La casa sperduta nel parco (1980)

... aka: Der Schlitzer (The Slasher)

... aka: House at the Edge of the Park, The

... aka: House on the Edge of the Park

... aka: Ripper on the Edge, The

... aka: Trampa para un violador (Trap for a Rapist)

Directed by:

Ruggero Deodato

Car lights down a busy highway and small white specks in high rise windows are caught in a backdrop of deep blue night. A man following a woman pulls in front of her, jumps into her car, throws her in the backseat, rips her clothes off and rapes her while strangling her as a eerily chirpy pop song ("Sweetly, oh sweetly. Summertime is coming. Happy and carefree. Waiting just for you...") plays. The quick-cut editing choices and decision to keep fading to black during the attack are oddly rhythmic; interesting. One hopes this haunting and disturbing opening sequence is getting the ball rolling on a film that will continue on with visual inventiveness and shocks but sadly this ends up being is the best scene in the entire film.

We then cut to a garage in New York City where perverted greaseball Alex (David A. Hess) and his slow-witted buddy Ricky (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) are about to close down shop for the night and go "boogie" at a disco. Wealthy young couple Lisa (Annie Belle) and Tom (Christian Borromeo) stop by with car problems. It's a quick fix. Since it's getting late, the couple agree to let Alex and Ricky come along with them to a small get-together at a secluded, swanky villa with three of their equally rich and refined friends; Gloria (Lorraine De Selle), Glenda (Marie Claude Joseph) and Howard (Gabriele De Giulio). So what would these respectable folks want a couple of low rent working class miscreants around? As Lisa later confesses, "Anything to stop our boredom." She gets her wish.

The little party starts out with bad disco music, bad dancing, bad dialogue ("Hot diggity!") and bad manners as Alex can't keep his hands off of the sleek, short-haired beauty Lisa. She tells him he looks like he belongs in a cage but keeps teasing him and giving off mixed signals all the same; letting him caress her legs and then more or less suggesting he join her in the shower, where she lets him ogle her and scrub her back but then leaves him cold. During a poker game, Tom and the other rich folks cheat the semi-retarded Ricky out of what little money he does have. Naturally they don't need the money. This appears to be all about having a laugh at his expense, just as they did encouraging him to dance. When Alex calls them out on it, Howard attempts to punch him out but he doesn't know who he's dealing with. Alex is the same guy who murdered the woman in the opening sequence. And he's brought along his straight razor.

After taking all of their money, Alex decides to stick around to "have a little fun with the cunts." This involves roughing up anyone up who threatens him or tries to escape. The men are beat, sliced, have their heads beat against a table and one is thrown into the swimming pool and then pissed on as he tries to climb out. The women naturally get about the same treatment, only worse as they're women so their assaults are compounded with sexual violence. Their clothes are ripped off, they're constantly being groped, having their breast squeezed, forced into having lesbian relations with one another and, of course, getting raped. Poor Cindy (Brigitte Petronio), a late arrival to the festivities, is revealed to be a virgin so she has her breasts and nude body sliced up after she's stripped naked.

While there's plenty of violence on display, though not much blood or gore, this seems much more focused on roughie sexploitation and rape fetishism and fills up most of its running time with nudity and sexual assault. Four of the five actresses have full frontal nude scenes, a number of them more than one, while the fifth actress, the only black one, gets by with only showing her tits a couple of times. The "action" probably hits its nadir when one the captives willingly has sex with her attacker seemingly out of pity! It's all rather unpleasant to sit through but Park isn't particularly harrowing as a thriller either due to poor dialogue, moronic character actions, gigantic plot holes and endless annoying shots of the cast standing around posing like models and looking only mildly uncomfortable as they watch their friends getting roughed up, violated and potentially killed. A twist during the finale attempts to explain why the victims behave like morons the entire time but it only makes their actions during the rest of the film even more senseless and infuriating.

This was clearly made in response to the success of The Last House on the Left (1972), which must have been extremely popular in Europe at the time as there are a number of similar films with similar titles hoping to cash in on Craven's notorious shocker. This one has an edge over most of the others though due to the casting coup of actual Last House star Hess ("Krug Stillo") playing a similar role. There's even a direct nod to LHOTL during the finale, only it's an amusing reversal of the fate of Last House's Mari Collingwood character inflicted upon Hess himself! The actor had already done another of these films a few years prior called HITCH HIKE (1977), which was released under the alt title Hitch Hike: Last House on the Left in some countries. Both it and Craven's film are better than this one.

