Red Nights Of The Gestapo (1977/Exploitation)
Picture:
C Sound: C Extras: D Film: C
Though
Fabio De Agostini’s Red Nights Of The
Gestapo (1977) wants to pretend to be about the events leading to the The
Schloss Grunewalde Massacre of 1941 as (or which led to) Hitler invaded Russia,
it is yet another in the cycle of exploitation/sexploitation Nazi films that
are beyond politically incorrect and make the German Nazi elites out to be
nothing but a bunch of sick, S&M-loving Fascists. Of course, they are favorites of regular
S&M types and/or those who love celebrated uglinesses.
I have
now seen a few of these and this is not quite as bad as some of the films made,
though still bad. However, it has some
amusing moments and I realized this time that these films sometimes owe
something to the screen space of Spaghetti Westerns, though similarities
quickly end there. These are a
phenomenon of the counterculture and also come out of the early violent
exploitation of the first such Horror (and quasi-snuff works) of the 1960s. Women are objectified in the worst ways,
though the violence can be phony.
Implication
is how these work in part, but the mostly no-name casts (unless they are a
semi-known name out of exploitation films) are used to make us feel as if we
were watching something like a documentary.
Of course, it looks phonier and cheaper than ever, but this sense of
populism still plays as such and keeps interest in such works. If you have to see one of them, this is one
of the better places to start by default.
The
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image (not 1.85 X 1 as the case says) looks as
poor as something shot in Techniscope, with weak color and definition as if it
were not dye-transferred color of any type.
Technicolor is credited for the color, though. The print is not in bad shape, though part of
this might be something from the PAL format going into NTSC. Note the classic type of cinematography
trying to make this look elegant and classier than it really is. The Dolby Digital 2.0 English Mono is typical
of Italian films of the time, where al the audio is dubbed, even in
Italian. The combination is
passable. Except for stills, trailers
for this and four other such films, that is all you get.
- Nicholas Sheffo
