Mad Heidi

Crowdfunded faux-exploitation flick Mad Heidi is intended as a bit of dumb OTT fun. With its endless gags on everything Swiss (especially cheese), it is definitely dumb, but it's not nearly as much fun as I had hoped, the joke quickly wearing thinner than a slice of Emmental. Like Iron Sky (2012), with which it shares a similar vibe, the film suffers from a weak script and bad acting, and it only delivers sporadic gore when it would benefit from pushing the limits further and further with each subsequent scene.

Alice Lucy plays Heidi, who has been living in the Swiss mountains with her grandfather ever since her parents were killed in a rebellion against President Meili (Casper Van Dien) and his Nazi-like regime. When Heidi's boyfriend Goat Peter (Kel Matsena) is killed for trading in illegal cheese, Heidi takes revenge and is jailed as a result. After a daring escape, Heidi throws herself over a waterfall and is presumed dead; however, she survives the plunge, and is trained how to fight back against her oppressors by Swiss goddess Helvetia.

Mad Heidi wears it's exploitation influences on its sleeve - there's Nazis, nuns, dwarfs, a training montage and WIP action (we even get an Asian prisoner who is #701) - but the result lacks the grit and grime of the genuine article, the film's effectiveness further weakened by the puerile comedic elements: there's only so much cheese-based humour I can take.

The trouble with Mad Heidi is that it actually does achieve basically everything it sets out to do. You know, it's this ridiculous quasi-exploitation movie that's just the dumbest thing they could come up with. It's difficult to be overly critical of a movie like this when it's clearly supposed to be like this.

My biggest complaint is that it needed a lot more violence. It has some, especially in the second half, but I think to really be effective in what it was doing, it needed to go all the way and basically be all violence all the time. As it is, Mad Heidi got a little too bogged down in showing Hedi going mad and not enough time showing her be mad.

I think what the production team for this either forgot or failed to realise is that it's not like in the early '70s anymore where people are going to be shocked by a little bit of gore anymore; especially in a movie like this which is mostly a fairly standard action movie otherwise. It really needs to either be all gore all the time with basically no plot or it needs to sorta be trying to be this decade's answer to A Serbian Film before it really gets that shocked reaction from most people.

I don't think this was awful or anything because it's doing most of what it set out to do and I think it was worth doing. It's just that I think they probably needed to lean into the violence a bit more.

Mad Heidi is a simple revenge story set in a world obsessed with dairy products where the lactose intolerant are shunned, publicly humiliated and even taken away to re-education camps and tortured with cheese. This daft film romps away in its own bewildering world of 'Swissploitation' for an undemanding 90mins and is well produced (particularly considering the means of funding) and features good cinematography and fight choreography with strong performances from Alice Lucy and Rebecca Dyson Smith, as the cruel Lutz. Bizarre, absurd and the most original thing that's been along in a while. 'Rest in cheese, b*tch!'

This crowdfunded, swiss made exploitation movie, has almost everything one can hope for; splatter, clichés, memes, movie references and great visuals.

The amount of time and love invested in this movie really shines through. You can feel the filmmakers love for film. I was very impressed by the quality of the costumes, the sets, even the cgi. (Remembering it's a small production without any big companies involved and a budget that was crowdfunded) There are so many references to swiss culture beautifully incorporated.

This might be controversial and is probably more wishful thinking on my part but what I didn't like was that the film is in English. Of course it has to be to be view and enjoyed around the world, but as a swiss I believe swiss german could have made it much more hilarious. And probably also improved the acting. ( I got the feeling that because the non native english speakers had to speak english their acting suffered a little)

The acting in general varied. Over all it was not great but it also didn't have to be.

What I greatly disliked were the scene with the naked maid. (Portrayed by a swiss "performance artist"). It didn't add anything to the movie and every scene with her in it was like: Naked maid with big fake boobs enters the room - the men around the table start staring and salivating.

In conclusion: definitely worth a watch to not only support independent film makers but also have a fun evening with "the boys" (or girls) and a few beers.

It is hard to criticize a film which starts off boasting about how it was crowd-funded by the common folk, with no interference from the big corporations or studios. Hard. But not impossible. The first red flag is that the uber-high ratings from the early posted member reviews do not match the ratings left by members who saw the film later, gave much lower ratings, but did not bother to leave a review. The explanation? Mad Heidi is loaded to the brim with raw energy and great expectations. But very little of that actually translates into a movie that anyone would care to waste 90 minutes on. The script seems like to have been written by someone trying to piece together the best parts of Max Max, Monty Python, and every Kung Fu film you have ever seen. The result is supposed to be unique and fresh. Instead it basically re-invents 1960's "experimental cinema," and does not do a very good job even at that. ((Designated "IMDb Top Reviewer." Please check out my list "167+ Nearly-Perfect Movies (with the occasional Anime or TV miniseries) you can/should see again and again (1932 to the present))