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Movie Reviews
Women in Prison
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Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS (1974) |
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| Dyanne Thorne stars are everyone's favorite big-breasted Nazi: Ilsa. |
I actually watched this one a couple of months ago and have been wrestling with how to write a review about it ever since. Somehow my usual practice of summarizing the movie while making snide asides doesn’t seem appropriate here. I don’t want to start moralizing, but this is a very strange, very disturbing movie, and yet condemning it doesn’t make sense either because it is clearly done tongue-in-cheek. Ilsa, SWotSS is not Nazi propaganda. It is just a particularly twisted exploitation movie, so it does not deserve the anguished hand wringing it often receives, but at the same time a plot summary that does little more than provide a chronicle of the atrocities depicted does not seem appropriate or interesting either. So, this review, as much as possible will try to understand and discuss Ilsa, SWotSS. Let me know what you think.
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| Ilsa questions the newly-arrived Wolfe. Is that Major Hochstetter's uniform she's wearing? |
The movie is set in Nazi slave labor camp (actually and famously the set from "Hogan’s Heroes," which given Bob Crane’s own kinky personal life is strangely appropriate). Our "heroine" is the camp commandant (played by Dyanne Thorne), a deranged sex-maniac-qua-mad scientist. The first part of that moniker is demonstrated by her practice of forcing male prisoners to have sex with her, castrating those who fail to satisfy her... and boy is she ever a hard gal to please. The second part is shown through the medical experiments she runs, designed to test whether women can withstand more pain than men. Apparently, the answer to this pressing question would somehow help the Nazi war effort. The "plot" revolves around Wolfe (Gregory Knoph, who seems to have been so traumatized by the experience that he never acted in movies again), an American prisoner, who is able to hold off orgasm indefinitely, thus allowing him to actually satisfy Ilsa (movies in the early 1970s demonstrated a strange conception of what women desire in bed). His "talent" is mirrored by Anna's (Maria Marx), another prisoner who is able to tolerate incredible amounts of pain without breaking, thus providing Ilsa with an irresistible challenge. While Wolfe toils and Anna suffers, the other desperate prisoners plan to escape before they are too weak to resist, and Ilsa tries to prevent her superiors from closing the camp. Will Wolfe keep Ilsa distracted long enough for the escape to occur? Will she castrate him before the allies arrive? Will Ilsa discover the secret of Anna's pain tolerance and devise a way to secure a Nazi victory before the camp gets closed down? This is the sort of deep suspense that bridges over the chronicle of atrocities we witness, including: rape; tortures by electrified dildo, boiling, acid, biological warfare, and hanging; and various and sundry other forms of debauchery.
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| Ilsa and her favorite implement of torture -- the notorious electrified dildo -- which she proceeds to use on the stoic Anna. |
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Famously, the finished product turned out to be so disturbing that producer David F. Friedman – known for producing such uplifting fare as The Big Snatch (1968) and The Erotic Adventures of Zorro (1972) – actually pulled his name off the film using the pseudonym Herman Traeger instead. Dyanne Thorne claims she was ostracized by friends after the movie came out. And yet, it was quite successful, spawning two sequels, Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976) and Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia (1977) as well as leading Jess Franco (or at least some distributor) to retitle his movie Greta, the Mad Butcher (1977) to Ilsa, the Wicked Warden in order to cash in on Ilsa’s popularity. All except Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia have been re-released on beautifully done DVDs. Friedman’s decision is interesting because one wonders what he thought he was funding. I mean, is there some way a soft-core exploitation picture set in a Nazi slave labor camp could ever have been done tastefully? Pulling his name off it seems a little self-righteous. Did he also return his share of the profits?
Anyway, what I find interesting is the decision to make this movie at all. Clearly a lot of the exploitation genre is connected with common sexual fantasies revolving around taboos and power. Taboo sex -- be it interracial, incest, across class boundaries, or simply between inappropriate partners (teacher-student, doctor-patient, priest-parishioner, etc.) -- is a common sexual fantasy, and it is not surprising that it finds its way into exploitation movies. Similarly, power and sex are often closely connected, explaining the popularity of bondage, D/s, imprisonment, and rape themes as well as power scenarios (boss-worker, cop-speeder, warden-prisoner, etc.) in the genre.
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| This scene is an example. It begins as straight soft core with two topless women whipping two naked women. But by the end, when the victims have been reduced to bloody pulps, it has turned into something else. |
But where is the turn-on in a Nazi slave labor camp? Or a cruel Japanese wartime prison for that matter? In these settings we seem to cross the line from the taboo/power narrative into the arena of full-blown degradation. Is there really a large market for that? Maybe it is just me, but I think there is a qualitative difference between standard women-in-prison movies and movies like Ilsa. WiPs usually play on the common male fantasy of have power over a large number of beautiful women in which torture (often whipping with the woman’s cries being played at the line between excitement and pain) is part of establishing the D/s relationship. In Ilsa torture is lovingly presented in great detail as an end in itself. Although Puritans of both the left and right might not see the difference, it seems pretty clear to me.
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| Ewww. Alright, stop the contest, Ilsa wins hands down for grossness. |
From the filmmaker’s perspective, of course, we can see Ilsa as a joke, or a dare, or a challenge. A gross-out contest with other movie people perhaps. I guess that is my main reaction after seeing the movie. It reminds me of my college roommate who could belch on command. It is a challenge. And for all of the recent attempts to anoint The Exorcist (1973) as a film classic, it too was just a gross-out challenge... much like Freddy Got Fingered (2001) and other recent movies. The subject matter is ultimately less significant than the tortures depicted on the screen, which explains how Ilsa in the following movies can travel across time and space with nary an explanation (the next movie in the series was apparently set in the 1970s in the Middle East, although Ilsa has barely aged). Anyway, if the public could accept a comedy set in a Germany POW camp, then why not an exploitation movie set in a Nazi slave labor camp?