Due to its tasteless nature and gratuitous nudity, this landed itself on the UK's coveted video nasties banned list. Here in the U.S. it was released theatrically in 1985 (Hess / Last House were both heavily used as marketing ploys) and then made its way to home video courtesy of Vestron, who released it unrated and completely uncut. I distinctly remember one of the video stores I frequented as a kid having this in their "Hard R" section and refusing to rent it to anyone under 18. Strangely, this same place had already let 10-year-old me rent stuff like Mondo Magic and Make Them Die Slowly, both of which are far more graphic than this one. (Irregardless, I didn't let them stop me from watching this as I just went to another video store down the block and rented it there instead, no problem!)

Regina Mardek (billed as "Karoline Mardeck"), the real-life wife of the star, plays the victim in the opening sequence. The score is by Riz Ortolani and most of the main crew (writer Gianfranco Clerici, cinematographer Sergio D'Offizi, editor Vincenzo Tomassi) had been ported over from Deodato's notorious Cannibal Holocaust (1980), which was filmed just a few months prior for the same producers and production company. Unlike the much more potent Holocaust, this one has always been easy to find and widely circulated. There have been numerous releases over the years, including a Media Blasters / Shriek Show DVD in 2002 (which includes interviews with the director and two male stars), and Blu-ray releases from TC Entertainment out of Japan and Code Red and Dark Force Entertainment here in America. A sequel, to be directed by Deodato and star Radice, was announced way back in 2011 but nothing has come of it so far.

★★

Wild beasts - Belve feroci (1984)

... aka: Noche de la fiera, La (Night of the Beast)
... aka: Savage Beasts
... aka: Wild Beast
... aka: Wild Beasts
... aka: Wild Beasts Will Get You!, The
... aka: Zoológico del Terror, El (Zoo Terror)

Directed by:
Franco Prosperi

The first ten minutes open with a quote from "Francis Thrive" (who?), a horrible song, smokestacks, foamy water, a bunch of used hypodermic needles lying around all over the place, zookeepers chopping up a (real) dead horse with a cleaver and then feeding the parts to a bunch of big cats, a tiger having a seizure after being drugged and a creepy topless scene featuring a girl who looks to be about 10-11 years old at the most. That should pretty much prepare everyone for what's to follow in this late-issue Euro-trash riff on all those popular killer animals flicks of the 1970s. This one is actually extremely similar to an earlier made-for-American-TV-movie called THE BEASTS ARE ON THE STREETS (1978), only with the added attraction of gore, a little bit of nudity and a flagrant disregard for the safety of the animal participants, none of which should come as a surprise considering who made this. Franco Prosperi had burst onto the scene decades earlier with the international box office hit Mondo cane (1962); a documentary featuring several scenes of real animal slaughter that shocked audiences of the day. It not only ended up being nominated for numerous major awards (including the Palme d'Or at Cannes and Grammy and Oscar nominations for its soundtrack) but also single-handedly invented a new sub-genre called the "mondo film" (documentaries made for the sole purpose of shocking viewers). Prosperi, along with his co-directors on the film; Gualtiero Jacopetti and Paolo Cavaro, continued on in that subgenre for a number of years, churning out such titles as Women of the World (1963), Mondo pazzo aka Mondo Cane No. 2 (1963) and Africa addio aka Africa Blood and Guts (1966). Many of those featured scenes of violence toward animals, a trend that continues here in what turned out to be Prosperi's final film.

Set in an unnamed "Northern European City;" one of the first things we actually see is a sign for the "Frankfurt Zoo" (that they poorly attempt to hide behind a tree branch!), which puts us in Germany. There's not much in the way of plot in this one. Industrial waste containing the hallucinogen phencyclidine (improperly labeled "phenol acids" on a title card at the end) has infiltrated parts of the city water supply system, contaminating it. At a zoo, veterinarian Dr. Rupert Berner (John Aldrich) and his partner / sort-of love interest Laura Schwarz (Lorraine De Selle) begin noticing that the animals - who've been drinking the water, of course - are behaving rather strangely. Before they can get to the bottom of things, malfunctioning security at the zoo unleashes a horde of beasts from their cages, who then hit the streets at night and begin killing. The first victims are a pair of teenagers having sex in a car, who are ambushed by an army of flesh-eating rats that chew them both up (including the woman's breasts in glorious close-up). Lions, tigers and hyenas rip apart a couple of zookeepers and a security guard. A blind man's canine companion turns on him. A cheetah chases after a woman's Volkswagen bug convertible until she crashes and burns to death. A stampede of cows and horses crash through an arcade. A bunch of elephants break through a brick wall (!), enter onto a highway, cause several car crashes and attack a man and woman in a car; strangling the guy and crushing the woman's head by stomping on it! The elephants also push down a gate and enter onto an airport runway, causing an plane to crash into a power plant, which cuts off all power in the city.

