Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS
The most dreaded Nazi of them all!
Year of Release: 1975
Genre: Horror/War
Rated: Not Rated
Running Time: 96 minutes (1:36)
Director: Don Edmonds
Cast:
Dyanne Thorne ... Ilsa
Gregory Knoph ... Wolfe
Tony Mumolo ... Mario
Maria Marx ... Anna
Nicolle Riddell ... Kata
Jo Jo Deville ... Ingrid
Sandy Richman ... Maigret
George 'Buck' Flower ... Binz
Rodina Keeler ... Gretchen
Richard Kennedy ... General
Lance Marshall ... Richter
Summary:
This notorious Canadian sexploitation cult classic is one of the most sick and sadistic features ever released to a general audience, and the only film that producer David F. Friedman, the king of sleaze himself, was so ashamed of that he removed his name from it. Statuesque, buxom blonde Dyanne Thorne is Ilsa, the ruthless commandant of a Nazi medical camp who subjects her patients (mostly naked women) through the most painful and brutal tortures she can think of to prove the superiority of the female sex to Nazi high command. At night she goes through the male prisoners like boy toys to be discarded and castrated the next day ("Once a prisoner has slept with me, he'll never sleep with another woman!"), until she meets a man she can't conquer in bed. It proves to be her downfall. Vamping it up with a corny German growl, Thorne leers with gargoylish delight at her latest diabolical tortures: grotesque, gangrenous infections, exploding sex toys, boiling alive, and a dinner centerpiece involving a naked girl, a noose, and a melting block of ice that leaves her dangling by meal's end. Directed with an artless bluntness and a cold cynicism, it's a brutal, nasty film, utterly tasteless yet perversely fascinating. It was reportedly shot in a week on sets left over from the sitcom Hogan's Heroes, and proved so successful that it spawned two official and one unofficial sequels.
Review:
ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, the movie that teaches us... lets be cereal here for a moment if I may, and I may, cause I'm the boss. Prejudice, bigotry, and intolerance is simply put the most obvious sign of insecurity devised by the human race. I cannot think of a better way for anyone, anywhere, to declare to the world that they do not matter. What happens in their lives is of so little consequence or relevance that they need something in their lives to hate, and rail against. These people are discontent with themselves and lash out at those who look, think, or fuck differently than they do. They are so insignificant and discontent with what they have in their lives (or don't have, as it were) that they have to be up in everyone else's business an act like rival clans of chimpanzees who pitch their poopies at each other in a display of defiance and self perceived superiority. But defiance of what? The people they're throwing their metaphorical doodie at couldn't give a shit less about them. Not unlike most of the other people in their lives. So what are they hoping to achieve? Well, I have a theory. Somewhere, each hate group has it's own board of insecure wimps. And each hate group has an annual competition to determine who among their ranks is the most pathetic. There's a big ceremony and everything when the competition has ended and the winner receives a trophy in the shape of a cat, because, after all, they're all striving to be ordained as the biggest pussy within the organization. I theorize further that there is also a neutral board of racists that presides over all the other individual hate group boards. This board is accepted by all the various hate groups because they actually hate every group of individuals on the planet, even the races they happen to be a part of. So each hate group sends their delegate of douchbaggery to a secret competition. A special Olympics, if you will. However, the real Special Olympics is made up of more intelligent people, and the victories mean something. After several grueling events, including but not limited to; Shit Talking, Destruction of Public Property, Running Away from the Cops Like Little Sissy Chicken Babies, and perhaps the most formidable, Bail Seeking, where the competitors must find someone as stupid as they are to get them out of the clink. The winner is given a job as dictator of a third world country of their choosing.
Now, equally important, this movie also teaches us to be thankful. Thankful for the British, the Americans, the French, and to a lesser extent the Russians. Sure, they lost more troops than the rest of the Allies combined, but Stalin wasn't much better than Hitler. It's like comparing puke to diarrhea. Anyway, why should we be thankful? Other than not being forced to speak German or having been run through the Easy Bake Ovens of Insanity? Boobs. Nazis hate boobs. The Nazis in this movie strip women down to their T&As. Everything's going fine, this movie has some exceptional racks in it, and what do they do? They completely ruin all the boob scenes by needlessly torturing the women the boobs are attached to. Okay, it's not needless, ilsa is trying to prove that women should be able to fight in the Nazi army because they have as much, if not more body hair than the men do, and discrimination is wrong. Never mind that they're discriminating against the prisoners the whole movie and ruining what would otherwise have been countless happy boob scenes. Back to my original point. If the Nazis had won WWII, we would never again have been allowed to view boobs without the women they're attached to being tortured in some way. Of all the things the Nazis did, this is by far the worst. Senseless, meaningless, wanton destruction of fantastic breasts. What kind of monster do you have to be to engage in this type of behavior? Thank goodness the Allies attained peace through superior fire power. I condone any actions taken by the Allies to quash Hitler's Nazi Germany, and his campaign against the female form. You can imagine how torturous it must have been for for Eva Braun anytime she was nude with Hitler, the flatulence alone must have been overpowering.
For anyone that missed the transition from serious back to comedy, you give me a sad.
