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Amos Lassen wrote on 07/21/2011:

A Nazi doctor who had a thing for young boys finds himself filled with guilt after torturing and then murdering his victim jumps off of a roof in a suicide attempt. He is put into an iron lung and forced to accept as his nurse a boy who had watched him kill another boy.

The film opens with Klaus (Gunter Meisner) stringing up a naked boy in an abandoned building and then beats him to death with a two by four and we get an idea of the depravity yet to come. However, Meisner is paralyzed after an unsuccessful suicide attempt and Angelo (David Sust), a boy who had witnessed his sick activities is hired to care for him. When Klaus was a doctor in the concentration camps, he experimented on children and now he is the subject of a clinical trial and Angelo subjects him to mental torture such as occasionally unplugging the machine just to watch him try to breathe. But Angelo has his own terrible secret and we see the battle of the wills.

Directed by Augustin Villaronga, the film premiered at Cannes in 1986 where it received both bravos and boos. This is a very dark movie that poses profound questions about the demons that are inside of us and we see the nature of sexual abuse. Villaronga does not hold back and the movie is a slap in the face.

The performances are uniformly excellent and the transition of Angelo is frightening. The movie can be taken as a metaphor about the ghosts of war which continue to haunt after war is over. This is a very serious film and it haunts and disturbs the viewer.

After the war, Klaus moved from Germany to Catalonia but was still being looked for by the authorities. He was relatively safe but his depravity got the best of him and he attempted unsuccessful jumping to his death. It was the jump that caused him to be paralyzed from the neck down and he is kept alive by the iron lung. His wife and daughter care for him but it gets to be too much so they hire Angelo. A perverse relationship develops between Klaus and Angelo and it becomes very strange when Angelo discloses that he has found Klaus’s diaries from the war.

While the film deals with violence, we see very little and this is a unique approach. We watch as Angelo loses his mind and he like Klaus becomes murderous. This is definitely not a film for everyone. It is a shocker and a well done shocker at that. This is one of the most disturbing films I have ever seen as it depicts the failure of mankind and the instincts of sadism and violence. While it is repulsive, it is also distinctive and well made.

Gay Movie Viewer (jamesvmorris@verizon.net) wrote on 01/31/2004:

The box for the DVD caught my eye immediately. I must confess I’ve always had a morbid interest in Nazi atrocity movies, although while watching them I usually find myself filled with disgust, and absolutely enraged that the participants of Hitler’s war on decency were able to get as far as they did, and that so many of them got away with it. This film is described as a horror story and, on that level, it certainly delivers. The narrative concerns a former Nazi named Klaus who took advantage of his position to indulge himself in the sadistic torture and sexual abuse of young boys. He continues his horrible blood-spree after the war, but in a fit of remorse, attempts suicide and winds up an invalid, confined to an iron lung (exactly how this happens was very unclear in the actual film – I rely on the accuracy of a review I read for this piece of plotline). His resentful wife and his small, shy daughter care for him, but long for a nurse to provide some relief. Enter a young man named Angelo who (we learn much later, but suspect from the moment of his introduction) was one of Klaus’ few victims to survive meeting him. In a bizarre twist, the young man not only wants to perversely torture his tormentor in revenge, he also seeks to carry out similar crimes, acting out certain details in Klaus’ diary exactly. Apparently Angelo’s mind has been twisted by his encounter with Klaus, and although he is horrified by the memory, he is perversely excited by death, and seeks release by performing acts of cruelty in the presence of the man who treated him so badly so long ago. The result is a somewhat hard to follow but always absorbing shock-fest, which succeeds for its gory excesses if nothing else. It has more than its share of difficult to watch horror scenes, and one perfectly unforgettable scene in which Angelo murders Klaus’ wife, and then ingeniously uses her corpse to exact a horrifying revenge. The contemplation of this scene alone chilled me to the bone and ruined my sleep for more than one night. This is NOT a gay film; I certainly don’t view Klaus –who is married and has a daughter – as anything but a sadistic heterosexual child molester, who happens to favor little boys as his victims. Yet it is aggressively being marketed as a “gay film” and I, for one, resent the fact that some people seem to see it that way merely because the sadistic child molester victimizes boys. The young actor who plays Angelo is quite handsome, but his actions are far too cruel, sadistic and depraved for anyone but a full-blown masochist to find him erotically stimulating. If you want a fully realized and graphically bloody horror film, you will enjoy this picture very much. However, if you find this shocker even slightly erotic, I suggest you check out a good therapist on the way home.

Natalia Carlisle wrote on 01/09/2004:

Mad props to TLA Video for carrying this hard-to-find, hard-to-stomach, impossible to forget classic of the bizarre. If you're hoping for eye-catching S&M Lite tableaux of nude Bel Ami types tormented in dungeons by sexperimental Aryan studs, you're out of luck (and pretty damn cheesy). This movie has much deeper, darker things on its very twisted mind. Like luring us into the psychology of the victims of the most unspeakable sexual abuse. What is truly amazing is how the director, with minimal explicit NC-17 imagery, is able to create a sense of dread and horror so overpowering that audiences are convinced they have witnessed scenes much more graphic than they actually have. Like HAPPINESS and SCHINDLER'S LIST, this movie forces viewers to confront physical and mental atrocities most people refuse to entertain for more than 5 seconds. And like a classic piece of suspense theatre, the screenplay sets up a dysfunctional Gothic household and then spins all expectations right off the balcony. If you can handle deliberate (NOT slow!) pacing and reading a few subtitles, this film is really, REALLY scary. There's nothing even remotely similar, but BRIMSTONE & TREACLE and THE 4TH MAN live on the same creepy street. So does the Stephen King story APT PUPIL, although IN A GLASS CAGE makes the Bryan Singer film version look like a very special episode of JOAN OF ARCADIA. Submit to this movie's evil spell....if you dare!

Green Giant wrote on 11/28/2003:

i recently rented this film based on its cult status. well am i ever glad i didn't
actually buy it. while the plotline seems
like it would make an eye catching film
the exact opposite happened- its as
boring as watching paint dry. i simply
do not know why this film has the cult
status it does.