Ilsa, No. 2 -- Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976)

A mere year after Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS warmed audience’s hearts, Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Sheiks appeared in grindhouses to pick up and continue the complete lack of a story. Over that interminable year, film goers anxiously awaited seeing what the lovable Ilsa would do next...Nothing! Ilsa was dead! The SS shot her and left her corpse to roast in a burning stalag!

But the death of the main character, or the lack of a compelling narrative or theme, can never stop enterprising storytellers from continuing their work. Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks is a sequel in the loosest possible sense. It stars the same lead actress from the first film, playing a character with the same name and nature, but drops any notion of even attempting cross-film continuity. No effort to connect World War II era concentration camps with 1970s Arabia would ever take, so thankfully no effort is made. There’s not even some lame Egyptian resurrection subplot or past lives or anything.

So the Ilsa in the title is simply a brand name, a way of saying to all cash-carrying deviants on 42nd Street: “Hey, you remember that gory sexual Nazi torture movie you onanized over a year ago? We have some more gory sexual torture for you now, this time with vague Middle Eastern theming.” And since the atrocities of 1975's Exploitoberfest were apparently too extreme for even the grindhouse crowd (at least too extreme to merit carbon copy franchising), the extreme snuff film tone of Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS has been toned down to something fairly similar, but altogether more cheesecake. Despite the same artistic team, including director Don Edmonds, this movie actually eschews the first’s X-rating for the tamer R. But don’t worry, drooling sleazehounds, there’s still plenty of obscenity to be found here.

One reason I am undertaking this enormous project is because I am fascinated by the lengths sequels will take to carry over elements from earlier films For a knowledgeable audience member, a later sequel becomes a ceremonial affair, moving past a particular franchise’s Stations of the Cross. Certain events and decisions that seemed natural (if unwanted) in wartime Germany don’t fit in quite so elegantly in a world of oil sheiks and off-screen OPEC shenanigans. Since the ostensible plot of She Wolf of the SS started with a shipment of fresh females to the titular Ilsa, this is also how Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks must start. Actual helicopter shots sail over the deserts of some unnamed fictional country in the Middle East. It’s all rather bargain basement Lawrence of Arabia, and I think they filmed it in California.

A convoy of trucks delivers a trio of crates to the palace of Sheik El Sharif – played by Victor Alexander, who is both heavily disguised and not using his real name since, you know, headlining an Ilsa film isn’t a source of pride or anything. El Sharif’s palace is one of those tacky, ostentatious places “South Park” gives the Persians so much trouble about. And Ilsa is there (Dyanne Thorne again). Standing on either side of her is something else we will recognize as a carryover element from the original: a duo of militaristic lesbian guards. I had very little to say about the previous Teutonic tit-tasters, but their lithe Nubian equivalents here have a far more significant presence, as they are Ilsa’s true henchwomen, replacing the need for countless faceless Nazi doctors. As the movie goes on, these two characters seem to grow increasingly allergic to their clothing, losing it for no apparent reason over extended sequences. However, at this stage I am astonished to report that we have not seen a single naughty bit. Actually, most characters tend to keep their clothes on in this one!

So I said the opening was about a transfer of females, right? Well, what did you think was in those three crates? Back in her dungeon Ilsa inspects the crates, revealing the three women in question, and more importantly, their three sets of naked breasts. Ilsa reveals they are three well-to-do types (an heiress, actress and equestrian, I believe, as though it matters) who have been kidnapped to be a part of El Sharif’s ever-expanding harem. And when I say “ever-expanding,” I mean that some of El Sharif’s girls happen to be grotesquely obese. This is a throwaway bit, and it’s probably only in there to satisfy whatever paying fetishists want to see fat women topless. Hell, you wanted to see something like that in the 70s, you either went to the grindhouse or you patiently waited for the Internet. Or...did something proactive, like dating...

I should also mention that, though eternally topless, these women are not going full frontal, as they are wearing golden chastity belts. This is the sort of minor detail I wouldn’t normally care to relate, but not in an Ilsa film. Later, El Sharif unlocks said chastity belts, affording us loving closeups of the women’s vaginas. Their faces never get this kind of treatment.

The three new girls cringe at the idea of harem work, so Ilsa threatens them with potential rat-based genital mutilation. This sort of rat torture is strangely similar to something from 2 Fast 2 Furious, which has to be a total coincidence. And nothing ever comes of it. By the way, this movie’s lighter tone is evident in the change of central victims. In the first, the women were selected due to historically accurate, nationally-mandated racism, and forced to endure tortures for no greater purpose. Here, the victims are just three worthless rich women, and the training Ilsa shall put them through is intended to make them better lovers, not destroy their bodies utterly. Most of the tortures to come will have to be created through plot machinations.

How about that? Plot machinations! Nothing serious, mind you, but in this movie, one event leads to another! There’s some espionage stuff in here about warring oil interests, and this is the pretext that signals the coming of the main male parties.

