Women's Camp 119 (1977) User Reviews

Bruno Mattei's second (and still pretty bad) attempt at Nazisploitation.

[BA_Harrison · 5/10 · 5 June 2007]

Despite such dubiously sleazy delights as uterus transplants, the use of prostitutes to thaw out a frozen priest, a wild-eyed mono-browed lunatic rapist (the 'pet' of a Nazi officer), experiments to reverse homosexuality, and countless female prisoners being flogged, getting in cat-fights, and having their clothes torn off at every opportunity, Bruno Mattei's Women's Camp 119 is still something of a chore to sit through.

The best Nazispolitation films manage to keep their audiences' attention with either a high level of camp and/or the ability to shock; somehow, for the majority of this film, Bruno manages neither. Most of the silly experiments perpetrated on the poor prisoners are rather tame, and the few 'nastier' ones lack the repulsively realistic make-up effects necessary to effectively turn the stomach.

Mattei's story has the usual roster of characters that are found in such films—an evil sneering jack-booted sadist, a lesbian guard, a beautiful prisoner intent on escape—however, his handling of the material is so mundane that what might have been prime exploitation ends up as rather boring.

The film picks up slightly towards the end when four prisoners make a break for freedom, and Mattei delivers an unexpectedly downbeat ending in which everyone dies, but this is not enough to make me recommend this one to fans of the genre.

Women's Camp 119 is, perhaps, a very slight improvement on SS Girls, Mattei's first attempt at the genre, but it still only earns itself a rather mediocre 5/10.

Needs to be Cleaned Up

[gavin6942 · 5/10 · 29 November 2010]

Women are held captive by the Nazis and tortured. One of the women is seen as highly skilled and is forced to help a doctor who is working on a way to cure homosexuality, as well as transplanting uteruses from fertile to barren women, among other things.

The version available from Fortune 5 DVD is grainy, and even though it is in English, it has (what appear to be) Dutch subtitles. This could obviously be improved: cleaner picture, and the original language spoken with English subtitles would be nice.

The film is written and directed by Bruno Mattei, who is probably best known for his zombie films ("Virus") and mediocre efforts in horror and sci-fi. This is not horror or sci-fi, but it could easily be called mediocre.

There are plenty of nude women showering and/or being molested to exploitatively feast your eyes on, if only the film was not so fuzzy. Also a few sex scenes with threesomes, under the guise of an experiment on heat transfer.

In one scene, actual film of concentration camp victims is shown, adding to the realism, but again in an exploitive and indecent manner.

Mein (boring) Kampf

[Coventry · 3/10 · 19 October 2007]

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.

Grindhouse Experience

[lastliberal · 2/10 · 1 August 2007]

Bruno Mattei, often called the Ed Wood of Italian cinema, started his directorial career with Nazi exploitation films, then moved to women in prison movies, and now directs zombie movies. he actually acted in Lucio Fulci's Zombie 3; I guess to learn the genre.

This is his second attempt at Nazi camp films, and it is poorly made. The lighting is absolutely atrocious and that is better than the acting.

The effects are non-existent, so the experimentation they were doing has no effect. It is just an interesting look at the sickness the Nazi's were working on, like transplanting a uterus, or reviving frozen pilots with women's bodies, or poison bullets to make people suffer more.

Naturally, since this is an exploitation film, you see a whole lot of full frontal nudity, degenerate monsters who rape, and some really creepy Nazi commandants and wardens.

It is funny in that I have seen a lot of girl fights in movies, but in this film, they always manage to get totally naked when they fight.

trashy, ugly nazi-exploitation movie

[funkyfry · 2/10 · 18 February 2008]