The movie begins with ilsa, who is someone you might call a "butter face", doing the horizontal squat thrust with one of the prisoners from the concentration camp. The guy can't get it done... scratch that. The guy can get it done, but he gets it done too quick. ilsa understands, she heads for the shower and shower heads her fun spot to get the job done properly. Never send a man to do a shower head's job. In the morning ilsa sends in her underlings in to drag the guy back to the camp. ilsa said he wouldn't have to go back to the camp, and because Nazis would never do anything dishonest, the guy is confused and more than a little bummed, but not nearly as bummed as he's about to be, because ilsa's hot goons drag him down to the doctor's office and Bobbitize him and let him bleed to death. So then, since ilsa is getting low on guys to Bobbitize, they bring in some more meat. One shipment of men, one shipment of women. The men are essentially there as workers. Apparently a women's high threshold for pain is no match for landscaping duty. In the new batch of meat, we've got the closest thing the movie has to a protagonist, as well as a strong spirited woman who's too dumb to realize she's helping ilsa accomplish precisely what she's been working on. ilsa spends the whole movie trying to get the strong willed woman to admit that ilsa has much nicer jugs than she does, but she's not having it. So tough gal spends the entire movie being sliced up like deli ham, getting electricity shot through her nipples and getting the electric dildo of doom stuck in her. Meanwhile, the pseudo protagonist, a blonde guy named Wolfe, strikes ilsa's fancy and she takes him back to her quarters to fill the void.
But Blondie's got a secret. Blondie can... hold it together, so to speak. As he puts it, he's a "one of a kind." He's like the Energizer Bunny of fornication. Which is fortunate for him, considering what happened earlier. So since he's able to make ilsa shake like a California quake, he's spared the wrath of the overzealous SS Mohels. Wait... nevermind, I'm leaving it. So anyway, while all this is happening, a male and female prisoner are caught talking to each other. ilsa told them from the get go not to be doin' that, so she has to have her hot goons take their tops off and whip them to death. The whipping scenes aren't all that convincing, but you've got to realize if the hot goons really let loose with the cracking of the whips there's a good chance their melons might fly up and concuss them. Then one of the other inmates is found to be female so the slobbenly male guards have to gang rape her and kill her. Mercifully most of it's off camera, so it's not clear if it happens in that order or not. Then again, I may have a cut version. So then the General comes to visit, so everyone is expected to be on their best behavior. But the remaining prisoners have had just about enough of this lousy German food and their boobies are are the verge of getting frost bitten by this point and they've had it with ilsa's bullshit. So the General comes to visit, checks out ilsa's work, promises to say nice things about her to Das Fuhrer, gives her the German Iron Cross, gets completely sloshed and asks ilsa to pee on him, otherwise he can't man up enough to sex her. Pretty typical stuff. After the General is found to be sexually disappointing, ilsa calls for Blondie and he ties her up like he's gonna sock it to her. Instead he just puts a sock in her mouth so she can't scream and the big prison break scene is on. I won't spoil the ending but, suffice it to say, ilsa peed on the General for nothing. How degrading.
I was really surprised at how good the production values in the movie are. It's got good camera work, pretty decent acting, and with the exception of some of the blood being too bright colored, very good make up effects. I've read a few reviews that say the acting is terrible, or "over the top." I have to say that these people have no idea what bad acting is. Watch Troll 2 sometime and tell me this movie has bad acting. I suspect that for some of them, they think any name that lacks Marquee value can't act, or, they are simply too unimaginative to come up with anything else to denigrate the movie, which is sad, cause it's pretty obvious what's bad about it. It's tasteless. And as for "over the top" acting? THEY'RE IN A NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP. Is it even POSSIBLE to over act? If they know they're over acting that says some pretty scary things about them. After all, how does one know how animated a person being boiled should be? How pained someone being whipped to death should be, being gang raped, castrated, ect. How would you even know that? If we're comparing it to reality I'd imagine these things are probably UNDER acted. And if people believe the sex scenes are over acted? My guess is they're just bad at it. So anyway, it's got pretty good production value. Does that mean it's a good movie? I suppose that depends how sick you are. I'd tend to rate this movie the same way I rate I Spit on Your Grave. Are they enjoyable? No. Are they fun to watch? Definitely not. The question is, is it a good movie? Is it a WELL MADE movie? And using that as a measure, I'm inclined to say it's a pretty decent movie. Certainly not a date movie, or one you recommend to anyone that you want to think well of you, but pretty decent none the less. This movie is exploitation through and through. Just wanted to put the cliched expression out there, because when most people hear that, it puts everything in perspective for them. Regardless of what that perspective might be. If that scares you, fine, if that excites you, seek help.
Overall, I hope these types of movies are made to be viewed by people who receive them as I do. That is, to be capable of seeing the artistic ability of the people involved in it's production, while at the same time being mildly disturbed and understanding the meaning of the message that is trying to be conveyed. If there is one. I fail to see much of a message in Cannibal Holocaust. Different kind of exploitation film though. And I think that is the intention of the movie makers here, there's even a big wall of text at the beginning making clear that what you're about to see should never be seen by anyone cause it's horrifying, but also that the movie makers dedicate the production "with the hope that these atrocities never happen again", or something along those lines, I'm paraphrasing. There's also a famous speech by Adolf Hitler playing in the background, which I thought was a nice touch. Although they really should have broken it up into two screens worth of text, that can't be more than 10 point font, and unless you're sitting 6 inches from your screen you have to pause the movie to read it. I also noticed that the moaning from one of ilsa's sex scenes plays in "House of 1000 Corpses" by Rob Zombie, which I didn't realize before now, but isn't all that surprising. Rob Zombie actually shot a pseudo trailer for a movie that didn't actually exist, to play at the beginning of Robert Rodriquez/Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse, titled "Werewolf Women of the SS", which needs to be made cause it sounds amazing. So anyway, these types of movies should never be viewed by anyone, and in fact the DVD covers should all have little disclosures in the bottom right corner that state "You must be this screwed up to view the contents of this disc." Naturally, the picture for comparison would be of Herschell Gordon Lewis.
Rating: 74%