Crew
Director/Screenplay – Ivan Katansky [Luigi Batzella], Producer – Clemente Roberto P. Moreno, Photography – Ugo Brunelli, Music – Giuliano Sorgini. Production Company – Sonora Films/Eternia Films.
Cast
Macha Magall (Dr Ellen Kratsch), John Brawn (Drago), Kim Gatti (Captain Hardinghauser), Brigitte Skay (Irene), Xiros Papas (Lupo), Brad Harris (Don Lorenzo), Sal Boris (The Beast)
Plot
Nazi officer Dr Ellen Kratsch unveils her new breed of genetically modified human, a beast-like creature that has uncontrollable sexual appetite and will ravage any women put in its cage. At the same time, partisans among the local villagers are active in the area and blow up a railway bridge. Captain Hardinghauser is given orders to take control of the situation. Ellen persuades him to let do it her way by torturing captured locals with a mix of sexual tease and sadistic cruelty.
Nazisploitation is a term given to a cluster of 1970s exploitation films that featured Nazis and were centred around sado-sexual themes. The genre was sparked by the US-made Love Camp No 9 (1969) and popularised with Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S. (1974), featuring Dyanne Thorne as the commandant of a concentration camp who enjoyed sexually using and torturing prisoners. This was followed by other works such as Salon Kitty (1976), SS Experiment Camp (1976), The Gestapo’s Last Orgy (1977), Love Train for the SS (1977), Private House of the SS/SS Girls (1977) and Nathalie: Escape from Hell (1978), as well as others that are outright porn films. There is a documentary about the phenomenon with Fascism on a Thread: The Strange Story of Nazisploitation Cinema (2019).
Unlike most of the other Nazisploitation films, the genre content in SS Hell Camp is not solely because of Sadism and Torture element but also features a Mad Scientist. In the opening scenes, Nazi scientist/SS officer Macha Magall (who gives the best performance of the show, alternately cruel and whip cracking but also seductive) introduces The Beast (Sal Boris). She then conducts a demonstration where a woman prisoner is placed in the cage with The Beast where it proceeds to ravage her like a wild animal.
Unfortunately, after such a strong, attention-grabbing opening, SS Hell Camp gets bogged down in the dull drama among the partisans. Fully two-thirds of the film is taken up by the in-politicking between the groups, the scheme to attack the Nazis, and Brigitte Skay as the girl who sleeps with the Nazi captain to spy but is treated as a whore by the villagers. These scenes are poorly directed, indifferently written and badly acted, while the bad dubbing makes watching a dreary chore.
It is nearly an hour in before SS Hell Camp gets back to the Nazi torture scenes. There’s one scene during this time where Macha Magall introduces her plot to alternate the pain with pleasure where she strips off to rub her body up against and tease some of the bound men. Around the one hour mark, there is a nasty sequence where Macha Magall tours a room where she is torturing various people, including women imprisoned with bulldog clips attached to her vaginal lips as someone hand cranks a battery to send electric shocks through her; another woman having her fingernails pulled out; a man being whipped while being dunked upside down into a bath; another woman with what looks like a bucket tipped upside down on her stomach and something alight on it; and another woman being given to The Beast where he proceeds to ravage her, including tearing her pubic hair out with his teeth and frenziedly eating it.
SS Hell Camp makes for a sordid and rather nasty film. I am used to watching all manner of sadistic nastiness and gore for this site, but this is one of those films you feel like you come out in need of a moral shower afterwards. The other disappointment is that for all the introduction of The Beast at the start, it serves no other purpose than being there to ravage women that are thrown into the cage with it. At least this does lead to an end that seems perfect for a film like this – a Frankenstein-like one where the uprising occurs and Macha Magall is thrown into the cage with The Beast to be ravaged by her own creation.
Luigi Batzella (1924-2008) was an editor turned director who made fifteen films as director, most being Spaghetti Westerns, Italian crime films or adult films. In genre material, he also made the vampire film The Devil’s Wedding Night (1973); the giallo Nude for Satan (1973); one other Nazisploitation film with Achtung! The Desert Tigers (1977); and Challenge of the Tigers (1980), a martial arts film with some SF elements.
Trailer here