Well, this is the kind of movie that you don't bring home to mama. You might not want to bring it home at all actually because it's completely grotesque and deliberately offensive in the most pointless and obvious ways imaginable. Basically it's about a bunch of nazi officers who have a women's prison camp where they torture women. It's the kind of movie where you can watch it and halfway through you still don't know the name of a single character. Honestly I don't want to pay enough attention to this movie to know what the characters' names are, if they're even mentioned. Nobody put much care or interest into this movie. About the only admirable aspect of the movie is the extreme ugliness that is so pronounced that it's clearly obvious. Well, if you're going to make a cheap movie you might as well make it look really cheap and horrible. I mean I've seen more than one women in prison type movie, but I've never seen a catfight that was so literally dirty as the one in this movie. The girls were rolling around in filth basically. The problem with that is that I didn't think it was really artistically interesting and it definitely wasn't a turn-on. Maybe this movie was made for fetishists and I just don't happen to have the particular fetishes that the movie was trying to play on. I can tell you for sure that it was extremely silly and yet it superficially took itself very seriously. For example there's a whole plot about the Nazis holding homosexual men and forcing them to have sex with women. The whole thing is handled in such a way as to make you think that the people who made the movie were about as educated about gay people as the Nazis themselves. The gay guys just waved their arms around and acted like they were totally mental. There was another sequence where the Nazis tried to use women to bring a man back to life who had been frozen, ostensibly so they could revive pilots who had fallen into freezing waters. See! -- I was paying some kind of attention. And I hate myself for it. Just kidding, but seriously I wouldn't recommend watching this movie unless you're an S&M completist who likes really grungy imagery, and if you already watched it and you're reading these comments then I'd like you to explain to me who the people in the movie were and what the heck they were doing.

Poor Naziploitation

[Michael_Elliott · 27 February 2008]

Women's Camp 119 (1977)

* (out of 4)

Naziploitation from Italian director Bruno Mattai has the familiar story of the mean Nazis taking women hostage and doing all sorts of experiments on them, both physical ones as well as sexual ones. Mattai worked as a producer, editor, director, actor, writer and various other things during his career but it's clear he never learned how to cut an exploitation movie down. This film runs 100-minutes, which is at least thirty minutes too long as the film grows very tiresome very quickly. There's plenty of lesbian sex, torture and nudity but all of this grows boring after the first fifteen times. As is to be expected, the performances are all rather weak but Mattai does bring a few decent touching in the visual look of the film. Apparently this film was based on real characters as we're told what happened to them since the time of these events including one who lived in America up to the time this film was released.

SHE COULD REVIVE A CORPSE

[nogodnomasters · 3/10 · 26 June 2019]

A group of women are sent to an experimental prison. The stated goal was to increase the twin output, but the experiments did everything but that. One of the prisoners is a doctor and is allowed to be part of the staff conducting experiments which tended to be sexual in nature. There is also a janitor named crazy Kurt who gets to rape the women.

The film includes rape, full frontal nudity, and bad cinematography. The transfer to DVD was horrible as was the sound. It is an Italian film, spoken in English with Dutch subtitles. The fuzzy film, which makes an nude scene not worth watching, has some authentic footage from concentration camps thrown in.

Film is available on a grindhouse multipack. The pictures on the Amazon DVD cover is not of this film.

Woah...

[BandSAboutMovies · 5/10 · 20 May 2021]

After The Night Porter and Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS opened the sewer gates of sleaze, the rest of the world's exploitation auteurs rushed to get their own German ladies of sin pictures into the grubby eyeballs of reprobates brave enough to find a grindhouse of drive-in willing to show these pictures.

Well, Bruno Mattei made two of them. This one and Private House of the SS, which has an absolutely berserk performance by Gabriele Carrara to go for it. This one has, well, a scene where dead soldiers are brought back to life by women rubbing their naked bodies all over them and homosexual soldiers try to get cured by watched naked women, which does not work.

Ivano Staccioli plays the camp commandant who gets things done, joined by Marta (Ria De Simone, who pretty much played the scheming wife in Mattei's Cuginetta, amore mio!) to lead the women into whatever fresh hell Mattei has in mind.

If you watch one movie where a healthy uterus is transplanted into another one, followed by a scene of a female commandant forcing herself on a prisoner, you know...man, I really have no taste whatsoever, huh?

Disturbing and Startingly Realistic Portrayal of Life at Rosenhaus

[Kammurabi · 3/10 · 5 February 2008]

This is a stunning glimpse of the conditions the women of Rosenhaus experienced up until the end of the war. Nazi doctors perform numerous ghastly experiments on the unfortunate female prisoners in this realistic dramatization.

The film is made more effective through the amazingly advanced color photography (considering this is 1945).

I visited the Rosenhaus camp on a recent trip to Europe and was stunned to see there are still visible bloodstains on the floor where the woman was shot with a chemical bullet.

.

