Ilsa, No. 1 -- Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975)

Five movies into my 2,000 movie project and I’m already watching pornography. This has to be proof that I’m selecting these franchises at random, because I would not have chosen to view this so soon (or at all): a sexploitation grindhouse flick about Nazi medical experiments during the Holocaust. Great, that description just made someone want to see it. It’s gonna be quite a shift from being snarky about middlebrow car pictures to finding entertainment in Naisploitation. From rapping to raping. What fun!

What little most people know about Ilsa, or grindhouse cinema in general, comes from the little-seen box office bomb Grindhouse, particularly Rob Zombie’s fake trailer for Werewolf Women of the SS. So a grindhouse, that’s a theater in a 1970s inner city that shows B-grade exploitation flicks. This phenomena is unique to its time, as white flight, television and changing cinematic standards forced the old single-screen theaters to rethink their business models to remain viable. Exploitation films proved popular since they offered something viewers couldn’t find on any other filmed medium, namely increased levels of sex, violence, degradation, sleaze, filth, taboos and puking. My only direct evidence of these cinemas and their audiences comes from Travis’s date in Taxi Driver, so I can only imagine these places were frequented by single, lone trench-coated perverted masturbators and Paul Reubens. So if you were to mention to these various transients and hoboes with shotguns that a film such as Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS exists, these bums would not spit-take their brown-bagged whiskey, but rather declare “I must watch this Holocaust pornography posthaste.” Know your audience. Ilsa could never achieve mainstream success, or distribution in Britain, but it could succeed admirably in the narrower stakes of the grindhouse circuit.

As noted, beyond all reasoning Nazisploitation is not a single isolated incident, but a full-on movement within the realms of exploitation. To give you an idea of what we’re dealing with, here is a partial list of other Third Reich sex romps, all of them real:

– Salon Kitty
– SS Hell Camp
– Salò (eh, kinda...)
– Last Orgy of the Third Reich
– Hitler’s Lust Train
– Helga, She Wolf of Spilburg (no points for originality here)
– SS Girls
– SS Experiment Camp
– Deported Women of the SS Special Section
– Achtung! The Desert Tigers
– Nazi Love Camp 27
– Hot Nazis
– Nazi Love Island
– Gestapo
– Gestapo 2
– Stalag 69

The roots for this movement lie in earlier pulp magazines, where damsel in distress tales would descend into degraded sexual torture on a regular basis. During the 1960s there was even a literary tradition of Holocaust pornography in freaking Israel! While Ilsa is the proud flag bearer of this August cinematic fraternity, the premier (that is, first) Nazi sex epic is 1969's Love Camp 7. The film was enormously popular in Canada, which I think has more to do with the fact it was produced and distributed there, and less to do with deviant Mounties looking to loose their maple syrup.

Don Edmonds, director of Love Camp 7, sought to outdo himself with Ilsa, creating a film famed (within certain limited circles) for being the most extreme example of a rather extreme genre. Granted access to the old “Hogan’s Heroes” set on the promise that he burn it to the ground afterwards, Edmonds set about creating his masterpiece.

The film, or at least the version I saw (which I believe is the uncut, Aryan version), opens with a disclaimer proclaiming the story’s connection to history. A common technique amongst earlier grindhouse sex films was to open with a doctor or some such touting the veracity of what follows, as a weak means of justifying as educational what would otherwise be purely pornographic.

The history referred to here, with reference to “medical experiments in special concentration camps throughout Hitler’s Third Reich,” is partly the story of evil Nazi mad scientist Josef Mengele. More apropos, though, is the historical figure Ilse Koch, “The Witch of Buchenwald.” She and her husband, SS colonel Karl Koch, ran the slave labor concentration camp at Buchenwald in so cruel a fashion it made their fellow SS cohorts uncomfortable. Ilse was a notorious sexual torturer. She would often order the prisoners to rape each other, or have them battle to the death in a personally-made gladiator pit. Spurred by charges of corruption, embezzlement and black market techniques, the SS executed Karl Koch, and sentenced Ilse to life imprisonment. Then she killed herself. Knowing all this certainly taints one’s exploitation experience, but we can at least expect an SS-ordered execution at the end.