The outsider men here are not much like their She Wolf counterparts. As El Sharif anticipates, a U.S. jet is presently en route, not to deliver lambs to the slaughter but to deliver civilized diplomats. One is Dr. Kaiser (Wolfgang Roehm, who played Derr General in the original), a broad, cartoony version of Dr. Henry Kissinger. His associate is Colonel Adam Scott (Michael R. Thayer). Isn’t Adam Scott the guy who does “Dilbert?”...No, that’s Scott Adams...And since a group of marginally competent filmmakers is trying to tell a plot here, the current function of these men is to spout off exposition. Basically, they seek a means of blackmailing Sheik El Sharif in order to benefit from his oil interests. And Adam is a spy.

Meanwhile in Fauxrabia, El Sharif knows Adam is a spy. That was useless. Further wasting time, El Sharif spouts off his own exposition at Ilsa. This scene serves both expositive and exploitative purposes, though, since as El Sharif says all this, his harem girl violates herself with a gigantic vibrating flute, as is her wont. That reminds me of this one time, at band camp...

Next up is a totally purposeless scene, except it’s the kind of scene this movie was made for. A disloyal servant to the sheik is corralled outside the palace, where he must prove his honor by wrestling Ilsa’s two topless lesbians. Their fighting style reminds me of Bambi and Thumper from Diamonds Are Forever. And of course the servant loses, quite some time later, so we can get another series trademark: male genital mutilation. Whoo-hoo, no movie’s complete without that! The lesbians turn the servant into a eunuch, in a hands-on approach, and somehow the way it’s done here is far more agreeable that in She Wolf. Maybe because it’s now just a sick joke, and maybe because eunuchs have been hilarious since the days of Herodotus.

Meanwhile, that plane is still in the air.

We get a few scenes in Ilsa’s dungeons and operating rooms. A little gore is tossed about, but somehow the notion of repairing breast implant scars, no matter how repulsive, isn’t nearly as horrifying as the catalogue of wrongs committed in She Wolf. A further bit of plotting reveals that the belly dancing girl in El Sharif’s entourage is Adam’s spy.

But before anything can come of that, it’s time for another wildly tangential sequence. This one is a slave girl auction, somehow lacking in Leias. It starts out as an excuse for women we haven’t seen before to prance around topless for crowds of ululating Middle Eastern stereotypes. When one sheik buys a particularly acrobatic girl, he proceeds to announce his distaste for “the scrape of teeth.” This becomes a remarkably flimsy excuse for a scene of forced dental malpractice. The setup for this single stupid tooth gag is so ridiculously convoluted, there’s very little left that’s actually disturbing.

Meanwhile, the following morning, that plane is still in the air.

By now Ilsa, who seems like a much more minor presence than before, has discovered the dancing girl’s true spy identity, through the recording device in her bellybutton jewel. This leads to some scenes of relatively justifiable torture. Ilsa wants the girl to tell her who other spy is, even though she and El Sharif already know it is Adam. So first up in our torturous cavalcade is some sort of wooden clamp device. Because of the film’s visual murk (courtesy of brilliant Halloween cinematographer Dean Cundey), I can hardly tell what is being clamped, but knowing this series it’s probably her naughty bits...Then ants eat off the girl’s foot. It’s silly.

Meanwhile, that plane is sti– Actually, it’s landed. Halfway through the movie, and here come our ostensible heroes up to the palace doors. I can see why they’re so hard up for El Sharif’s oil. That damn plane must use up a ton in the three days it takes to cross the Atlantic.

The time has come to entertain these guests. Ilsa binds herself up in a spidery black dress that carefully reveals choice bits of anatomy. Despite all this, Thorne has remained astoundingly clothed throughout the film. It will not last for the whole running time, but it’s admirable, and it’s actually almost...a tease. The first film kinda blew its Thorne boob load one minute in.

The final major piece of Ilsa trademarks falls into place. For as usual, Ilsa desperately wants a man, and Adam the American is a fine substitute for Wolfe the American. There is no justification given this time around for the American’s studliness. There is no delayed ejaculation subplot required. (I can’t believe the sentences I’m writing.) And so, following a quick detour where a hand gets sliced off and an eyeball gets eaten, it’s time for the big Ilsa/Adam love scene. Still Ilsa’s breasts somehow remain off-camera, though she’s entirely nude and the buttocks are everywhere. No, they’re saving those breasts for the big hunchbacked leper rape scene in the finale! (Whoops, spoilers!) And parallel to this lovemaking, in a move I’m sure the director thought was “artsy,” El Sharif himself is busy “drilling for oil.” The ineffectual Dr. Kaiser is also allowed a potential partner, in the form of an underage slave boy who – I don’t know what they were going for here. There’s been a subtle gay vibe throughout this thing, and I think the screenwriter is racist.

