-Grindhouse Fest is the special section in Celluloid Dimension where you can discover all the goodies… and baddies from the golden age of exploitation cinema. Have fun!
Directed by Cesare Canevari
Written by Antonio Lucarella and Cesare Canevari
Starring:
- Daniela Poggi as Lise Cohen (credited as Daniela Levy)
- Adriano Micantoni as Commandant Conrad von Starker (credited as Marc Loud)
- Maristella Greco as Alma
- Fulvio Ricciardi as Prison Doctor
- Antiniska Nemour as Lager prisoner
- Caterina Barbero
- Domenico Seren Gay
- Vittorio Joderi as Lt. Weissmann
Rating: 
Cesare Canevari’s operatic Nazi exploitation flick hits your morality with the customary dose of sadism and gratuitous salaciousness that typifies the unsavory genre, but the wallop it inflicts feels different, more lacerating and mortifying, and the unpleasant aftertaste lingers with you well past the end credits. This reaction is anomalous, particularly given that the normative affect associated with such films is one of transgressive delight in low-cultural spectacle, rather than moral recoil from an overtly sadistic, ideologically grotesque artifact of SadicoNazista cinema. You don’t usually feel this way—most of the time, it’s a sick little jolt of trashy joy from watching some sleazeball pop garbage, not this kind of stomach-turning, mean-as-hell, Nazi-flavored sadist flick.
Canevari’s heavily banned picture offers a fresh treatment of the barbarous violence of Nazi eugenics and its degenerate ideology, depicting evil with harsh acerbity and exploitative lewdness rather than through the lens of pulpy, lowbrow entertainment. Granted, it is steeped in senseless pornography, sensationalistic violence, and sadomasochistic torment—but it is exploitation with discernment. The film transcends all standards of malice and breaks all boundaries of decency to capture, in purposeful excess, the turpitude of National Socialist philosophy at its most dissolute and unhinged. Canevari taps more into the controversy of European proto-Nazisploitations—Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, Tinto Brass’ Salon Kitty, Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter and many others—than into the outrageous North American Nazisploitations featuring raunchy, sexy bosomy women and virile, sadistic Nazi officers in fetishized SS uniforms—Don Edmonds’ Ilsa She Wolf of the SS and Lee Frost’s Love Camp 7—it’s as if we had before our eyes more a film determined to unsettle you than to entertain you. The experience—if it can be described in words—is like a kind of low-budget, artless Salò. With Pasolini’s permission, I would venture to speculate that Canevari is pulling off his own version of Salò, though instead of powerful fascists in a sumptuous palazzo, we get debauched Nazi officers in a concentration camp. It’s a harrowing descent into the worst of the human being inebriated with power. The Nazi exploitation subgenre may not appear the most fitting arena for confronting the corruption of man, yet Canevari renders it strangely apt by wielding its crude paraphernalia to jolt the senses and unsettle the viewer with a tone far more disquieting than indulgent.
An opera of devastating reminiscences unveils the horrors of the Nazi inferno on earth. We, as listeners, bear witness to the mournful and harrowing testimonies of concentration camp survivors in a court trial—yet we do not see them. Their voices, laden with anguish, echo against the backdrop of a man speeding through winding hills in his car. He arrives at his destination, where he reunites with Lise Cohen (Daniela Poggi). As they interact, we learn that their past is intertwined in tragedy: they first met within the walls of a death camp. The man, Conrad von Starke (Adriano Micantoni), was a ruthless Nazi commandant; Lise was one of the victims who suffered under his reign.
While Conrad greets her with sinister delight, Lise’s reaction is steeped in unease. He thanks her for a misleading eyewitness account—an act that obscured the truth of what transpired in that hellish Nazi domain. As they walk through the derelict remains of the extermination camp, time unravels. Through Lise’s perspective, the past resurfaces, exposing the origins of their story—the agony, the atrocities, and the ghosts that linger in the ruins.
