Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975)

Posted on September 29, 2013 at 6:45 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Sometimes a movie owes you a “safe word” up-front. Such a film is Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975), the notorious Nazisploitation film that ups the sleazy ante from previous entries in the genre such as Lee Frost’s Love Camp 7 (1969), as well as the various women-in-prison films that were popular throughout the 70’s. With its increasingly extreme (and absurd) torture sequences, Ilsa aims to get patrons into seats through word-of-mouth: the poster promised, “A Different Kind of X.” It’s the sort of movie that mercenary commercialism produces, playing to the basest instincts of the audience. You think your imagination is sick? We’ll show you something even worse, and you’ll pay us for the privilege. This was the trend of the decade as far as grindhouses were concerned: more extreme measures were necessary to jolt the jaded audience, and Ilsa could show the way. It all sprung from the mind of producer David F. Friedman (Blood Feast, Love Camp 7), who is here so confident of his product that he uses a pseudonym, “Herman Traeger.” It’s not Friedman, but Herman Traeger who signs the Nazi-red title card that claims: “The film you are about to see is based upon documented fact…Because of its shocking subject matter, this film is restricted to adult audiences only. We dedicate this film with the hope that these heinous crimes will never occur again.” Here’s exploitation in a nutshell. We completely condemn this! Now let’s watch.

Ilsa (Dyanne Thorne) prepares her prisoners for her medical research.

All of my “grand guignol” arguments in defense of some of the more extreme entries in this month’s grindhouse marathon fall apart when it comes to Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, simply due to the obvious bad taste of the enterprise. Not that I feel any desire to defend it. (Perhaps I should also take on a pseudonym, switch on the projector, and flee the city limits.) Ilsa is the kind of movie that was inevitable, a crossing of the invisible line that was drawn by Holocaust films and commentators. Although it’s not the ultimate in sleaze – cinema hadn’t plumbed the bottom of tastelessness yet, and probably still hasn’t (sorry, human centipedes and Serbian films) – it’s significant in that it declares that nothing is off-limits, not even turning a concentration camp into a grisly arena of debauchery. Of course, in spite of the hilariously inadequate disclaimer that this is based on historical fact (Ilsa is inspired by the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” war criminal Ilse Koch), it is in fact an S&M fantasy with a Hogan’s Heroes backdrop. I mean that literally: this X-rated movie was shot on the set of Hogan’s Heroes. Ilsa is the ultimate dominatrix, and the film’s central twist – that she secretly desires to be dominated, preferably by an Aryan superman – just cements the film’s status as a dark fable for those with a very specific fetish, one that prefers busty women in tight-fitting uniforms exacting excruciating punishments. (Somewhat unintentionally, A Month at the Grindhouse, which started with the “Olga” movies, comes full circle with S&M fantasies that read like indecipherable code to this author. But it’s clear that Ilsa is Olga reincarnate and more sadistic than ever.) Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford’s 2002 book Sleazoid Express frequently betrays the authors’ predilection for S&M images; they write, “There’s a built-in apprehension factor inherent in viewing Ilsa: When would the sadism cease being erotic and start sickening the viewer?” Which tells me: apparently some of this is erotic.

Ilsa accepts a bondage scenario from her lover, the prisoner Wolfe (Gregory Knoph).

