The Beast in Heat (also known as SS Hell Camp, SS Experiment Part 2 and Horrifying Experiments of the S.S. Last Days) is a 1977 Italian Exploitation Film about fictionalized World War II Nazi POW camp atrocities, a common theme amongst the video nasties. It was directed by Luigi Batzella and written by Batzella and Lorenzo Artale. The film gained notoriety when it was placed on the list of Video Nasties and banned in the United Kingdom.
Dr. Ellen Kratsch, a beautiful and sadistic senior SS officer and doctor, creates a half-human, half-beast, incubus-like mutant. This ugly, squat creature has a limitless sexual appetite, and so Kratsch uses it to molest and torture the female prisoners of war under the clinical eye of the Nazis, keeping it happy by feeding it aphrodisiacs.
Hewing closely to the basic premise of Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS and its sequels, this film follows the trend of Nazisploitation films that Ilsa pioneered, and Kratsch is clearly modeled after Ilsa. It is considered one of the worst (or funniest, if you have a really sick sense of humour) films ever made, using only a single set of a laboratory with a cage in the middle, cheap costumes, poor lighting and inept editing.
This film contains examples of:
- Badass Preacher: Don Lorenzo, played by stuntman and bodybuilder Brad Harris. The Nazis learn the hard way not to pick a fight with him.
- Creepy-Crawly Torture: A prisoner is tortured by having an overturned bucket full of rats (actually guinea pigs painted black) placed on her stomach and set on fire.
- Deadly Doctor: Dr. Ellen Kratsch, the creator of the beast.
- Death of a Child: Nazi soldiers have no problem snatching babies out of their mothers' arms and tossing them in the air for target practice.
- Gratuitous Rape: This is likely the main reason the film was made in the first place.
- Half-Human Hybrid: The beast itself, an incubus-like cross between a man and a beast.
- Hoist by Her Own Petard: At the end of the film when the partisans attack the castle, Kratsch falls victim to the beast she used on her prisoners when she is given to it in revenge.
- No Ending: Kratsch gets her comeuppance isn't the actual ending. The movie keeps going for another few minutes with some completely unrelated scenes of a dude wandering around a battlefield until he gets killed.
- Stock Footage: Everything that isn't Dr. Kratsch's shenanigans is poorly grafted in from an older movie about partisans.