Director – Johannes Hartmann, Co-Director – Sandro Klopfstein, Screenplay – Trent Haaga, Johannes Hartmann, Sandro Klopfstein & Gregory D. Widmer, Producer – Valentin Greutert, Photography – Eric Lehner, Music – Mario Batkovic, Special Effects – Valentin Altorfer, Fabian Lüscher & Julia Morf, Makeup Effects – Dana Hesse, Tanja Koller, Claudio Raho, David Scherer & Daniel Steffen, Production Design – Myriam Kaelin. Production Company – Swissploitation Films/A Film Company/SRF (Swiss Radio and Television).
Cast
Alice Lucy (Heidi), Casper Van Dien (President Meili), Max Rüdlinger (Kommandant Knorr), David Schofield (Alpöhi), Kel Matsena (Goat Peter), Almar Sato (Klara), Pascal Ulli (Dr. Schwitzgebel), Katja Kolm (Fraulein Rottweiler), Julia Föry (Flora), Andrea Fischer-Schulthess (Helvetia), Rebecca Dyson-Smith (Lutz)
Plot
In Switzerland, the President Meili runs the country with a dictatorial hand, demanding that people consume the cheeses his factory produces and conducting a war against the lactose intolerant. Heidi lives in the mountains with her grandfather, a revolutionary plotting against Meili. Heidi is witness as her boyfriend Goat Peter is brutalised and then murdered in the streets by Meili’s troops. She is arrested where Meili takes a personal liking to her and wants her to compete in the upcoming gladiatorial games. Instead, Heidi makes an escape from prison. Guided by the spirit of Helvetia, she begins training and arming in preparation to start an uprising to bring Meili down.
Mad Heidi advertises itself as a ‘Swissploitation film’ – indeed the film’s production company proudly calls itself Swissploitation Films. It was a debut feature for Johannes Hartmann, who had previously worked in music video and commercials and made some short films.
On one level, Mad Heidi takes the famous Swiss children’s character of Heidi, who appeared in Heidi (1880-1), a novel by Johanna Spyri that was originally published in two parts. The original story concerns Heidi, a five year-old girl who is taken to live with her grandfather in the Swiss Alps following the death of her parents, and the assorted friendships she makes while there. Johanna Spyri only wrote the one Heidi book – although there were a series of sequels written by her French translator Charles Tritten in the 1930s – but it has become one of the most popular children’s stories of all time. There have been numerous film and tv adaptations, including Heidi (1937) with Shirley Temple, several animated films and even an anime tv series.
Mad Heidi operates in the same sense as the recent Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023) in that it sets out to sarcastically puncture the innocence of the children’s tale. There are only sporadic connections between the film and the book. There’s the character of Heidi, the girl who is raised in the mountains, although she is upped in age from a five year-old to Alice Lucy, who looks to be in her mid-twenties. There’s the grandfather, who now becomes David Schofield’s revolutionary, her friend Klara, who is unable to walk in the book, and her friend Peter the goatherd, who become her boyfriend Goat Peter in the film. Heidi’s nemesis of the stern housekeeper Miss Rotternmeier gets rewritten as the prison warden Fraulein Rottweiler. However, resemblances end about there.
Alice Lucy as Heidi
Everywhere else, the film is a mad cartoonish parody of all things Swiss – cheese is turned into a weaponised zombifying form; we see Toblerone chocolates used as a torture weapon; Heidi is guided in combat training by the spirit of Helvetia, the spirit of Switzerland; along with assorted uses of alpenhorns, lederhosen, fondue, cuckoo clocks and Swiss Army Knives that probably weren’t intended by their creators. This comes amid a good many splattery deaths and a series of ridiculously over-the-top moves. Over-the-top acting seems the call of the day, none the more so than from the film’s most well-known actor Casper Van Dien.
There are assorted references to other exploitation movies – the middle of the film takes a detour into the Women in Prison genre, while Heidi’s training montage and power-up sequence is borrowed from the Martial Arts film. Not to mention, there is a scene where Casper Van Dien’s cries “faster, pussycat,” at Heidi in the arena and is joined by the crowd who chant a chorus of “kill, kill,” namedropping the Russ Meyer exploitation classic, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965).
The tone seems informed by Troma – indeed, the film employs Trent Haaga who has acted in and written several of Troma’s Toxic Avenger films on script. That said, it ventures far less into Bad Taste humour than most Troma material wilfully embraces. Perhaps the more apt comparison might be to the Gonzo Japanese Splatter films – The Machine Girl (2008), Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl (2009), Mutant Girls Squad (2010) etc – which regularly feature schoolgirls going into combat with machine-gun attachments and samurai swords. Although in comparison to these, Mad Heidi is not quite up in the same arena of dementia and never quite hits the heights of their surreal glories.
