Behold, the Hilariously Gory Trailer for “Swissploitation” Flick Mad Heidi
Photos via A Film Company
The market for “intentionally campy action parody” is a fairly robust one, and a lot of these films come out every year without making much of a splash or a name for themselves. At its core, this is likely due to a simple lack of appreciable talent and budget, which often renders these films as more amateur than one would like to see in order to really land the joke. But then something like the following trailer for Mad Heidi comes along, and you get to see what cinematic silliness looks like when it’s really executed well.
Mad Heidi bills itself as the first-ever “Swissploitation” film, and is a tongue-in-cheek adaptation of the iconic children’s novel first published in 1881 by Swiss author Johanna Spyri. The book documents a young Swiss girl’s adolescence in the pastoral beauty of the Swiss countryside, as she grows and learns about the world around her. The film, on the other hand, has Heidi as a sexy young freedom fighter, battling “cheese fascists.” Oh, and did we mention that the evil President of Switzerland is played by faded Starship Troopers star Casper Van Dien? The full synopsis is as follows: