Never thought that I, as a native Dutch speaker, would encounter irremovable Dutch subtitles on a Region 1 movie that came imported from the USA! This movie is available in the newly released "Grindhouse Experience" box-set, but since it never officially came out on DVD, the version is clearly ripped from an ancient VHS copy. And that copy must have originally come from either The Netherlands or Belgium, which makes sense, as the lowest shelves of video stores around here are literally packed with this sort of rancid exploitation trash! I've seen loads of "Naziploitation" efforts and they're all pretty terrible, but in the hands of the infamous Bruno Mattei (appropriately nicknamed the Ed Wood of Italian cinema) you get something that is even worse than terrible, namely something downright unendurable! "Naziploitation" was the most pointless trend of 70's smut-cinema and to this day I still fail to comprehend why it was so damn popular in those days. All these movies practically have the same senseless plot, and so does "Women's Camp 119". Beautiful and defenseless young girls are shipped off to vile concentration camps where they get abused & humiliated by sleazy wardens and where they serve as reluctant guinea pigs for idiotic scientists of the Third Reich. In this piece of garbage, for example, the girls are forced to thaw frozen Nazi officers using simply their body heat and "cure" men from their wicked disease called homosexuality. One poor woman even has her uterus removed because the Nazi's decided she should share her fertility with other, less fertile women. Of course there's a lot of full-frontal nudity and sex on display, but it's never once arousing or even agreeable to watch. This clearly was an extremely low-budgeted production and I don't even think Bruno Mattei's cinematographers could afford to buy a couple of light bulbs. Too often you find yourself staring at an almost entirely black screen and even the exterior sequences suffer from bad lighting. There are numerous (and redundant) scenes in which people glorify the ideals of Hitler and his book "Mein Kampf", and I suppose this was done simply to increase the shock-value. The acting performances are atrocious, with the exception of Lorraine De Selle who's adequate as the doctor's assistant. In the 1980's, De Selle would also star in Bruno Mattei's absolute best movie called "Woman's Prison Massacre"; this time as a warden.
Review of Women's Camp 119