The plot centers on the sexual humiliations endured by all female prisoners in a concentration camp overseen by SS Commandant Conrad von Starke. To survive the inhumane regime enforced within the camp, the women must submit to the sordid trials imposed by the Nazi officers. Yet it is not enough merely to endure the demoralizing and sadistic treatment; the victims are also expected to display fear and submission before the Nazi high command—degenerates who are aroused only by the visible terror and suffering of those under their control. Lise, portrayed with a perpetually dazed and traumatized expression by Daniela Poggi, falls into a catatonic state of apathy after witnessing such extreme cruelty in just a few days within the Nazi camp. This emotional paralysis is deeply unsatisfying to Commandant Conrad, who, obsessed with her, desires not mere possession but the visible signs of fear and submission. Determined to provoke a reaction, the nefarious commandant commits himself to subjecting her to a series of degrading and revolting tortures designed to awaken terror.
The film dwells obsessively on its tableaux of quasi-pornographic torment, each new degradation plunging deeper into an abyss of ritualized cruelty. Yet at its center, Daniela Poggi gives a performance so sensuous and wounded, so haunting in its emotional clarity, that it anchors the carnage with an eerie sense of purpose. Her presence distills chaos into tragic poetry. Enhancing this cruel theatre is the operatic score by Alberto Baldan Bembo, whose swelling compositions overlay the grotesque imagery with an uncanny grandeur. Canevari’s roving camera often captures scenes that border on the vulgar or the absurd—but it is precisely in these moments, when the music swells with mournful pomp, that the film’s trashy artifice is alchemized into something solemn and strangely sacred.
Calling Canevari’s movie one of the dirtiest in the Nazi sleaze canon doesn’t cut it—this is the filthiest. It’s so vile that even Daniela Poggi, the film’s tragic center, has spent years expressing regret over taking the role. But the irony? Her performance is the best thing in the movie—raw, fearless, and totally essential. Absent her performance, there would be no tragedy, no fragile humanity threading through the darkness. Poggi bears the film’s weight with grace under siege, facing each revolting trial with a haunted resilience. The narrative remains unpalatable, obscene in premise and execution—but through Poggi’s eyes, we glimpse something more: the erosion of a soul, the flicker of dignity in the face of dehumanization. By its end, what began as shock becomes sorrow, and what was once monstrous takes on the contour of the tragic.
Perhaps Canevari’s most glaring fault lies in his relentless pursuit of moral degradation, which at times tips into the absurd. The spell begins to crack with the arrival of Maristella Greco’s grotesquely mannered, sexually unhinged Nazi officer—a performance so theatrical it fractures the film’s somber dread and plunges it into unabashed torture porn. And yet, it is through such extremes that the film dares to confront the grotesqueries of power and transgression. In shedding restraint, it exposes the dark theatre of fascist cruelty as both obscene and ludicrous—a danse macabre performed at the edge of cultural taboo.
This is pure Nazi melodrama—bloody, bonkers, and packed with sleazy tropes that make you wonder what kind of maniacs even made this thing. And yet, for all its tasteless excess, The Gestapo’s Last Orgy shows a weird kind of commitment: these guys meant to drag you through the worst. They’re not backing off, and that’s part of what makes it so potent. You watch with your jaw on the floor, disgusted one second, hypnotized the next. It’s cinema at its most depraved.
Perhaps the most chilling moment in Canevari’s vision arrives not with sadism clothed in sex, but in the cold, ceremonial horror of a Nazi banquet. Within a hall adorned with fascist regalia, the officers toast to genocide, their words oozing with perverse elation. This is not mere satisfaction—it is arousal by atrocity. As the feast descends into a surreal crescendo of cannibalism and infanticide, Canevari’s camera lingers with theatrical indulgence. It is a vile opera, staged at the edge of sanity. And yet, the scene distills the film’s essence: cruelty without limits, delivered through a grotesque pageantry that both repels and commands attention. The effect is ghastly—but undeniably potent.
Cesare Canevari’s film resists easy recommendation, yet its significance is undeniable. In a career spanning only nine films, he carved a place in Italian genre cinema that refuses to fade. Once watched, this film imprints itself on the mind, its insidious images haunting long after the final frame. Neglected rather than underrated, it remains obscure, still censored in the UK. But for those who dare to descend into its twisted depths, there lies a work worthy of rediscovery. Be warned: this is no casual viewing experience. Coprophagy, deviant sexuality, and graphic gore are presented with uncompromising clarity. Yet, for the adventurous, few exploitation films rival its singular impact.