What takes up much of the film’s 90 minutes is Ilsa conducting “medical experiments” on her female prisoners, testing her theory that a woman has a greater threshold for pain than a man. She – deep breath – twists off a girl’s toes, administers static shocks from a dildo (and later through wires attached to a woman’s erogenous zones, including the use of nipple clamps), slices open wounds for the application of “gangrene pus” and maggots carrying typhus, boils one woman alive, puts one’s head in a vise, and places another (sexploitation icon Uschi Digart, in a cameo) in a pressure chamber. To celebrate the arrival of “The General” (Richard Kennedy, The Witch Who Came From the Sea), Ilsa has one naked girl placed in a hangman’s noose, her feet balanced on a block of ice set upon the banquet table; as the dinner proceeds and the ice melts, she’s slowly throttled by the noose. Ilsa, who has a voracious sexual appetite, is disappointed that the General only prefers to be dominated (he declares her a “blonde goddess” and asks her to urinate on him, which she does, frowning). She is accustomed to sleeping with the male prisoners; in the film’s opening sex scene, she demands her partner’s patience so that she might achieve her own sexual satisfaction. When he finishes early, she sighs, “You should have vaited.” But he could not vait, so in the morning she has him castrated, her typical post-coital treatment. Only blond, blue-eyed Wolfe (Gregory Knoph) meets her Aryan ideal. He explains to a fellow prisoner that he is blessed with the ability to maintain an erection, without orgasm, for as long as needed; he describes himself as a “machine.” Ilsa is delighted at his stamina, and soon becomes his slave, which fits perfectly with his plan to liberate the camp. The finale is a peculiar combination of The Great Escape-type WWII films and over-the-top 70’s horror, with the disfigured victims of Ilsa’s experiments overcoming the guards and exacting their revenge.

Ilsa, on her quest to scientifically prove that a woman can tolerate extraordinary pain.

Even more peculiar than Ilsa‘s existence is the fact that the film was a big enough hit to spawn sequels and rip-offs. Though Ilsa meets a definite end (ironically, at the hands of an SS officer and not one of her victims), the film’s director, Don Edmonds, brought her back in Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976). Her final outing was Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia (1977, directed by Jean LaFleur), though Thorne played a similar character in Jess Franco’s Wanda, the Wicked Warden (1977), a film that has also been released under the title Ilsa, the Wicked Warden, to cash in on her character’s popularity. Other films in the Nazisploitation genre to ride the coattails of Ilsa‘s success include Deported Women of the SS Special Section (1976), SS Experiment Love Camp (1976), and Last Orgy of the Third Reich (1977). The thing about Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS is that it’s a slickly-made film, far more polished than the films Friedman made with Herschell Gordon Lewis. With decent production values, believable makeup effects, and adequate acting (though the accents are all over the place), the over-the-top, X-rated sadism on display is all the more jarring. Ilsa’s stated experiment of testing the limits of the pain threshold can be extended to the film itself: Friedman and Edmonds are seeing just how much an audience can take while still demanding more (the follow-up films are reportedly even more graphic).

Wolfe leads a prison break.

In certain ways, the grindhouse films of the 70’s were a grand experiment in exploding taboos and every measure of decency: show me more, show me more, I can take it. But that hunger for cinematic catharsis would begin to wear off. The oft-noted sea-change initiated by Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) – the rise of the mainstream, audience-crossing blockbusters – began to push transgressive exploitation cinema even further to the margins. Once upon a time in the 70’s, larger audiences wanted their minds blown with new extremes of sex and violence. As the 80’s arrived and wore on – and while 42nd street was slowly sanitized – exploitation started to become as predictably packaged as a Happy Meal. Jason slashed up naked females on a union schedule and for union wages; Freddy made wisecracks and left room for cameos by Dick Cavett and Zsa Zsa Gabor. The stuff that really felt dangerous became harder to find; you’d need the tenacity of a fetishist. The home video revolution helped keep fever-dream memories of the likes of Ilsa and Olga alive, particularly in the DVD boom years of the early 21st century; and now, with a fractured audience driven by their unique, specific interests – not to mention the cheaper costs of producing one’s own movie – there’s more room for esoteric and original entertainment to thrive. But we don’t need to carve up bodies in newer and more nauseating ways. We just need to break loose of the Hollywood rails. We need to be original…dangerous. That’s what the filthy screens and sticky floors of the 42nd Street movie houses should really teach us.

Still, sometimes you should establish a “safe word.”

This is the last entry in A Month at the Grindhouse. I’ve set up a permanent page collecting all the essays here.

