Sweden: Heaven and Hell (1969)

Simply Perfect

Expected more

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

I'm not a big fan of Italian "mondo" movies, not so much because of their sleazy, hypocritical exploitation of the Third World, but mostly because of their occasional use of unsimulated animal (and occasionally human) slaughter. You don't have to worry about that here though because instead of this "mondo" movie taking place in some primitive tropical hellhole, it takes place in a more modern dystopian hellhole--Sweden! And NOTHING here is unsimulated. Ironically, this is kind of the reverse of the usual mondo film where a "modern" society passes judgment on more backwards "primitive" ones. Here it is the more modern society (Sweden) that is taken to task by what was then still a backward theocracy (Italy) for having such things as sex education and day-care for working mothers.Like most mondo films though a lot of this is just laughably ridiculous. There's a scene where a man is arrested for beating up a kid who is trying to steal his car because car theft was supposedly perfectly okay in Sweden but violence wasn't. But even if anybody then or now believed that, wouldn't you have to wonder how the filmmakers manage to record this "spontaneous" scene from several different camera set-ups? Even more unconvincing is a scene where a group of marauding bikers "gang-rape" a young girl. You might ask why the Italian filmmakers didn't try to help the "victim" instead of doing various set-ups and close-ups of her during her ordeal. Of course, you might also notice that the "rape victim" here is actually Swedish sex star Marie Lilljedahl from Joe Sarno's "Inga" movies and Jess Franco's "Eugenie", so the better question might be why Italian filmmakers in this ridiculously staged scene didn't have the "bikers" tear the clothes off this Scandanavian lovely for the delectation of the audience (but I guess for that you have to check out "Eugenie" or "Inga"). Don't worry though, the movie does show plenty of naked, nubile Swedish girls including a nude photography session and whole gaggle of them running around bare-assed in the snow or sunbathing nude. (The narration claims Swedish women always sunbathe nude, yet almost all these girls have visible bikini lines).Other scenes like one of blind orphans diving for stolen property in the bay are so bizarre it's hard to tell if they're fabricated or not. And, of course, you also get scenes of alcoholism, drug use, and even a ridiculously staged suicide! The English version I saw was narrated by British actor Edward Purdom (who adopts quite a smarmy, morally superior tone for a guy that would later direct "Don't Open Until Christmas"). The music is actually pretty good including the famous "M'nah. M'nah" song that later appeared on "The Muppet Show". Any other entertainment value here though was purely unintentional.

When Sweden:Heaven or Hell came out in America, I was only 16 years old. America had started the "ratings" game. Sweden was X rated. My mother and sister went out for the evening, so my brother in law suggested that us "men" should go out on the town. We ended up sneaking me into this movie. To say the least, I was quite surprised at what I saw. I think my brother in law was feeling about the same and he was a Marine! I did enjoy it myself. I actually would like to see it again. From what I read in the IMDb, I guess it will never be offered again. Too bad. It has been many, many years. It made me want to go to Sweden. If anybody knows how to get a copy, please respond to this commentary.

This movie where never banned in Sweden, it was heavily cut. If you have seen the movie you may ask your self why they cut it down. The reason for that was that Luigi Scattini filmed this movie in Sweden and without permission to the people who acts in it put it out on the market. The film have never been shown on a theatre in Sweden, it was the Swedish national tv who send it in 1971 as one of other movies about other countrys opinion about Sweden. They decided to cut the movie, to save a lot of "actors" dignity. The day after they have shown the movie, you could read a lot of wild protests, from the angry viewers, in the newspapers.My own oppinion about the movie: It is not a documentary, it is a classic mondo movie, with a lot of faked scenes...If you have the opportunity to get it on tape, watch it with a smile!!