When the cannibal film boom Italy started was starting to wane out, exploitation filmmakers of the ole’ Boot figured it was time to move into another, different kind of extreme exploitation, the nazisploitation after the surprise box office success of Canadian Ilsa, She Wolf Of The SS in 1974 paved the way, and sure as shit Italian genre directors definitely went hog and basically monopolized the market, as sure shit Germany couldn’t (directly) due to the censorship laws, and Japan – surprise – was doing it slightly different (plus Men Behind The Sun was 8 years away)
Enough with the animal cruelty and the penis removal with a hook so fake tribal people could reenact a Rammstein live show, it’s time to bring back the WIP (Women In Prison), ramp up the sadism, crank up the deviance, generally make it more graphic in both the sex and violence, and have them take place in Nazi brothels or with the backdrop of WWII concentration camps.
We ain’t talking the more nuanced and intriguing works by Visconti or Pasolini on this theme today, we’re unearthing something else, with the eye catching title of Holocaust 2: I Ricordi, I Deliri, La Vendetta (Holocaust II: The Memories, The Delirium and The Revenge), directed by Angelo Panacciò (under the alias of “Angel Jonathan”), and released internationally under the more concise Holocaust 2: The Revenge.
Here would go a very tasteless joke about the sequelicious title, but there’s actually a proper reason why its called “Holocaust II”, because it was trying to mooch off and pose as a sequel to a 1978 TV miniseries called Holocaust by Martin Chomsky (also behind the famous Roots), and Pannacciò did this by dusting off a film he shot in 1972, Subliminal – Una Buona Giornata Per Morire (Subliminal – A Good Day To Die), which wasn’t actually finished due to production and budget issues.
That movie was about a woman that had psychic powers as a result of the literal Nazi experiments she endured as a child, and she uses this powers to have another girl kill off her ex-Nazi captors and exact finally revenge on them.
Which it’s already a sign of quality when the director resumes his dead project that almost a decade old, then shoots half an hour of new footage, and cuts all into a new film, Holocaust II, which basically keeps the psychic girl plot intact (now though she can basically hypnotize people hard) but makes it so there’s a group of people of Jewish heritage that survived the Holocaust and now in modern day plan to capture, torture and kill the ex-Nazi soldiers, scientists and collaborators that did the same on their parents and family.
Do not let that fool you into thinking there’s a plot, because there’s more the idea of a plot as a wafer thin excuse to glue together the old and new footage… which more or less looks the same but couldn’t hide it properly when early on they cut to old unpolished footage from the new one, this movie can’t even hide its own stitches, but then again, it doesn’t matter, because it’s more of a series of very disjointed vignettes, so don’t expect people talking about a thing to follow up on that.
Or anything.
Trying to describe the subplots is nonsense because the editing will break your neck on a random jumpcut, scenes may begin but will not end, often you’ll feel that you skipped a scenes or two… but you didn’t, the movie did, it was more important to just show you people that are never introduced, maybe eventually we’ll transition (badly) into a flashback and never properly tell you, maybe we’ll eventually get to know who the fuck that characters were or why we should have cared about.
After all, if we just set up a scene and cut to its implication it will save us some money, and boy this movie is a big fan of “telling and not showing”, because it’s also incredibly tame, but it’s obviously not by choice and by force of the non-budge, there’s barely any blood, it cuts away from when a Nazi soldier is about to shoot a priest in the head, even the lesbian stuff it’s barely present, more suggested, as is sex overall, and it’s worrying when one has to wonder where the fuck is the “nazy sleaze shit” and “if see sex, let us know”…. in a nazisploitation flick.
Even the strongest semblance of a plot, the leftover “nazi lesbian hypnowoman” one from the old unfinished film, is just stupid and convoluted, because of course it is.
As is the incredibly half-hearted attempt to be “nuanced”… this is people hunting down Nazis, it’s not complicated, really, especially because these are Nazis, kill em, who cares, to quote good ol’ Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame, “Nazis are like Skittles in that you can rid the world of as many as you like and never get a bad taste in your mouth”.
Also, this is a nazisploitation film and let’s be real, one that didn’t want to be like Visconti’s The Damned…. or maybe it did, but i doubt it, as the usage of real archive photo stills and footage during the opening credits is more in line with the depressing cheapness of it all, and the general plotline is just screaming that it just wants to be another nazisploitation sleaze fest, it wants to be Ilsa Of The SS or The Beast In Heat but can’t afford to.
At the end the two women (the one with the Hypno powers and the chosen girl to use as a proxy to murder the targets at their command) were suddendly…. dead, i guess they killed themselves in a romantic double suicide, we never know, it just cuts to other guys having paramedics carry their bodies out, and then credits roll, guess there are no more Nazis left that we care to kill.
it just stops, because saying it doesn’t end still implies there was any logic or reason, any “end” to aspire to, this is just an incoherent mess if i ever seen one, badly photographed, edited like a guillotine execution, with no pacing, barely inexistent production values and very bad acting, there are William Berger and Gordon Mitchell in small roles, they’re bait, Berger is in the film for like 4 minutes and barely does anything…. but these are barely characters at all.
A film also so desperate to Godfrey Ho itself, all so it could reach a 76 minutes runtime….. which is laughable but also too much as it feels about as twice as long.
Holocaust II: The Revenge is just an unbelievable Z-tier disaster that is almost fascinating.
Abysmal, chilling in its utter incompetence, to the point that i’m tempted to say this could suffice as an horrendous tombstone for the genre as a whole, even if i haven’t watched many nazisploitation flicks, because this is just the pits, so near it draws to a cosmic amount of absolute nothing, pure cinematic detritus, even by the low standards of this subgenre of exploitation flicks, Holocaust II The Revenge is almost able to chew through and go below the bottom of the barrel, so fiercely bad, empty and ungodly boring it is.
At the very least the melanchonic score by Giuliano Sorgini is nice and “classy”.
I would end the review by telling how “Angelo Pannacciò never worked on anything else ever again after”….but how could i, this is Italian 80s exploitation of the bottomest tier, of course he kept working until 1987, doing mostly erotica as he was mostly proficient in that, passing away in 2001, his legacy being called one of the more apt, shining contenders to the throne of “worst italian director ever”, as Italian historian and critic Fabio Meielli once wrote.
Let’s just say it is something when you make one miss the suddle touch of a Mattei or D’Amato hand in your production, when a Fragasso directed film now doesn’t sound so bad a prospect.
