revealing to him why she does not cry. She wants to die, as she betrayed her family to the Nazis years earlier and feels intense guilt about it. When the Doctor tells her it was not her fault, she becomes determined to survive. She has sex with the Doctor, reaffirming her decision to live.
Lise is tortured further by Starke, who tells her he has fallen in love with her. She claims to love him as well, and begins an extreme sexual relationship with him, willingly donning a gruesome belt made of the scalps of fellow inmates to prove her affections. The Commandant is later sodomized with his own whip by jealous Alma, who realizes the extent of Starke's feelings for Lise. In response, he fatally strangles Alma. Lise gives birth to a child, but the baby is killed by Starke because it is "half-Jewish", and a "half-breed" would have no place in the world. Back in the present day, Lise and Starke still stand in the ruined camp and are having sex. Lise shoots him, and his body falls into a nearby pit.
Alternative Italian ending
[edit]In an alternate ending of the film,[3] Lise shoots Starke and then herself.
Style
[edit]Gestapo's Last Orgy was part of a sub-genre of exploitation films created in the early 1970s called Naziploitation.[4] These films were primarily produced in Italy and in the United States.[4]
Production
[edit]Daniela Poggi said she regrets having participated in this movie: "I was twenty years old then and I was a model, my agency pushed me. Unfortunately they added unexpected scenes and a monstrous title."[5]
Release
[edit]Gestapo's Last Orgy passed Italian censors on January 28, 1977.[2] It has been released under several English titles on home video including Gestapo's Last Orgy and Caligula Reincarnated as Hitler.[6] It was refused a UK DVD certificate by the BBFC in January 2021 due to pervasive sexual and sadistic violence in a clearly anti-Semitic context.[7]
Reception
[edit]From retrospective reviews, Robert Firsching of AllMovie declared that among the Nazi-themed Italian sex and horror oriented films made after the release of The Night Porter, Gestapo's Last Orgy was "among the best made and absorbing of its ilk."[8]
References
[edit]Footnotes
[edit]- ^ Koven 2004, p. 22.
- ^ a b c d e f g "L'ultima orgia del terzo Reich (1977)". Archiviodelcinemaitaliano.it (in Italian). Retrieved December 19, 2018.
- ^ Tatlock, Michael (2022-01-07). "The Gestapo's Last Orgy Blu-ray Review (88 Films)". Cultsploitation. Retrieved 2023-04-09.
- ^ a b Richardson 2012, p. 44.
- ^ ""Nella vita come in scena non abbasso mai la testa"". corriere.it. Retrieved 2022-01-30.
- ^ "L'Ultima Origia del III Reich". AllMovie. Retrieved December 19, 2018.
- ^ "The Gestapo's Last Orgy". BBFC. Retrieved 2 March 2021.
- ^ Firsching, Robert. "L'Ultima Origia del III Reich". AllMovie. Retrieved December 19, 2018.
Sources
[edit]- Koven, Mikel J. (2004). "Chapter 1: 'The Film You are About to See is Based on Documented Fact': Italian Nazi Sexploitaiton Cinema". In Mathijs, Ernest; Mendik, Xavier (eds.). Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945. Wallflower Press. p. 22. ISBN 1903364930.
- Richardson, Michael D. (2012). "Sexual Deviance and the Naked Body in Cinematic Representations of Nazis". In Magilow, Daniel H.; Bridges, Elizabeth; Vander Lugt, Kristin T. (eds.). Naziploitation!: The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture. A&C Black. ISBN 978-1441183590.
- Shipka, Danny (2011). Perverse Titillation: The Exploitation Cinema of Italy, Spain and France, 1960–1980. McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-4888-3.