Never mind the ridiculous cover (at least of my old VHS tape) showing the heroine simpering like baby-doll jailbait on a bed in lingerie--this is an at least somewhat serious attempt to dramatize a purportedly true story, however loosely based it may be. Yet it does occasionally lurch into cheesy sexploitation, just one among many ways it can't seem to maintain any tone or focus at all.
Kerry Mack's heroine starts out kinda white-trashy, and one feels for her callous dismissal of carny co-worker Ralph Schicha's earnest marriage proposal. Then suddenly she's the poor victim, pregnant and into marriage against her will--his life in danger, he refuses surgery unless she gets consents--and he's acting like an obsessed stalker in a horror movie. They move to his native Germany, where he reveals himself as a Nazi fanatic and forces her to perform a bank robbery with wig and machine gun like Patty Hearst. That's hardly the end of the extreme globe-trotting melodramatics, either.
Mack is made to jump through too many emotional hoops, and the very handsome Schicha can't make sense of a character who's sweet and loyal one minute, then psycho and abusive the next. (On the plus side, the kid who plays their toddler daughter is adorable, and seems very relaxed around her "parents.") The movie just doesn't have the finesse to pull off such a complicated relationship in psychological terms, and stylistically it reels from sober drama to broad, lurid, sometimes choppily edited sequences.
Despite its alleged factual basis in the experiences of a woman who endured some years tied to a delusional Nazi husband, the film's progress is too erratic to be credible. It awkwardly lands between drive-in fare and something more respectable. Still, it's too hectic to be dull.
Kerry Mack's heroine starts out kinda white-trashy, and one feels for her callous dismissal of carny co-worker Ralph Schicha's earnest marriage proposal. Then suddenly she's the poor victim, pregnant and into marriage against her will--his life in danger, he refuses surgery unless she gets consents--and he's acting like an obsessed stalker in a horror movie. They move to his native Germany, where he reveals himself as a Nazi fanatic and forces her to perform a bank robbery with wig and machine gun like Patty Hearst. That's hardly the end of the extreme globe-trotting melodramatics, either.
Mack is made to jump through too many emotional hoops, and the very handsome Schicha can't make sense of a character who's sweet and loyal one minute, then psycho and abusive the next. (On the plus side, the kid who plays their toddler daughter is adorable, and seems very relaxed around her "parents.") The movie just doesn't have the finesse to pull off such a complicated relationship in psychological terms, and stylistically it reels from sober drama to broad, lurid, sometimes choppily edited sequences.
Despite its alleged factual basis in the experiences of a woman who endured some years tied to a delusional Nazi husband, the film's progress is too erratic to be credible. It awkwardly lands between drive-in fare and something more respectable. Still, it's too hectic to be dull.