By Eric Ortiz (@EricOrtizG)
The classic Swiss children’s book Heidi was written by Johanna Spyri and published in two parts between 1880 and 1881. The story follows an orphan girl forced to live with her aunt, then with her hermit grandfather in a hut in the Swiss mountains, and then in the house of a wealthy family in Frankfurt, Germany. This ode to rural life, contact with nature and faith in God has been totally altered by directors Johannes Hartmann and Sandro Klopfstein. Mad Heidi (2022) is the self-described “Swissploitation” movie about an adult Heidi (Alice Lucy) and a Swiss village that for two decades has been under the yoke of a Nazi Germany like regime that has monopolized cheese.
American actor Casper Van Dien plays the dictatorial antagonist, President Meili. In an interview for the Fantastic Pavilion, Van Dien said that he likes to be “obscure and over the top, just play around and try different things. When I was working with a dialect coach, he would sometimes come and go ‘that was kind of a little too Arnold Schwarzenegger’ or ‘that sounds like Tommy Wiseau from The Room (2003)’. And I’m like: great, perfect! I love it.”
References to Paul Verhoeven’s cult classic Starship Troopers (1997) don’t take long: “Are you doing your part?”, asks the president in a propaganda advert against lactose intolerant people. Van Dien revealed that he enjoyed the nods to Starship Troopers, a film in which he played a young man who joins the military academy just before the start of a war against an alien bug race.
“I’m always going to be grateful to Verhoeven because he’s basically given me my career. He remembers vividly his family fighting against the Nazis when they came to the Netherlands. When he takes his sense of humor and does a propaganda film with all these references, trying to show us different aspects of humanity, I’m always impressed. I love that Verhoeven has influenced young filmmakers like these guys that we had (Hartmann and Klopfstein).
“All the guards in Mad Heidi had name tags of all these great directors: they had Rodriguez for Robert Rodriguez, they had Tarantino, Argento, Carl Schenkel, who was my director on Tarzan and the Lost City and was Swiss-German. So they even did homage to that. I think when you put that kind of detail into a film, it really pays off, it shows that these people didn’t leave anything out,” Van Dien said.
Mad Heidi is, indeed, a movie that probably wouldn’t exist without Grindhouse (2007), the epic tribute to old school exploitation cinema led by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. It also included fake trailers, some directed by Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright and Eli Roth – whose Thanksgiving trailer will become a real full-length slasher next November –.
Hartmann and Klopfstein, for example, take Peter, the goat herder who befriends Heidi in the original novel, and turn him into a blaxploitation character (played by Kel Matsena). If Heidi, in the book, feels imprisoned inside the Frankfurt house, where she has to deal with the villainous housekeeper Rottenmeier, in Mad Heidi our protagonist literally ends up in a prison, thus alluding to another subgenre of exploitation cinema: women in prison. There’s also time for Nazi experiments – here linked to Swiss cheese –, gladiator combat, and for a dose of gore made with both practical and digital effects.
According to Van Dien, “it was fun being around it, when the guy gets his chest ripped apart, I’m in that one, and then what Alice does to me was painful, but only for the character. But it is a practical effect and it was very creative the way they did it. I like the mixture of it. In Starship Troopers, we had not as many practical effects but we did have some practical things like the leg stabbed, and some of those things were a mixture of practical and visual effects. Right now I still think there’s something magical about practical effects. They did a great job on Mad Heidi, it needs to have that look, that visceral feeling that people get from seeing the over the top gore violence.”
The young Alice Lucy – who knew the original Heidi book and the anime – had to immerse herself into the exploitation films that were released mostly during the 1970s, in order to construct this crazy version of Heidi: “The directors really introduced me properly to this world. I’d seen different genre and exploitation films, but not like them. When they offered me the role, they sent me an encyclopedia of films to watch before arrival, so that I could understand what was going on and the things that had inspired them. I really got on board with it and loved it,” Lucy assured.
Among the films that Lucy had to watch are the Japanese Lady Snowblood (1973) and a couple directed by Tarantino: Kill Bill (2003-2004) and Django Unchained (2012). Likewise, the Swiss movie makes explicit references to Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Machete (2010): “You fucked with the wrong Heidi.” It’s no coincidence because the core of Mad Heidi is violent revenge and rebellion, led by a female warrior, as the only solution to overthrow the tyrants.
Mad Heidi is now available on Blu-ray, Digital HD and Cable VOD, presented by Raven Banner Releasing and Swissploitation Films.