Synergy Magazine

Severin

R1 DVD

Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960) is still seen as the classic tale of rape and revenge, however, in the Seventies filmmakers taking inspiration from Bergman’s work and wishing to express it in a more modern setting, jumped genre and moved into what could be best described as rape revenge exploitation cinema.

The first film credited with such a jump was the highly controversial Wes Craven film Last House on the Left (1972) and from there the genre produced such other titles as Night Train Murders and Bay of Blood and the highly successful but notorious I spit on your Grave. One of the most unusual releases of the period was La Settima Donna, or The Seventh Woman marketed in the West as Last House on the Beach (1978).

Out of all the rape-revenge films of the period, Last House on the Beach is the most unusual. It has a strong art-film feel, using all manner of unusual cinematic tricks ranging from strange angles through to creative editing. While it is an extremely violent, brutal and vicious film, it tends to take the approach that less is more and actually shows a lot less violence than you first think. It tends to infer what occurs and uses careful editing to allow your imagination to fill in the gaps, this actually makes the film more effective and at times far more unpleasant. It is interesting to discuss the film with people after they first watch it, nearly always they think they have seen far more than is actually in the film. The unusual filming style and editing has been used to great effect in Last House on the Beach to create a constantly violent and hostile feel so that every scene seems far worse than it is. This is not to underplay the savagery of much the imagery in the film.

Last House on the Beach opens with a strangely art film type introduction. We enter a scene from a low angle of the seeing people’s shoes and bags, we never see their faces. Then suddenly we are realize this is a bank robbery and as it goes horribly wrong and a gun sprays bullets through a group of people and they fall to the floor bleeding. It seems one of the bank robbers has been killed and Aldo, Walter and Nino travel towards the countryside looking to hide out until the heat is off.

We then see another scene, again first shot from a low angle and then rising upwards to show a range of young girls playing on a beach. You know these two worlds are going to collide and it isn’t going to be nice!

Aldo, Walter and Nino find an isolated home by the beach which looks just like what they need. Inside Cristina and a group of young girls to whom she is guardian, are practising for an upcoming Shakespeare festival. They take the girls hostage and begin a journey of degradation, violence and rape. The first killing sets the tone for the film, the hired help is bashed to death and finished off with an iron to the head.

As the men discover Cristina is a Nun she is degraded and then raped and the girls are all subjected to psychological, physical and sexual abuse. Nino attempts to rape one of the girls and gets stabbed with a hair pin in the leg and this sets in play a major aspect of the plot. The rape scenes are brutal but again not especially that explicit. For example, in one of the major rape scenes the whole scene is shown with a slow motion introduction and then from the perspectives of the faces of the rapists and the victims. We also see Cristina held back by Aldo, watching from the sideline. This is a compelling and unpleasant scene and the lack of actual explicitness means that the scene has a added emotional punch but actually lacks what we could consider to be explicit content.

The character development is surprisingly solid for an exploitation film, Aldo is at first presented as more restrained than the others, unsure of their methods and perhaps even a little sympathetic to their plight. Then slowly you begin to realize he is the mastermind of the gang and indeed, he was the killer at the bank robbery.

There are some especially nasty scenes, as Nino’s leg becomes more and more infected, he takes revenge on the girl who rejected him by raping her with a sharpened wooden stick. This leads to the final climatic scenes where Cristina, realizing that non violence is not the answer, injects Nino with poison, shoots Walters and attacks Aldo. When Aldo doesn’t die the girls gang up together and in a scene of Dionysian fury, beat him to death with garden tools and anything else they can find. Cristina removes his ring (the symbol of her faith) symbolizing her rejection of non violence and her life as a nun...

While certainly this is exploitation cinema, the mixture of an excellent and innovative cinematic style which borders on art house, excellent character development, a killer soundtrack filled with Italian groove and lounge (and some rock as well) make this a real treat. It is a shocking film, filled with depravity and violence and nunsploitation and yet in the end it has the ultimate twist – Cristina becomes a “vengeful” Nun fighting for her girls with righteous violence.

Extras include a lengthy high quality featurette, "Holy Beauty vs. the Evil Beasts," which has Lovelock talking about his career as well as his memories of working on the film and his co-stars and the German and Italian theatrical trailers.

Severin’s presentation is a very clear with a nice 2.35:1 anamorphic picture and superb sound, the soundtrack is particularly impressive ranging from groove, jazz and lounge through to rock and heavier fare at the more brutal moments. This is a superb edition of a very unique and rare film.