One of Mattei´s Best

[matalo · 6/10 · 26 September 2000]

This movie´s a sleazeball. There´s no other way of describing it. I guess, that´s no big surprise for you, knowing other Italian Nazi-Exploitation-Films like "La Bestia In Calore" or "SS Camp 5: Women´s Hell". But this movie is different. It´s not as campy as the others. On the contrary, it tends to take its story serious, which doesn´t make it easy to watch, because some sequences are very disgusting and depressing. So, it´s one of the rare serious efforts by Bruno Mattei, King of Sleaze-Boredom. Although very cheaply produced like simply all his other films, this one´s not the right choice if you want to have a cheap laugh at his incredibly bad directing skills and, surprisingly enough, he might have intended it that way, perhaps to give us all something to think about. But why? He doesn´t come up to our Sadiconazista- Expectations, he simply doesn´t deliver. So, now you´re warned.

Masterpiece

[jdbmjf · 10/10 · 26 May 2008]

SS Extirmination camp is a grim and depressing film. Not like the usual Nazi films ie SS Hell Camp, SS Girls. Its cast of characters symbolise the holocaust, and the music is very sad and plays well with the grim scenes.

Bits of the movie are exploitative, but they (medical tests) are all based on Nazi records, so they are realistic.

The cast is actually very well acted, and the script is brilliant, other parts of the movie, belong in schindlers list, as they are so real in their depitction of the holocaust, such as gassing, shot with poison bullets and and the kind doctors getting hung while inmates sing Israel much to the annoyance of the Commandant.

The sets are all very good, the concentration camp looks like an old industrial factory and the guards all wear proper uniforms, as well as the inmates, and the special effects are not bad either.

For the Exploiation fans, there are rapes, whippings, hangings, uterus transplants, vivisection, and shootings, and gang rapes etc.

For the historical fans out there, there are very depressing moments which show the holocaust for what is was, horrible.

The film is no doubt Bruno Mattei's best film, as it contains a good cast, no stock footage and none of the plot is borrowed from any other film.

I seriously suggest you check it out-

Good example of Nazi exploitation cinema, if you like that sort of thing

[dbborroughs · 7/10 · 30 March 2008]

One of Bruno Mattei's women in Nazi Prison camp sagas. It tells the story of a female doctor plucked from the ranks of prisoners to help with the Nazi experiments.

Lurid, Vile and nasty this is 90 odd minutes of women being abused and debased and raped and (fill in the blank) Amusing for a while (watching the technical problems- modern buildings in the background, modern locations, bad acting) but it becomes drag rather rapidly. Even allowing that many of the horrible experiments alluded to were real, there is no one to root for or care about. Its by the numbers cruelty for a low brow audience. That said its a good example of this the Nazi exploitation genre, and worth a look if you like that sort of thing- However it's not for the easily shocked.

Relatively Decent Nazisploit From Bruno Mattei...

[EVOL666 · 7/10 · 9 February 2010]

The Nazisploit genre in general doesn't tend to do a whole lot for me. I think the idea is decent-but there's very few within the genre that I feel are very noteworthy. Even most of the more 'highly acclaimed' within the genre end up leaving me a little cold-as I don't feel that there are really any out there that exploit the genre's sleazy potential to it's fullest. While LOVE CAMP 119 is a decent foray into such material-it's yet another of these films that never really 'takes off'...

The premise of the film is much like any other in the genre: women are used as sex- slaves, guinea pigs, and laborers all in the name of advancing the Third Reich. A sympathetic doctor and his assistant do the best they can to alleviate the prisoner's suffering whenever possible-largely to no avail. An escape attempt is hatched by a few of the prisoners-and they're actually successful at first...but what sort of exploit film would this be if it had any sort of happy ending???

Mattei has done a handful of decent films spanning most every sub-genre in the exploit/sexploit realm-Nazi themes, WIP, zombies, cannibals, etc...and LOVE CAMP 119-while definitely not great by any means-is another of his films that I found to be mildly interesting. Whereas many in the genre tend to be pretty tongue-in-cheek almost to the point of being somewhat comedic (depending on your sense of humor...) LOVE CAMP 119 plays it pretty straight-faced and serious. I personally appreciated this about the film-and it gave it a bit of an 'edge' that many of these types of films don't have. Although not nearly as graphic or notable-the tone of the film reminded me a lot of T. F. Mou's classick historical-exploiter MEN BEHIND THE SUN. There's a decent amount of female flesh on display (as is to be expected of such a film...), and although the FX are weak-some of the experiments are suitably sleazy and/or rough (if sometimes just downright silly). Personal favorite are bringing the frozen guy back to life by having two sluts make out with him, and trying to turn a pair of gay guys straight by forcing them to have sex with a group of women. I'm sure both of those techniques are extremely effective in the real world. I also particularly enjoyed the downbeat ending that had the minor twist of the main prison guard getting his in the end. A decent entry in a weak but interesting sub-genre...definitely worth a look to Nazisploit enthusiasts. 7/10