While Rupert and his cop buddy, Inspector Nat Braun (Ugo Bologna, from Fulci's ZOMBIE), are busy trying to humanely hunt down the various animals with a tranquilizer gun, Laura rushes to get to her pre-teen daughter Suzy (Louisa Lloyd), whose dance class has been crashed by a vicious polar bear. I should stop right here and note that this is the exact same plot as the aforementioned Beasts Are on the Streets, which also featured a park worker and cop hunting down the animals with a tranquilizer gun and the mom character / romantic interest rushing to try to get to her young daughter, who's in danger. Both films also feature animals breaking through fences, busting through windows, strolling city streets and causing a bunch of car accidents. Though the animals in BAOTS were just regular animals on the loose and the ones here have been made extra-violent by drug contamination, it's quite obvious Prosperi saw the earlier movie and decided to turn that tame, modest film into a gory exploitation flick. Only one of these movies was supervised by the American Humane Society... and it wasn't this one.

While Wild Beasts does muster up a few good horror sequences and a surprise ending I didn't see coming at all, the amount of actual violence committed against living animals puts a damper on the fun and the fact they attempt to justify it by hiding behind a flagrantly hypocritical message is pretty pathetic. The opening quote warns us that "Our madness engulfs everything and infects innocent victims such as children or animals." The filmmakers then go on to prove that quote true by covering an "innocent" terrified cat with a swarm of rats, having a guy with a flamethrower set "innocent" rats on fire and entrapping an "innocent" pig and an "innocent" cow in pins and letting a hyena and a lion chew them up. I also have to wonder how warped someone has to be to think it's OK to take a domesticated pet - which is, after all, an animal conditioned to trust us - and then completely violate that trust by turning around and harming the poor animal. I can handle any amount of simulated violence directed toward whoever or whatever and have no issue with any of that, but seeing animals really being hurt and killed for entertainment's sake just isn't my idea of a good time. Some viewers out there aren't going to be the least bit bothered by any of that, but I'm putting it out there as a warning for those who do. That said, the animal violence here is a bit tamer than what you'd see in a lot of other cannibal and mondo films from the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Lead actress De Selle (who now works primarily as a TV producer) was a frequent presence in Euro exploitation films and also no stranger to films featuring animal violence, having already starred in one of the primary offenders in this category: Cannibal ferox (1981). She also had roles in the cult favorites Emanuelle in America (1977), which also exploited an animal... though in a much kinder fashion (*wink*), and The House on the Edge of the Park (1980). Lead actor Aldrich wasn't an actor at all (this is his only known role) and is clearly an animal specialist in real life, as he's asked to interact with and handle tigers, bears, snakes and other wild animals. Most of the rest of the cast are also one-timers, many of whom are likely either circus or zoo workers used to the dangerous animals. In fact, aside from De Selle and Bologna, John Stacy (Zeder aka Revenge of the Dead) and Alessandro Freyberger (Caligula II: The Untold Story) are the only other cast members with other acting credits. Production for Wild Beasts actually began in Africa, but had to be relocated to Europe thanks to a terrorist attack!

The only U.S. video issuing that I'm aware of came in 1985 on the Lightning / Vestron label under the title The Wild Beasts Will Get You! That release was horribly-dubbed, too dark and murky and had terrible English-language dubbing, among other problems. The German company Camera Obscura however released a better-quality DVD in 2011 with German, Italian and English audio options as well as English and German subtitles. This restored print actually looks great and the film has surprisingly glossy production values for a film of this caliber, something you'd never have guessed viewing the Lightning tape. Extras on the DVD include a thirty minute interview with the director and a bonus booklet about the history the "animal attack" subgenre.

★★