Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS

So here’s the thing. At one point, I was indeed aware that this was a full-blown porno, but somehow I managed to forget this fact over the years, and came to believe it was just a standard 70s exploitation film. Imagine my surprise, then, when I bought it expecting nothing more than another sleazy 70s grindhouse type film and just got nudity and sex every two seconds to go along with the Nazis performing grisly experiments on their victims. Call it a nice bonus, I guess.

As might be expected, the plot (based on factual events, according to the film, as it lies to our faces) centers on Ilsa, the head of a Nazi prison camp who delights in sadistically abusing her prisoners and performing various experiments on them. Her stated goal, in defiance of the Nazi patriarchy, is to prove that women have a higher pain threshold than men, and so would presumably make better soldiers or something. I’m not sure where she was headed with this, really, as I have a sneaking suspicion that it was only a thin pretense to enable them to show scenes of men and women being tortured a whole lot, in a variety of different ways, be it by pressure chambers, heat chambers, whippings, etc. Whippings especially. This film, as one could expect from a Nazi porno, is extremely fetishistic, with a great deal of care taken to their various uniforms and to a great deal of bondage (Ilsa herself is renowned for bringing male prisoners to her bedroom, and then having them castrated afterwards for not pleasing her enough, until she meets a new American prisoner who can boss her around and fully dominate her in the sack).

In the knowledge that it was based on factual events (the only change was that the various events were condensed into one locale), it was a bit eye-opening for me to discover certain things about World War 2 that I had never before known. One such thing is how, when whipping prisoners, the female Nazi officers would strip topless, presumably so their arms would be less constricted. Another is the knowledge that, back in the 40s, every last woman in existence seemed to be at least a C-cup, leading me to believe that Russ Meyer may have actually been a documentarian rather than a nudie director with a love of big topsails. One thing I had been aware of, and which the film backs up, is that all women back then wore big old bloomers that completely covered them and preserved their modesty, which was rather amusing both because of how frequently they were stripped of them anyway, and for how I live in an age where an eye patch would often be considered an overly modest piece of female underwear, and I must laugh at past generations for their lack of my futuristic space age knowledge.

So yes, the film certainly has its share of amusing moments to go along with its heavy amount of sleaze (though let’s be honest here, it’s not really any sleazier or more misogynistic than most porno films), but overall the film is a bit lacking. It doesn’t go far enough with its grotesqueries to be a match for any of its more notable exploitation peers, and most of the women weren’t really attractive enough to make the nudity palatable enough to justify its existence. It’s kind of an ‘eh’ movie, quite frankly. Despite my love of women in Nazi uniforms, I find I simply cannot recommend this film. You should all look elsewhere for your Nazi fetish porn.

Rating: *