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Last House on Dead End Street (1977)

Posted on September 27, 2013 at 6:45 am by Jeff Kuykendall

To avoid fainting, keep repeating, it’s only a movie (in a movie)…

That wasn’t its tagline, but should have been. Last House on Dead End Street (1977) obviously owes its title to Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972), which is a film that I don’t particularly like but will admit is a landmark of its kind. Dead End Street‘s distributor encouraged the comparison right down to the poster, which made it sound like a sequel: “It’s Back! The Evil That Had You Screaming…It’s Only a Movie!” What both films have in common is a gang of vicious young adults who torture and kill, their actions depicted at excruciating length. But Last House on Dead End Street was not, as you might have guessed, its original title; its shooting title was, appropriately, At the Hour of Our Death, and the first cut of the film reportedly bore the title The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell (this particular cuckoo clocking in at nearly three hours, which does sound hellish). It was filmed in 1972 but not released until 1977, at a more reasonable 78 minutes. That’s when its legend began. The film was more horrifying and nihilistic than Craven’s film; Craven’s was inspired in structure by Ingmar Bergman’s (infinitely superior, and just as harrowing) The Virgin Spring (1960), a fable of rape, murder, and bloody retribution, but Dead End Street doesn’t bear such a shapely narrative arc. It’s more of a line slanting downward, right off the precipice. But what’s more, it’s a metaphysical film, with a commentary on the act of viewing horror films that’s as visceral as anything out of Michael Haneke’s oeuvre. These killers are even more crazed and scary than the ones in Craven’s film, and perhaps that’s because they’re filmmakers.

Pornographer Steve Randall (Steve Sweet) in his office, a poster for the Freddie Francis/Robert Bloch Amicus film "The Psychopath" hanging behind him.

Our central character is Terry Hawkins, a bitter psycho in a leather jacket, fresh out of the state pen after serving six months for a drug-peddling sentence. His thoughts are delivered to us in mumbling voice-over while he smokes and wanders empty streets (the film was shot in upstate New York) under grim-looking skies. “I’ll show ’em. I’ll show ’em all what Terry Hawkins can do…I think I’m ready for something that nobody ever dreamed of before.” While distorted choral music plays, we see gruesome images of a screaming, bloody woman and a disemboweling – ugly promises of scenes that are yet to come. “I want to make some entertainment for all my friends. I want to take care of all those people who been takin’ care of me for all these many years.” We see him reuniting with old friends: a young female vagrant who likes the sound of his new movie idea, and would love to participate; a cameraman with bad skin and bags under his eyes who agrees he’ll film whatever Terry has in mind; and a hustler named Ken who recommends he check out this woman named Nancy Palmer, who makes pornos with her husband Jim for a sleaze merchant named Steve. Terry tells Ken, “Nobody’s interested in sex anymore. They’re looking for something else.” And Terry’s the one to give it to them.

A member of Terry's film crew dons her mask.

We visit the Palmer residence for one of their swinging parties. Nancy’s in her bedroom applying makeup – hang on, that’s blackface. She heads downstairs, strips down to lingerie, and bends over while a man pretending to be a hunchback whips her. (More disturbing: the young boy who’s present.) The bourgeois spectators laugh and applaud while Nancy winces in agony, and Steve, in sunglasses and clearly bored, smokes from his chair. Nancy’s husband Jim listens from upstairs, in evident discomfort. Eventually Steve joins him; they watch some of his stag films, and Steve is critical. He wants something that moves faster, something exciting and innovative and edgy. The next day, Terry shows up. Nancy doesn’t know him, but when he says he’s a friend of Ken’s, she agrees to fuck him. Afterwards, he shows her a film he and his friends have shot of an old man being strangled. “It looks so real,” she says while they lie in bed. “They’re supposed to, aren’t they? That’s why they sell…I’ll let you in on a little secret, if you promise not to tell anybody. They look real because they are real. It looks like I strangled him because I did strangle him.” “That’s not funny,” she says. “It’s not supposed to be funny,” he replies. Then he confronts her: she and his friends took credit for one of his stag films, cutting him out of the profits. He rapes her. We see Steve in his office, receiving a phone call from Terry; he’s being invited to a meeting in an old abandoned building. Shots of gargoyles, the sound of thunder. Steve arrives and climbs stairs into the attic, a vast and dark interior. Spotlights suddenly blaze on. Terry and his friends emerge from holes punched into the drywall – his movie set. One of them is holding a camera. Terry’s girls are wearing transparent Halloween masks. The Palmers are tied up, and so is a blonde acquaintance named Suzie. Terry’s movie is now underway.

