Hanna-icon

By Your Humble Reviewer’s stan­dards, Italy was the king of the rip-offs dur­ing the great 1970’s/1980’s era of exploita­tion film­mak­ing.  The Italian genre film mill could take any pop­u­lar film, strip it to its most exploitable essen­tials, crank up the excess and deliver a dis­tinc­tive knock-off that could blow the grind­house fans out the back wall of the the­ater.  Better yet, they were will­ing to try these tac­tics out on any import.   It didn’t have to be an iconic cult item like Dawn Of The Dead or The Road Warrior — any vaguely pop­u­lar or noto­ri­ous film could get the Italo-ripoff-remake treatment.

A great exam­ple is Hanna D.: The Girl From Vondel Park, which is the Italian riff on a German film, Christiane F. The orig­i­nal was a dark, gru­el­ing adap­ta­tion of a teen’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal chron­i­cle of drug addic­tion and pros­ti­tu­tion.   It was a crit­i­cal suc­cess around the world, even in the badly-dubbed U.S. ver­sion, and retains a cer­tain cachet in cult movie cir­cles for its con­cert footage of David Bowie (and the use of sev­eral Bowie tunes on the sound­track).  It was a shocker but the shocks were there to sup­port its anti-drug mes­sage and there was noth­ing tit­il­lat­ing about its por­trait of the junkie lifestyle.

Simply put, Hanna D.: The Girl From Vondel Park is the funhouse-mirror reflec­tion of its model.  Sober message-mongering is replaced by push-it-to-the-limit sleaze,  documentary-styled depic­tions of drugs are replaced with Reefer Madness–style hys­te­ria, grim real­ism is replaced with gra­tu­itously absurd melo­drama… and the result is an unin­hib­ited sleaze cock­tail that will leave cult-movie obses­sives with know­ing smiles on their faces.

As in Christiane F., the hero­ine of Hanna D. (played by the dis­tress­ingly teenage-looking Ann Gisel Glass) lives in an apart­ment with her boozy mother (Karin Schubert) and the mother’s slea­zoid boyfriend.  However, young Hanna is not just a drug-curious teen, she’s also a full-on teenage pros­ti­tute who hooks to pay the family’s rent.  Domestic strife dri­ves Hanna into heroin addic­tion and the arms of motor-mouth pimp sven­gali Miguel (Fausto Lombardi).  As she sinks into deprav­ity, she gets a life­line in the form of uncon­di­tional love from good-guy Axel (Sebastiano Somma) — but will it be enough to tri­umph over the evils of the sex/drugs abyss?

The fin­ished prod­uct plays like a 1930’s drugsploita­tion epic that col­lided with an early 1980’s soft­core effort.  Director/co-writer Rino Di Silvestro is as sub­tle as a fly­ing mal­let, cram­ming in over­ripe mono­logues where a sin­gle line would do and allow­ing every big dra­matic scene to erupt into a scream­ing, teeth-gnashing frenzy (the shout­ing matches between Gisel and Schubert are to die for).  The script wastes no time in deliv­er­ing the grotty goods — Hanna is strip­ping for a cus­tomer with the first two min­utes — and it never passes up an oppor­tu­nity to throw the viewer into the most depraved sce­nar­ios imag­in­able.  For instance, many a fan’s favorite moment in this film arrives when Hanna is try­ing to kick heroin cold-turkey in jail and an inmate work­ing for her pimp pro­duces a secret fix for Hanna that was hid­den in her anus.

This kind of excess wouldn’t work if the act­ing didn’t live up to the wild­ness of the sce­nario.  Thankfully, Hanna D.: The Girl From Vondel Park is packed to the gills with scenery-chewing of the first order.  Sexploitation vet Schubert threat­ens to steal the show with her wild-eyed antics as the alco­holic nympho mom and Lombardi piles on the sleazy charisma as he deliv­ers many florid mono­logues crammed with “dog eat dog” showbiz/rat-race cliches.  However, Gisel takes top hon­ors with her all-stops-out lead per­for­mance.  Whether she is thrash­ing and puk­ing through with­drawal or bump­ing and grind­ing through a sex scene with a tear in her eye, her total com­mit­ment to her character’s tribu­la­tions is hypnotic.

It also helps that the movie has a gen­uine amount of crafts­man­ship prop­ping up its excesses.  Franco Delli Colli’s glossy pho­tog­ra­phy makes great, atmos­pheric use of gen­uine Amsterdam loca­tions and the edit­ing by erst­while trash direc­tor Bruno Mattei is unex­pect­edly artsy, par­tic­u­larly a jaw-dropping mon­tage depict­ing Hanna going through an impos­si­bly sor­did cycle of face­less sex and drug use.  Luigi Ceccarelli’s synth-driven new-wave/jazz score adds the final ele­ment of deli­cious retro-kitsch.

However, the most sur­pris­ing thing about Hanna D.: The Girl From Vondel Park is how gen­uinely com­mit­ted it is to its sor­did mis­sion.  Whatever Di Silvestro lacks in sub­tlety or orig­i­nal­ity, he makes up for with an intense belief in his story.  His direc­tion grabs the viewer by the scruff of the neck and drags it through the film’s neon under­world with an almost furi­ous inten­sity.  He may not com­mand your respect but he com­mands your atten­tion… and this relent­less energy makes Hanna D. a trashy high in that clas­sic Neapolitan style.