A nice'n'slimy serving of nasty Italian Nazisploitation sleaze

[Woodyanders · 8/10 · 25 August 2008]

Compassionate Maria Black (well played by the lovely Lorraine De Salle) is forced to work as a medical assistant at a Nazi concentration camp and witnesses firsthand the various brutal and inhumane scientific experiments being conducted by the Third Reich at the place. Director/co-writer Bruno Mattei delivers the lowdown harsh, grimy and appalling goods in an unflinchingly graphic and upsetting manner: Among the foul stuff to relish herein are naked women being severely whipped, a lady have her uterus surgically removed so it can be transplanted in a sterile woman, ladies being put to death in a gas chamber, a frozen guy getting revived by the sexual body heat of a hot nude prostitute (he of course then makes love to said hooker!), an unsuccessful attempt at curing gay men of their homosexuality, one poor gal slowly dying after being shot with a poisoned bullet, and several vile rapes. Moreover, we also get some lesbianism, a catfight, and plenty of full frontal female nudity. The despicable Nazi swine villains make for a memorably hateful rogues' gallery: Ivano Staccioli as the cruel, unhinged Commander Wieker, Ria De Simone as the predatory chief capo Marta, Giovanni Attanasio as the bald, cackling, depraved cretin Kurt, and Gabriele Carrara as the sadistic Oberleutnant Otto Ohlendorff. Sonia Viviani contributes a solid supporting performance as fetching and fragile female prisoner Cristina. Alessandro Alessandroni's moody, shivery score, the grim, humorless tone, Luigi Ciccarese's slick, yet grotty and washed-out cinematography, and the uncompromisingly downbeat bummer ending all further enhance the unsparingly bleak and depressing atmosphere of this perfectly ugly and offensive piece of deplorable trash.

something for everyone (or maybe not)

[cones · 6/10 · 19 August 2007]

this is not great film-making. the lighting is poor, the shot composition is nonexistent, the acting is barely passable. and yet i didn't really mind all that. when i say it has something for everyone, trust me when i say my tongue is planted firmly in cheek. personally , though, i would be very selective with whom i would share this movie.

beatings, shootings, cat-fights, drowning, hanging, torture, rape, full frontal nudity (male and female), prison camp, Nazis, forced lesbianism and a threadbare plot are what to expect from this movie. if you are searching for something out of the ordinary, give this a try. just remember to check your good taste at the door.

best WIP movie ever

[badenkeiler-msn · 10/10 · 28 February 2011]

This move is so fantastic it made my eyes tear. I bought a copy for all my grandchildren and gave it to them for Christmas, isn't that right napoleon? once somebody tried to steal my copy in a jelalous rage as they could not afford a copy. I disposed of this individual. If you burn your skin martha wont want you anymore

No. Um, well, ordinarily when you make glue first you need to thermoset your resin and then after it cools you have to mix in an epoxide, which is really just a fancy-schmancy name for any simple oxygenated adhesive, right? And then I thought maybe, just maybe, you could raise the viscosity by adding a complex glucose derivative during the emulsification process and it turns out I was right.

Not so bad Nazi exploitation

[mrsgerardway-37769 · 10/10 · 20 October 2015]

Okay so the only version of the movie is really bad quality, but don't let that put you off. Nasty exploitation movie, the acting isn't bad like some reviewers say. I would say Lorraine De Selle as Maria and Ria De Simone as Marta are really great in this movie. Plus Gabriele Carrara as Oberleutnant Otto Ohlendorff is particularly sadistic in this movie.

Some experiments in the movie involve having naked women rub their bodies over frozen soldiers to revive them and attempts to cure homosexual men.

Wondering if you should watch it?

Give it a try, you won't be disappointed.