In a Glass Cage

Director: Agustí Villaronga
Year Released: 1986
Rating: 2.5

A former Nazi - with an elaborate history of experimenting on children - finds himself confined to an iron lung after a failed suicide attempt; while trapped helplessly in the contraption, a crazed young man from his past shows up at his house to torture him. While the essential point - that sexual abuse begets sexual abuse - is conveyed quite clearly, Villaronga's a little too taken with the conventions of the suspense/horror genre to make the kind of passive, intellectual film like Salò or even something truly sleazy and subversive like The Night Porter - his characters are also too one-dimensional. The overall mood of the film is undeniably oppressive and intense (which is its real strength) and only in the third act does it get flamboyantly involved in its own kind of 'Fascinating Fascism' (the young man 'recreates' a concentration camp-type atmosphere in the giant house - he also reads out loud from the pedophile's WWII journal of debauchery).