I was reluctant to watch this first instalment in the Ilsa franchise. "Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks" is an exploitation classic, campy fun with over-the-top violence and nudity. "She Wolf of the SS", however? Kind of hard to enjoy camp value with the shadow of the Holocaust being wilfully evoked. The movie even has the shamelessness to begin with a message on the screen, claiming that the following BDSM porn that makes up the movie is actually some kind serious document of the horrors of Nazi Germany.
So I was prepared for a demoralising experience. What's more depressing than a Holocaust movie? How about a movie that exploits the Holocaust for an easy buck?
With movies like the Ilsa series, and all those "Pinky violence" flicks from Japan, I think filmmakers were basically trying to provide bondage porn to people who couldn't easily get it in the pre-internet age. Most of "She Wolf", as with the Japanese flick "Terrifying Girls High School", seems to be naked women being tortured.
Children of the 2000's thought they knew "torture porn" from all those Saw movies, and indeed, they thought it was a new invention. Wrong! In the '70s, movies like the above put the "porn" in torture porn, and they didn't skimp on the torture, either.
In "She Wolf of the SS", the tortures are surprisingly not very graphic, but the aftermath is shown in disturbing detail, with horribly burnt and blistered skin, and hideous wounds to the body, including burst eyeballs.
In one scene, the movie even evokes a fetish many might find even more disturbing than the BDSM scenes: urophilia.
I'm not going to summarise the plot, or what plot there is. Nobody watches it for that anyway. It's a series of BDSM porn scenes, some violent moments, and minimal character development. I'm struggling to think of why I didn't hate it as much as I probably should have. Maybe it's because I knew what to expect - and I wasn't disappointed. The special effects are good. The actresses are improbably beautiful. Dyanne Thorne makes an iconic villain. The movie is surprisingly well made. I just wish they hadn't evoked the memory of the greatest evil of the 20th century, in service of cheap BDSM pornography.
So I was prepared for a demoralising experience. What's more depressing than a Holocaust movie? How about a movie that exploits the Holocaust for an easy buck?
With movies like the Ilsa series, and all those "Pinky violence" flicks from Japan, I think filmmakers were basically trying to provide bondage porn to people who couldn't easily get it in the pre-internet age. Most of "She Wolf", as with the Japanese flick "Terrifying Girls High School", seems to be naked women being tortured.
Children of the 2000's thought they knew "torture porn" from all those Saw movies, and indeed, they thought it was a new invention. Wrong! In the '70s, movies like the above put the "porn" in torture porn, and they didn't skimp on the torture, either.
In "She Wolf of the SS", the tortures are surprisingly not very graphic, but the aftermath is shown in disturbing detail, with horribly burnt and blistered skin, and hideous wounds to the body, including burst eyeballs.
In one scene, the movie even evokes a fetish many might find even more disturbing than the BDSM scenes: urophilia.
I'm not going to summarise the plot, or what plot there is. Nobody watches it for that anyway. It's a series of BDSM porn scenes, some violent moments, and minimal character development. I'm struggling to think of why I didn't hate it as much as I probably should have. Maybe it's because I knew what to expect - and I wasn't disappointed. The special effects are good. The actresses are improbably beautiful. Dyanne Thorne makes an iconic villain. The movie is surprisingly well made. I just wish they hadn't evoked the memory of the greatest evil of the 20th century, in service of cheap BDSM pornography.