World War II is at its height, and at this secret European location is a special camp run by the Nazis to test out scientific theories and experiment on the prisoners there who refuse to buckle under the totalitarian regime. For their trouble they can be tortured or put under the knife in operations that almost invariably fail, leaving dead bodies behind that are incinerated in the furnace on the grounds of the camp. Today a couple of women have been placed in an electric chair to break them down and persuade them by force to swear allegiance to the Fuhrer, but it hasn’t worked, and stubborn as they are the guards are left with more corpses to burn. But what if they introduced a sexual angle?
What indeed, begging the question, how can a film with this much nudity and simulated sex be so excruciatingly boring? It’s quite a feat, and not one taken into account by the campaigners against the so-called video nasties who twice were up in arms over the fact this had been released in Britain, once back in the mid-nineteen-eighties and later in the late noughties, though that time it was a bit of a storm in a teacup as it was recognised something this tedious was unlikely to bring out any unhealthy impulses in the potential audience and the fact they had chosen to watch it was punishment enough. Many's the viewer hoping for twisted titillation who emerged from this ashen faced with boredom.
Its roots were not in something like Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, 120 Days of Sodom or The Night Porter (which had actual box office stars) but in the trash benchmark Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS which itself spawned a couple of official sequels and a whole bunch of rip-offs that took the idea of sex and torture horror and ran with it. It won’t surprise you to learn none of these are regarded as classics, you won’t be getting a South Bank season of the likes of The Beast in Heat or Gestapo's Last Orgy any time soon, but their perceived audacity at taking a taboo subject and making exploitation out of it - or Nazisploitation as it was otherwise known - generated some interest among cult movie enthusiasts.
Or it does until they have actually watched them, and then a long hard look at what they’re doing with their spare time may result. The title here brought up unpleasant evocations of the war crimes of Josef Mengele, which themselves would get an almost respectable treatment in science fiction thriller the Boys from Brazil about the same time, but there was little here to truly offend other than the thought of someone trying to make a profit from real life horrors. Indeed, some have found SS Experiment Camp unintentionally funny thanks to its ineptitude and cheaper than cheap production values (not to mention its cheaper than cheap moral values), but there was really only one big laugh to be had here, and you had to wait for it.
Before that grand finale that is predictably blood-spattered, we had various scenes dolefully going through the trash motions as the female prisoners are sexually preyed upon by the Nazis, though there is a musing over whether the German soldiers lower down the ranks who are participating are being preyed upon as well. This was as much a women in prison movie as it was a war story, probably even more so with its shower scenes, sadistic guards and eventual rebellion, though with a bit of low concept torture thrown in such as a tank that either heats up the victim or freezes them to death. Looking impoverished to say the least, with grubby sets and wooden actors, the plot burbled along professing to condemn the atrocities that the filmmakers themselves had dreamt up for entertainment purposes, so there was a dose of hypocrisy to go with the ennui, but if you're wondering about the funny bit, it occurs after a testicle transplant and is really the line "What you been doing with my balls?!" Everything else was a slog. Oh, and the music intermittently sounds like the theme to eighties rural police TV show Juliet Bravo.
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