The year is 1953, the place is Siberia where the Soviets send their prisoners to the gulags and in this one in particular, Ilsa (Dyanne Thorne) rules with a fist of iron. If anyone is foolish enough to try to escape, they are hunted down like a wild animal and executed, often on the spot, their corpses brought back to the camp to be displayed as a warning to those who might try to follow in their footsteps and make a break for it. Today one such victim is retrieved, and to make certain he really is dead and not pretending after being impaled through the heart with a long spear, Ilsa orders his head squashed with a large mallet, all in front of the demoralised inmates. But there is a political prisoner who will not crack…
This was the third in the official Ilsa series of what would actually quite accurately be called torture porn, though since nobody used that term back in the nineteen-seventies it was simply called trash for its grimly cheery combination of gore effects and softcore sexual situations. There was a fourth entry made before this, not by the usual mob of Canadians who made the others, but by Jess Franco who recruited star Thorne to make a facsimile, and some fans have mixed feelings about counting that one, so let’s say it here that this was an Ilsa trilogy and dismiss that fly by night operation from Europe. Not that the originals were really any more accomplished in quality, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
After having its lead villainess join the Nazis and the Oil Sheiks for her initial two entries, we had her as a Communist madwoman this time around, merrily torturing all the men she could get her hands on, or at least that was the impression the film would like to give, yet this was rather lighter on the torture than those previous instalments. In fact, it preferred the softcore sex, presenting Thorne in a state of undress as if uncommonly keen to get her out of that uniform and those fur coats, depicting her in threesomes with her underlings as she had them at her lustful beck and call – they toast “her left neeple!” (among other body parts, one assumes) with shots of vodka and fight over who gets to be taken to bed by her, and not because they’re scared of the consequences of rejecting her, either.
In fact, it’s unthinkable that any man could resist her, which in a way makes her a strong character, but since she is regularly described as a “bitch” by all and sundry you do wonder if the sexual politics could have been in need of a look. Not that anyone was especially taking these seriously, least of all the filmmakers, as evinced by the way they swiftly became bored with the whole gulag idea and changed horses midstream as it were, transporting Ilsa to the Montreal of the 1976 Olympics where she now runs a brothel which doubles as a front for her experiments in, what else, torture. You may be pondering what happened to the whole prison camp angle, given the halfway point looked like the end of a seriously truncated story what with it going up in flames and just about everyone except Ilsa dead, and you wouldn’t be alone.
From then on the film resembled a low rent James Bond copy, as the sole surviving prisoner from the gulag is Andrei Chikurin (Michel Morin) turns ice hockey coach cum espionage agent to track the bad girl down to her urban lair, though aside from a little grey in his hair he doesn’t look any different than when he did a quarter of a century before. Though that’s nothing compared to Ilsa, who aside from a new hairdo as a concession to the passing years looked exactly the same as well, even in her nude scenes, suggesting she had discovered a fountain of youth in the interim. She had also discovered technology, for her proudest possession is a computer that simulates the victims’ worst nightmares: when a captured Andrei is strapped in, he envisages a hag biting off his manhood in one of the most bizarre images of the franchise. There’s nothing left for it but an OHMSS-style attack on the snowbound base of Ilsa’s Russians in a burst of action, but even that wasn’t enough to rescue what was a rather ho-hum experience if you were not enamoured of ridiculous torture.