Terry Hawkins and his gang.

What follows is forty straight minutes of hallucinogenic torture and slaughter. Terry wears a large white mask that looks like some Greek god: Hades, perhaps. The sound of a beating heart thumps on the soundtrack, and occasionally that creepy choral music. Dialogue is repeated over and over so it becomes increasingly meaningless, but also hypnotic mantras: Terry…the answer…his virgin bride…will all be natural… Later, after some bloodshed, Terry turns his sights on porno director Jim Palmer, asking the terrified man to direct his cast. Some of his thugs do a demented can-can in a shot that reminded me of Pasolini’s Saló (1975). Then there’s a new mantra, delivered with screams and spittle by the increasingly unhinged Terry as he attacks poor Jim with an Al Pacino-style rant: “I’m directing this fuckin’ movie! I’m directing this fuckin’ movie!” Nancy meets the most terrible end of all, tied to a table and covered by a sheet in a faux hospital set, the gang now dressed in surgical masks and uniforms; painted on the wall behind her are Rocky Horror-style lips marred by two rows of sharp teeth. Her face is cut up, her legs are sawed off, and when she passes out, she’s roused with smelling salts. Then her belly’s cut open and bloody viscera is held up to the camera. In the film’s most inexplicably disturbing sequence, Steve is confronted by one of his female torturers, who removes her top, unbuttons her fly, and reveals a severed deer hoof jutting through the opening. He’s forced to put his mouth on it in a bizarre obscene gesture, while another girl positions two other hooves behind her head like horns. After another chase, Steve is tied up, and the spotlights are turned on him once again. The killers gather, trading masks, then slowly approach the camera (we are now firmly lodged in the victim’s POV). Terry doesn’t say a word. He holds out a power drill and drives it through Steve’s eye. Then, with no one left to torment, the figures retreat slowly into the darkness behind the movie lights, while we remain watching from Steve’s seat. One man wipes his bloody hands distastefully on his shirt. Credits roll, but not before an unconvincing message from a disembodied Dragnet voice that the members of Terry’s gang “were all later apprehended.” Oh good.

Nancy Palmer (Nancy Vrooman) is tortured on Terry's hospital set.

The film shocked grindhouse and drive-in audiences (who were expecting some Last House on the Left-style cheap sicko thrills, but not this) before slipping out of the public eye. As it sporadically resurfaced in different edits – some more graphic than others – fans obsessively collected and bootlegged and spread the legend. Some rumors even suggested that this movie about snuff movies actually was a real snuff movie, an appealing notion only among those disappointed that the Mike and Roberta Findlay movie Snuff (1976) was not what the posters claimed. Certainly the mystery was stoked by the fact that the detailed credits are actually chock full of pseudonyms. The director was named “Victor Janos,” for example, a name that had no other credits. It was not until 2000 that the real Victor Janos stood up: a man by the name of Roger Watkins, who had made some amateur experimental films and hung out with Otto Preminger, Nicholas Ray, and Dennis Hopper before his feature film debut of Last House on Dead End Street. Watkins claimed he shot the film with money on loan from his father, most of which he wasted on meth and heroin during the shoot. Watkins himself played the wild-eyed Terry Hawkins, and the character may not have been too far from his real persona: he also shot some stag films (including the black-and-white film shown in Dead End Street; the actress sued over the use of the footage, which accounts for the film’s long-delayed 1977 release), and enjoyed dark and sadistic subject matter; though it was after shooting this film that he was lured into directing pornography, under the alias Richard Mahler. Watkins’ decision to come out of the shadows and take credit for this film allowed him to enjoy some of its revival success, and he recorded a commentary track for the (long out-of-print) DVD prior to his death in 2007.

