The most famous Nazi exploitation movie and a still-pungent whiff from the wild days of the grindhouse era when films like this played more for freaks than geeks. Filmmakers could get the harshest subject matter in theaters if they slithered low enough where even the staunchest moralists didn’t tread, lest they catch fleas.
Still, let’s get one thing straight: Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS is an apolitical film. It doesn’t care about Nazis or their victims or men or women. It’s all about the shocks and a Russ Meyer-like fixation on girls with breasts the size of Stuttgart. See any Saw movie for nastier splatter than you’ll get from this relic. Ilsa’s low-budget prosthetics and stage blood are more obvious today than ever. What survives forty years is pure, undiluted CAMP. Ilsa is ridiculous and hooray for that.
Get a load of this: So, there’s this sadistic female Nazi officer (the great Dyanne Thorne), who’s got two torpedoes on her chest big enough to sink Churchill, and she’s out to prove that women can handle pain better than men. A whole lot of carnage follows, from castration to flesh-scalding to torturous spankings to this one girl who’s forced to stand naked on a block of melting ice with a noose around her neck. We never expect any of these victims to get away. They’re all dead meat. But there are plans a’ brewin’ in the concentration camp to bust out and spill some Aryan blood. It ends up as good seedy fun.
Producer “Herman Traeger” is none other than David F. Friedman, who’s got his fingers up the ass of many great vintage “shock, horror!” movies from Blood Feast on up. If you find this film offensive, grotesque, disturbing and an absolute piece of garbage meant only for deviant minds, please write it down and post it. The late Friedman would have loved it.