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| In the end, Ilsa is done in by her own perversions. |
Obviously, this movie could not be made today, although not necessary because we’ve become more sensitive. Naw, what we’ve become is more earnest. Sickeningly earnest -- we’re turning into a society of prudes, even as the Internet is beaming every manner of perversion directly into individual homes. We feel as if any mention of the Nazis has to be dealt with utmost seriousness. This, of course, ignores the use of satire as part of political communication. Indeed, until the past decade or so, the Nazis were often portrayed as ridiculous and incompetent – and not just in "Hogan’s Heroes"; the tradition was spawned most notably by Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). Frankly, I’m not sure that insisting that the Nazis must be portrayed as sinister is a step forward. I mean, first of all, they were ridiculous. The Nazis were some sort of cosmic joke – led by a deranged, would-be artist, and populated with various petty criminals, perverts, and drug abusers, all of them narcissistic and sociopathic. Second, from a political perspective, insisting that the Nazis must always been portrayed as sinister, menacing, and above all else, ruthlessly competent is problematic. As I mentioned in my review of American History X (1998), this message is more likely to recruit a generation of neo-Nazis than anything else. If you’re an alienated kid, sinister, menacing, and competent is precisely what you aspire to. In a weird way, the Hogan-Ilsa version of the Nazis as laughable and deranged is a more powerful condemnation. (BTW, you can apply this logic to other issues too... like cigarettes. I suspect that anti-smoking campaigns would be more effective if they used ridicule rather than dire warnings. I mean, is there anything more laughable and pitiful and a bunch of nicotine junkies bundled up against the cold or rain puffing away in the doorway of buildings on cigarette breaks? Commercials on that theme would be more useful than grimly worded threats on the side of packages. The message would be, it’s not so much that cigarettes will kill you as much as that they will make you a laughing stock.)
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| Despite a steady regimen of torture and hard labor, the busty prisoners find time to blow dry their hair. |
But if we accept this notion of Ilsa as a gross-out project, then how do we explain its continued popularity? These movies haven’t faded into obscurity. People went to see them at the time. They have become cult favorites, and they have all been re-released on DVD, beautifully restored to their richly-colored, well-lit, pristine states. Why? Is there a cultural or social or psychological basis for the staying power of the Ilsa films? Are sadism and degradation more powerful themes that I suspect? Or is it just that once a movie gets the "cult" label it acquires some sort of lasting cachet? I think in the case of Ilsa, it is really the latter. I suspect that many more people have heard of Ilsa than have actually seen any of the movies... as with I Spit on Your Grave and Cannibal Ferox, for that matter. What struck me most about the movie is how boring it is. Sitting through is something of a chore, although one has to admire how single-mindedly the filmmakers take up the challenge of trying offend everyone possible. Technically, it is well made, and there are enough absurd moments to make it worth seeing at least once. Hence, the 2 ½ manacle rating.
Anyway, let me close with a few random tidbits:
(1) Dyanne Thorne was 42 when this movie came out, and although she’s a little doughy, she’s not bad looking for a middle aged woman. Her copious nudity is particular interesting given the tendency to rely almost exclusive on surgically enhanced twenty-somethings in recent exploitation movies.
(2) One of the first torments Ilsa inflicts on female prisoners is to shave their privates... which is sort of amusing since it is straight porn fetishism masquerading as Nazi torture.
(3) I like the scene where Ilsa strips the men nude and looks them over to pick a new lover (after castrating the most recent one). After she sneers at Wolfe's "package" he replied, "size isn't everything commandant," with a goofy leer. It is scenes like that remind you that Ilsa was made with tongue firmly planted in cheek.
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| Wow, that is some very red blood. |
(4) This movie is very gory, but the gore is obviously fake. Not that the makeup effects are bad, but rather they are stylized. The blood is very, very red, almost like ketchup. All the wounds are exaggerated mounds of latex. It is almost a parody of gore rather than an embrace of it.
(5) One of my favorite scenes is when Wolfe and Mario (a recent Ilsa victim) discuss her MO of castrating her lovers. "Why?" asks Wolfe. Mario, very solemn, replies, "Perhaps it is her way of punishing a man who makes her feel like a woman, yet fails to satisfy her cravings for more. Who knows?" Mario seems to have been teleported in from some serious Italian drama.
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| Mario (Tony Mumolo) tells Wolfe that he lives on as "half a man" only in order to get revenge. |
(6) The only truly disturbing scene is the famous dinner sequence. In honor of a visiting general, Ilsa throws a party which includes killing a prisoner by tying a noose around her neck and placing her on a block of ice. When he body heat melts the ice she dies. This occurs while Ilsa and the general drink and gorge themselves, and is followed by a truly weird sequence where Ilsa indulges the general's perversions by urinating on him.
(7) The movie ends on a strange note. After the prisoners revolt and seize the camp, they mete out justice to their tormentors. Wolfe and his girlfriend Kala -- who, btw, makes it through the movie without being raped or disfigured -- sneak out, but all the other inmates are massacred by German troops who destroy the camp and burn it to prevent the allies from discovering it. The ending is disturbing because the movie suggests that all the "freaks" die together in a mass conflagration, and yet not all freaks are created equal. Mario and Anna deserved better.
Anyway, unpleasant or not, it is the duty of all cult movie aficionados to see Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. Anchor Bay has re-released it in a beautifully done DVD, featuring commentary by director Don Edmunds, producer David Friedman, and star Dyanne Thorne. It is a must for bad movie collectors.
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(2.5 out of 5)