Steve in his screening room.

In evaluating the qualities of Last House on Dead End Street, it’s difficult to avoid that it’s a grindhouse movie, with muddy sound, rough editing, and crudity, not just bad taste. Some scenes are completely superfluous, such as one in which two girls discuss whether prostitution is worthwhile. The screening of the stag film certainly drags, with awkward dialogue improvised by Steve Sweet, and the audience becomes aware that this is really just padding. (Perhaps the three-hour cut is only more of this.) But Watkins has an undeniable flair for images and montage. The second half of the film unfolds with sights and rhythms that are deliberate, ritualistic, and contain the electric feel of being authentically occult. I mean, those deer hooves – what the hell does that mean? Watkins at times seems to be channeling Kenneth Anger, with a touch of Jodorowsky and Arrabal. The final moments were as powerful to me as when I watched the finale of Saló. Which means that Last House on Dead End Street, though it contains elements of exploitation, does not feel exploitative to me, but infused with a real artistic purpose: to invoke the “Hour of Our Death,” to put the audience through the catharsis of confronting death (thus the frequent shots from the victim’s POV). By commenting upon the context of the horror film, and then explicitly tearing it down, Watkins does make strides toward erasing the barrier between artifice and reality. The spotlights of his movie set are constantly blinding us, turning the horrorshow in our direction – and making us ask why we seek out horror films in the first place (doubtless the film has inspired its share of walkouts, with fleeing audience members asking themselves that very question). It doesn’t provide pleasure or cheap thrills but intense discomfort and dread, and on that level, it succeeds. Watkins was not a genius, but for a film student on a drug binge, he managed to pull off something unique. I compared him to Haneke, as the film reminds me of Funny Games (1997, 2007) in the way it challenges the genre to which it belongs. Of course the more direct descendants of this film (and others, including Craven’s) are the so-called “torture porn” movies of the last ten years. Modern horror and its emphasis on extreme shocks and sadism have made Watkins’ nihilism seem mundane; horror fans of the Internet generation who seek this film out for sleazy thrills are already too jaded to find what they’re looking for. But I was surprised to find that I admired the film. I admire the way it commits completely and with a surfeit of gritty style, like a performance of Marat/Sade or Le Grand Guignol by college kids on acid. Love it or hate it, it’s authentic. Just not authentic snuff.

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Love Camp (1981)

Posted on September 25, 2013 at 6:45 am by Jeff Kuykendall

In Love Camp (Die Todesgöttin des Liebescamps, 1981), the compound of the title is a white-walled fortress beside the ocean where the so-called Children of Light, a doomsday love cult, cavort semi-naked, practicing free love, singing pop songs, and worshiping a woman they call “The Divine One” (Indonesian-born Laura Gemser, Black Emanuelle), waiting for the Endtimes to come. Some who join the sect vanish into thin air, so a police officer named Gabriel (Gabriele Tinti, Gemser’s real-life husband and frequent co-star) goes undercover as a cultist to uncover any dark secrets. But the Divine One is guarded by a hulking enforcer named Tanga (Sascha Borysenko), whom she uses to dispatch her enemies – dropping them down a bottomless pit hidden in a cave – and to deflower young virgins publicly to welcome them into womanhood, leaving spots of blood before her throne. Everyone is welcome to the love cult, provided they don’t leave, and pay strict adherence to the rules. Your body should always be given freely to others, not selfishly reserved for just the one you love. When a young couple confesses to the Divine One that they’ve fallen in love, she tells them: “Your actions mean you haven’t understood anything… None less than Mahatma Gandhi said, ‘He who only loves one person cannot love them all.'” The two are stripped naked and sentenced to twenty lashes. Kindly, she stops at fifteen and commands, “Go now and sin no more!”

Tanga (Sascha Borysenko) massages The Divine One (Laura Gemser).