Commandant Ilsa is played ex-Las Vegas showgirl Dyanne Thorne in the role she was born to play, baby. Ilsa’s introduction finds her in the middle of schtupping some guy whose name I would not learn until late in the film (a common problem). It turns out he is Mario (Tony Mumelo). And my first thought while watching all this is, “Yup! This is definitely X-rated!” Sure, the sex is all softcore, but if you cut this film down to remove all shots that included a breast, buttock or genital, you’d have a film under 10 minutes long. Dyanne Thorne’s relative stardom becomes instantly obvious – she has large mammaries, something which was actually important in the 70s before the Silicone Uncanny Valley. Also, the lighting and production values in this scene are surprisingly high. This is pretty much the only scene in this sex flick that actually tries to compliment the human body. From here on out the cinematography will be awfully flat, quite unlike Thorne herself.

The sex scene goes on. Then the man cums. (This is a plot point.)

And here’s why: As punishment, Ilsa castrates him. AAAEEIIRGHH?! The film proves to be just as generous with the blood as it is with the boobs. Thankfully it rarely stoops to directly depict genital mutilation, which is good because it’s a common feature of this “story.” Still, I’d be hard pressed to describe the alternative presented here as tasteful, what with the groin blood flowing down steel troughs and all. Do note that Ilsa employs a pizza slicer.

Much of the film’s cast is soon introduced in the form of incoming prisoners, all female. Soon enough they are all completely nude, as Ilsa systematically inspects them. Boy, there’s little that can de-sexualize the human body as much as this kind of clinical treatment, and yet for some reason it seems the vast majority of grindhouse-level sex flicks use this approach. Also, it’s a bad sign that I could only tell these characters apart by breast size as opposed to, you know, personality or whatever.

The women are soon separated into two groups. The official, state-sanctioned purpose of Medical Camp 9 is to sterilize the inferior races, as well as to infect them with germane German germs in what is apparently a bid at biological warfare. The lucky women get sent here (or to brothels). Ilsa also has a private project underway, to prove that women can withstand more physical pain than men. Some justification is given, but in reality this is simply a pretext for a movie’s worth of plotless torture scenes. Said tortures are all performed on bound, naked women, and it all quickly becomes tiresome and numbing rather than daring and risque – not the effect I expect the filmmakers were going for. We cannot by any means judge this film by merits such as plot, characterization or artistry, and I don’t just mean that those things are bad, but they are nonexistent. The only things of relative value in this film are the nudity and the atrocities, and, well, let’s just go ahead and catalogue those atrocities, shall we? Here goes...

The Atrocities:
– A nurse performs impromptu oral sex on a sobbing female inmate.
– A lengthy, forced bisexual gang rape, resulting in death.
– Naked, bloodied corpses paraded around endlessly for all to see.
– The systematic electrocution of female genitalia with some sort of a dildo.
– Slowly killing a woman inside a pressure chamber.
– Scalding a prisoner alive in boiling water (the makeup effect for this is surprisingly gross).
– More than one scene exploring the various uses of electric nipple clamps.
– Unnecessary surgical procedures on female nether regions, all done without anesthesia (they actually went and showed this in detail).
– More rape.
– The centerpiece at a dinner table, where a bound and naked female prisoner slowly hangs while perched atop a melting block of ice.
– Maggots forced into a leg.
– The constant physical degradation of the female cast as they slowly succumb to numerous infectious diseases, complete with open, oozing sores.
– As already noted, castration.

I think this is the kind of movie James Woods would air on Videodrome.

From a scientific standpoint, it makes little sense for Ilsa’s study to be focused almost exclusively upon one gender, but the sexual torture of males constitutes a totally separate arena of grindhouse film-making.

Speaking of males, here comes a truck’s worth of them. Their main non-slave labor purpose at the camp is to serve as Ilsa’s nightly sexual playthings. This is always followed by the inevitable castrations post-ejaculation. Standing nude in the barracks, Ilsa systematically inspects the men’s plainly-visible schvanschtuckers, much like Madeline Kahn in History of the World: Part I. All in all, this movie is rather like a Mel Brooks film, only with more sex, more violence, and a complete and total lack of humor, craft, and any other element one finds in a Mel Brooks film. Except there are Nazis.