Fed up with his never-ending gay encounters just as I’m sure Dr. Henry Kissinger constantly was, the good Dr. Kaiser leaves to take the three-day plane flight back to the States. Adam intends to remain in El Sharif’s nameless emirate, and the best reason I can come up with is because the plot demands it. Apparently Adam’s sex is far better than even Wolfe’s, since this Ilsa is being converted to the side of good Not too good, though, since her next big scene is a completely ludicrous affair where she demonstrates...I don’t even know how to put this. She’s...she’s...she’s turned the dancing girl into a...a...a sex bomb. That is, there is...there is...

Okay, deep breath...Just say it quick. There’s a plastique bomb in the girl’s uterus that can only be detonated through vigorous sex. There! This is shown when one of those electronic silver dildo machines (what like they got all over that there Internet) makes short work of the dancing girl. Her...area instantly explodes, sending groin grue splattering all over El Sharif, who guffaws in inexplicable delight at this turn of events. He must take great glee living in a fantasy universe. Apparently this is all part of an under-explained assassination scheme against some other sheik. Encouraged, Ilsa instantly goes to “verk” brainwashing one of the other harem girls (they’re all interchangeable to me), creating another exploding sex assassin. You’ve heard of Chekhov’s gun? This is Chekhov’s diaphragm.

Adam and Ilsa have another love scene, this time surrounded by candles.

Then an assassin (of the male, non-exploding vagina variety) makes an attempt on El Sharif just as he’s engaging in nipple mutilation – okay, that’s a slight change of pace, I guess. The nipple-bearing girl is killed instead. The assassin is caught, and some sort of bizarre death must be meted out to him too, so the film has him set on fire as he runs into the desert. Remember way back when I said this movie had a plot? I think I was being sarcastic.

El Sharif orders Ilsa to kill Adam. But because Adam’s a good lay, instead Ilsa decides to lead an impromptu bloody coup against the sheik, replacing him with his young nephew who it now suddenly turns out has been jailed in the dungeon this whole time. Since this plot development is actually important, unlike the slave auction or rival sheiks or unexplained assassin, you’d think there would have been more hints about this earlier. There was one, a single shot, only I thought it was a monster.

Before the coup can start, a little more needs to be accomplished, mostly to get this up to feature length. Time to drop that shoe. The hunchbacked leper finally gets to rape Ilsa, and I know you were all holding your breathes for that one. And Adam is placed in a torture device of a most convoluted nature, involving a great big assembly strapped to his head, with a tarantula and a candle and a string and, you know, Jigsaw would be proud. In fact, I think this is where those damn Saw guys get their inspiration from.

El Sharif lets Ilsa go, because he is a dumb bad guy, and she instantly assembles her army of eunuchs and lesbians. And saves Adam. Like the last film, and like all women in prison movies ever, there is a standard climactic shootout, and at this point in my write-up I’ve run out of new ways to say there are breasts everywhere. At one point I thought Ilsa had shot the sheik’s cheek, and I laughed most generously, but it turns out it was just the sheik’s guard’s cheek. Sheik El Sharif himself has a much grander fate...The Sex Bomb! Wow, that sounds like an old “Get Smart” movie, doesn’t it? And it’s a good thing they set up that bombastic genital, because otherwise this would be really unrealistic.

Adam releases El Sharif’s nephew, the rightful heir. This unnamed prince is played by a 6-year-old boy who is undoubtedly thrilled to be appearing in a semi-pornographic sex epic. The kid then does something totally out of place for a leader in the Muslim world – he abdicates all decisions to the Americans. So if we really want the Middle Eastern oil that is our God-given American right, we simply have to bang the right Germans...Uh-huh. Ilsa looks forward to joining Adam in this brave new world, but Adam is, er, adamantly against her. (“You stinking bitch!”) So we get that happy ending we’ve all craved, as a little boy throws Ilsa in a dungeon to starve to death.

I think the little details above are enough to make it clear this is not nearly as harsh as She Wolf. This movie achieves that campy, tacky quality some would have you believe the original also possesses. I am no longer having a hard time reconciling the series’ fundamental nihilism. The atrocities are stupid enough now that things simply come across as weird rather than awful. It’s all kind of like a bad John Waters movie, minus the idiosyncracies and plus a stronger grindhouse aesthetic. This is a really strange comic book mixture of weirdness and violence. It would take a truly special audience to appreciate this, people both “adult” enough to demand a story filled with torture and mutilation, and immature enough to accept exploding diaphragms at a necessary part of that.

What can I say about it as a sequel? It dilutes the original premise, and is therefore the weaker film. Let most film series run long enough and they resort to camp, even without Joel Schumacher’s help. However, I’ve never seen a series descend this quickly. Of course, the grindhouse lot doesn’t need to be patronized with serious melodrama for so long, therefore it’s far easier to go from Kamp to camp. And given its pedigree, I doubt this movie could have avoided being tongue-in-sheik.


Related posts:
• No. 1 Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975)
• No. 3 Ilsa the Tigress of Siberia (1977)
• No. 4 Ilsa the Wicked Warden (1977)