Some are permitted to leave the “Camp of Love,” provided they bring back donations and new disciples. Of these missionaries, The Divine One’s most faithful is the blond, blue-eyed Dorian (Christian Anders), who uses the teachings of “the Goddess” – and an endless pop song called “Love, Love, Love” – to recruit Patricia Benneman (Simone Brahmann), the daughter of a wealthy American senator (Bob Burrows). Dorian fends off one of the senator’s henchmen with his karate moves, making some Bruce Lee noises and faces. Dorian adores The Divine One, even though she nearly drowns him while having sex in the ocean, holding his head submerged while she straddles him. He forgives her. But when he tells her that he’s fallen in love with the senator’s daughter, she sends Tanga to throw him down that bottomless pit (Dorian busts out some karate). The days of the Camp of Love are numbered. After Gabriel is discovered to be a police lieutenant, and killed, The Divine One orders the destruction of the camp. Tanga opens up the back of her ivory throne, revealing dozens of sticks of dynamite and a timer. While one of their cultists sings another musical number called “This is the End,” the naked throng poses around him on the steps of the temple, and writhes in an orgy on the grass as The Divine One gazes on. “This is the end/there’s nothing left for me/only eternity/or is it obscurity?” the singer wails.

Some air guitar is performed during a Children of Light musical number.

Love Camp is not your average West German softcore-porn rock musical. It’s a film from the “Chranders” production company, meaning Christian Anders, the German singer who wrote, produced, and directed the film, along with playing the role of black-belt/Christ-figure Dorian. Anders was a major celebrity in Germany in the late 60’s and 70’s, a womanizing pop star with plenty of hit records in his native country. He was eager to branch into film, starring in his own martial arts epic, Roots of Evil (1979), before sinking a million of his own dollars into this film. He told Vice in 2010, “Back then I used to get $3,000 a night, so I could have easily paid it off, but I said they should just take my royalties instead.” The film flopped, and his quest to conquer cinema came to an abrupt end. Broke, he traveled to the U.S., converted to Buddhism, and adopted the name “Lanoo.” “I was too divine,” he told Vice. “Students began washing my feet and really wanted to establish me as a guru…They promised me a castle on a beach in Mexico with luxury mobile homes. I was supposed to live there with all my pupils. It was a huge deal. They washed my feet and I sat as their guru on a golden throne…Well, gold-coated plastic, but you get my point.” As Christian Anders, he was a pop star. As Lanoo, he was The Divine One.

Writer/director Christian Anders as Dorian, disciple of The Divine One.

Anders still performs, writes, and occasionally pops up in German headlines with wild stunts and conspiracy rants. But Love Camp must remain his crowning achievement of hubris. He introduces his character as a Tommy-like Messiah figure, leading his fellow sect members along the beach while they gaze at him longingly. Although he’s absent for much of the film – only to return with the senator’s daughter in tow, professing the importance of love over partner-swapping orgies – Anders’ presence is still felt behind the camera in every shot, underlining his clear preference for orgies over love. The music is energetic but mediocre (for quality, the songs are just below the level of 1980’s musical flop The Apple), yet it takes a film this terrible for me to wish there were more musical numbers. Most of the film is taken up with sex scenes, and the majority of those sex scenes feature Gemser. The cult-fave actress, who had starred in far more extreme grindhouse films (Emanuelle in America, Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals), is nude for most of the film and sports a Tia Carrere pout; for more on her career, see Lianne Spiderbaby’s “Emmanuelle et Emanuelle” article in the May/June Video Watchdog (No. 174), which tackles that successful series from a female point-of-view. It’s Gemser’s presence, not Anders’ craft, that’s the sole reason this film can still be tracked down. Her sex scenes are so frequent that they quickly become dull. Occasionally, though, we’re blessed with some of Anders’ dialogue during these exercises, and it often goes like this: “Let’s find your infinity…there! It’s growing now! Now penetrate into all the secrets of the universe. And do it standing!”

Enjoy these musical selections from the film, courtesy The Crazy World of Laura Gemser:

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