One of these males is an American (Gregory Knoph) – It wasn’t until the film’s final 10 minutes that I learned his name was Wolfe. Perhaps I wasn’t paying attention to the right things. Anyway, he shortly serves as Ilsa’s sex toy. It turns out the American has a superpower far more useful than Aquaman’s – he can opt to not release semen. This cuts short Ilsa’s plans of cutting him short, and instead the American becomes Ilsa’s regular sex slave. This allows the monotony of the overextended torture scenes to be broken up with the monotony of overextended sex scenes. A little variety is presented here, beyond the diminishing pleasure of Thorne’s omnipresent tits. So rather we briefly explore notions such as voyeurism, threesomes and lesbianism, the latter provided by Ilsa’s duo of loyal Teutonic lackeys. Some choice dialogue: “I will satisfy you until you beg me to stop,” quoth he. “Please cum!!!” quote she.

Eventually an inspecting General arrives in the form of bad actor Wolfgang Roehm. Now, certain fans of this film (obviously they exist, or else there wouldn’t be a franchise) think that this movie is campy, and therefore a lot of fun. Their reasoning for that, I gather, is largely due to Herr General here. Between him and Ilsa to an only slightly-lesser extent, we have one of the most extreme, brazen stereotypes of goose-stepping, sausage-snorfling Krauts outside of a...well, a Mel Brooks film. The accents are ridiculous. Of course as a general, er, standard rule, the acting in this movie is bad. Dyanne Thorne is one of the few who could find further real work after this, and that was mostly in other Ilsa films. Strange how the only thing that really makes this movie remotely palatable to most people is a bit of incompetency the filmmakers probably wanted to avoid. Some examples: Ilsa frequently pronounces “Reich” with a hard “ch.” And at one point (responding to the Dining Room Atrocity), Herr General actually screams out “Vunderbar!!!”

Later, Ilsa pees on him.

But all grotesqueries must come to an end. Following the standard rules of the women in prison genre which Ilsa occasionally resembles, the prisoners have been plotting a revolution for the climax. This begins when the American introduces Ilsa to the pleasures of S&M bondage, effectively leaving her bound and gagged in her own bed. Then the prisoners set about, in suitably gory fashion, to garotte, slit and disembowel ze German soldiers. A shootout takes place, notable only because it switches randomly between slow motion and fast forward, never actually occurring in regular time. And the escaped male prisoners seemingly go ahead and rape the female soldiers for good measure.

What of Ilsa? As she struggles, Kata (Nicole Riddelle) crawls in for her revenge. Now, Kata here is the woman who has endured the vast majority of the non-lethal atrocities listed above, all since she dared stand up to Ilsa. In my notes I called her the Strong Woman (again, names aren’t often clear in this flick). At this point she is a grotesque bloody mess, like Frank in Hellraiser. Kata is juuust about to stab Ilsa when – she dies instead....So, yeah.

The victorious rapist rebels proceed to systematically execute ze Germans (I love how often the word “systematically” is applicable to this film). Sickened, the American leaves with his bland, barely-there love interest whom I’ve never mentioned. Then Mario the castrato explodes in the guard tower. A budget-conscious assembly of German tanks pulls up to camp and the SS proceeds to kill everyone! So much for the good guys. One SS officer retreats to Ilsa’s quarters, where he both shoots her to death and shoots sequel continuity to hell. The officer returns to his tank, announcing that the Allies shall never know about this place and the Canadians shall never use it as the basis for exploitation. And...freeze frame.

Whew! That is a pretty darned nihilistic ending. Tanks for nothing.

This is by no means the most extreme movie I’ve ever seen, though it competes on a similar model. An unprepared viewer could be forgiven for finding it altogether too much. In regards to the upper ends of cinematic degradations, Cannibal Holocaust remains the standard bearer for me. But in a way I found Ilsa here to be more difficult to digest than that film, and not because of the controversy-baiting Holocaust setting. It’s simply because Ilsa has no point. Had I not set myself up to write in length about it, I’d have simply showered and watched a cartoon or something. But Cannibal Holocaust (and I should mention that one is not about the Holocaust) is a media satire, a commentary on voyeurism, and an examination of cruelty and violence. For as sick as its own atrocities are, at least they serve this agenda. Ilsa has no agenda beyond pure exploitationism. For some this is a positive point. For me it just makes Ilsa taste like ashes. It’s just rather nasty and flat. And I have three more movies just like it to watch.


Related posts:
• No. 2 Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976)
• No. 3 Ilsa the Tigress of Siberia (1977)
• No. 4 Ilsa the Wicked Warden (1977)