SS Camp: Women's Hell

Italy | 1977 Directed by Sergio Garrone Starring Giorgio Cerioni Serafino Profumo Rita Manna Color | 96 Minutes | Not Rated Format: DVD / R1 - NTSC Exploitation Digital

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SS Camp: Women's Hell is only my fourth "Naziploitation" film (not counting Tinto Brass' trashy but artsy Salon Kitty) and already I feel we're really starting to scrape the absolute bottom of the barrel.     It was shot back-to-back with the slightly less awful SS Experiment Love Camp by Italian director Sergio Garrone, who recycled not only the same sets, costumes, and much of the plot from that movie but many of the same actors in practically identical roles. Giorgio Cerioni again plays the SS commandant of a konzentrationlager for female politicals, where the inmates either become sex slaves or test subjects for hideous medical experiments. Bald Serafino Profumo is his sadistic, brutal subordinate (here promoted from sergeant to lieutenant); Patrizia Melega is the cruel and skanky Nazi lesbian (demoted in this one from doctor to kapo guard). The only differences between this film and its predecessor are the inclusion of Pam Grier wannabe Rita Manna as a Jamaican caught fighting with the French Resistance (who eventually becomes the commandant's preferred bed-mate) and a somewhat greater emphasis on sadism over sex. Apparently, bits of footage from SS Experiment Love Comp were reused in Women's Hell to reduce costs. (I simply do not possess the fortitude to watch these turds one after the other for 100% verification.)     This pic is in dire need of some genuinely sexy women (sadly lacking here) and/or moments of unintentional mirth. A handful of amusingly goofy, badly dubbed lines and a truly bizarre moment involving a strap-on banana (!) will get a few laughs, but they definitely come a day late and few thousand Reichsmarks short. Gorehounds will find that, aside from a bit of scab-picking in the laboratory, the grue is limited to a single — albeit plenty grim — torture set-piece. (Amongst other things, an inmate's tongue is torn out by the roots a la Mark of the Devil.) The sex is all misogynistic, mostly involving a grunting Profumo forcing himself on one or other of the girls. I don't know what to make of that banana scene, though... (Until now, every Naziploitation flick I've seen always paired up at least one couple who actually have romantic feelings for one another.) Girl-on-girl action, despite the setup for just such a sequence, is minimal.     Poorly paced and mostly boring, the film could just as easily be called "SS Camp: Viewer's Hell". But it isn't content to be simply bad, oh no. It has to be tacky, too. In especially bad taste is the inclusion of actual newsreel footage and photographs from the real Holocaust, a pathetic attempt to lend this trash some measure of pertinence. Unless Media Blasters can come up with better quality — or at least laughably cheesier — Naziploitation pics (do they even exist?), it might be best if the company just left it at that. To borrow Dr. McCoy's line of dialog from a classic Star Trek episode:     "We appeal to you in the name of civilization... PUT A STOP TO THIS!"

The latest serving of Nazi nastiness from Media Blasters (under the Exploitation Digital sub-label), SS Camp: Women's Hell probably looks and sounds the best of all such titles the company's released on DVD to date. The 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer comes from a practically damage-free print; blacks are well-rendered and colors fine within the film's deliberately gray, muted palette. The dubbed English-only mono audio track is unexceptional but clear, unsullied by any of the bugaboos (drop-outs, distortion, hiss, etc.) typically encountered with such Eurotrash fare.     Extras: Along with the original theatrical trailer, trailers for three other MB Naziploitation titles (SS Girls, SS Hell Camp, Elsa: Fraulein SS) and a minuscule image gallery is a 15-minute interview with director Sergio Garrone. In subtitled Italian he talks briefly about the start of the genre, jumping on the bandwagon with his two quickie pics and accommodating various censors. And as with the similar featurette included in the SS Experiment Love Comp disc, Garrone maintains that these trashy, gutter-trawling films actually serve a positive, cathartic purpose — teaching historically ignorant members of the audience about Nazi crimes while providing others a harmless, vicarious means of assuaging their inner sadist. (What a crock of scheisse.) 1/07/06

UPDATE In March 2008 Media Blasters released SS Camp: Women's Hell as part of the bargain-priced 3-disc SS Hell Pack, which also includes SS Experiment Love Camp and SS Girls.

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