SS Hell Camp

Starring:Macha Magall, Gino Turini, Edilio Kim, Xiro Papas, Salvatore Baccaro, Alfredo Rizzo, Brigitte Skay, Brad Harris
Director: Luigi Batzella
Studio: Exploitation Digital
Product Type: DVD

Description

Meet the diabolical Dr. Krast, a sadistic female Nazi scientist who makes ILSA THE SHE WOLF look like DR. QUINN, MEDICINE WOMAN! She creates a barbaric, sex-crazed Neanderthal beast that feeds upon the beautiful women tossed into its cage! The demented diva doctor will stop at nothing to further her series of shocking and depraved experiments on human guinea pigs. Can the partisan forces fight the Nazis, liberate the prison camp and put an end to the doctor's scientific atrocities in time to save the beast's next human meal?

Customer Reviews:

Banned in the U.K........2006-06-06

And censorship is sometimes the best thing that can happen to a movie. Case in point SS HELL CAMP, a `video nasty' that contained scenes of such perversity it moved a nation to impose sanctions to protect its citizens from its baleful influence. And that's just the stuff that'll get chumps like me to line up around the block to take a gander.

Well, peek away, and try your best to stay awake. The Germans are occupying a town, a band of partisans are blowing up bridges, and the bad guys are rounding up the wimmen folk for interrogation purposes. The chief Nazi doctor on-site is a gorgeous brunette with a dominating air and a caged, half-human, sex maniac in the cellar. To make them talk, the women are either sadistically - and graphically - tortured (a bad thing,) or they're thrown naked in the cage with the neanderthal Casanova (a very bad thing.)

More than half this movie, the half that's spent with the intrepid band of partisans in the field, is impossibly boring and can't be watched without mashing the fast-forward button. The acting is atrocious and the scenes in the field run on forever. Besides, the whole point of the movie is to linger over the shoulder of the beautiful and twisted Nazi doctor.

I'm sorry, this movie is supposed to shock and disgust, but it is done so poorly it's impossible to take it even half-seriously. Its worse scene involves a number of women undergoing a number of tortures. One woman, strapped to a table, is supposed to have been cut open, her entrails exposed and gnawed on by rats. Supposed to have been, but the stage blood was gruel thin, you could see her intact stomach underneath it, and the red sawdust on top failed to convince as innards. Plus, the `rats' on her stomach were a couple of overweight guinea pigs, who scampered away as quick as their pudgy little legs could take them. I gave this movie two stars for the unintentional laughs it provided. SS HELL CAMP is a nasty little exploitation movie, although I'd call it silly rather than shocking, and pretty poorly made.

Difficult to imagine how this could have been any worse........2006-01-17

Let me preface this by saying that I bought this film fully aware of the fact that it would be a horrible exercise in exploitation. I harbored no illusions that led me to believe that I was possibly buying a forgotten Bergman masterpiece or a classic John Ford western. I enjoy a good bad movie every now and then, so I figured that this had to be one of the best of the worst. Well, I was half right.

To refer to "SS Hell Camp" as "a" movie is somewhat misleading. In actuality, "SS Hell Camp" is two different movies that happen to be on the same DVD and through an accident of editing, have become inexplicably intertwined in one package. One movie is about a group of Italian partisan rebels in the German-occupied Republic of Salo in the last days of World War II. They sabotage German railroad shipments and work to actively resist the Waffen SS and Wehrmacht detachments in the area. The other movie is about a sadistic bisexual nymphomaniac named Dr. Ellen Kratsch who runs a sexual torture dungeon under the guise of "science." Experiments include the genetic engineering of a bestial naked Italian man with a unibrow who violently has his way with captured females. With a name like "SS Hell Camp," which of these two movies do you want to see?

Either way, it's more of the former than the latter, and is therefore quite slow-moving and only occasionally funny. (My definition of "funny" being "unintentionally hilarious.") There's nothing particularly 'graphic' here other than female nudity and fake blood (neither of which is done very well). The highlight of this movie is a scene in which the country priest remarks "put your trust in the Lord: he's the best!" For a movie that bills itself as being unspeakably evil and extreme, that's not a very good sign. In a movie as bad as this one, it's difficult to know who to root for. The acting is so bad among the partisans that I frequently found myself hoping that Dr. Kratsch would capture them and kill them and then a stray bomb would destroy the dungeon, killing Dr. Kratsch and her underlings. That way, everyone would be wiped out. Even still, I'm not sure I'd have gotten any satisfaction from this movie beyond the feeling of finality that comes with knowing everyone is dead.

If you're looking for a good non-prescription sleep aid, this movie will do wonders for you. If, on the other hand, you're looking for something that's so-bad-it's-good owing to its tastelessness, violence, and sexual perversion, you're out of luck here.

NAZI ABOMINATION! NAZI RUBBISH!.......2005-12-29

Well, i think some of my fellow reviewers have made the point but being English i'd just like to point out that in the 1980's this film (English title 'Beast in Heat') was placed alongside Evil Dead, last house on the left, Tenebrae and cannibal holocaust as a video nastie. Lets get this straight. It's a pile of doo doo that has no right to be placed aside genuine classic horror movies, even the nazi nasty genre should be ashamed of this drivel. It's basically an italian war movie spiced up with scenes of females being tortured in an ilsa type fashion except the director forgot to tell the maidens to act like there being tortured, i'm guessing having your finger nails pulled off with pliers would warrant a stronger response than 'ow'. Also we get a midget troll thing who's fed on ahprodisiacs who promptly tries to body slam chicks before munching on a wig placed over there special areas. It is Awful and has no redeeming features at all. In england because of our beloved (hopeless) media certain films got a reputation they didn't deserve and an audience that they shouldn't have had, this was one of them, luckily in terms of other films like Evil dead it worked in a positive light. SS Hell camp is for historians only and should be avoided if you want to be entertained, most approach this film in the hope that it will deliver what the cover promises, oh dear.

Awful, awful, awful.......2005-11-18

My god, this film is terrible!! One of the hardest films to track down in the UK "video nasties" scare, there are instances even now of this selling for £200-£300 on eBay in it's original VHS video format ...!! Unfortunately this film being rare had nothing whatsoever to do with it being any good.

"The Beast in Heat" (to use its more famous title) seems to be a low budget clone of "Ilsa She Wolf of the SS", but without a single ounce of the talent or budget present in any aspect of even that film's production. It's basically a very boring war movie in which we watch grumpy (and very obviously un-German looking) Nazi soldiers trade insults with civilians and members of resistance groups in some anonymous European village. Every so often some very obvious stock footage kicks in of planes and tanks attacking, which, apart from being obviously filmed completely seperately, is also in a different aspect ratio to the main feature footage!! Yes it's that bad! This dull state of affairs drags on for 85% of the films running time and is enough to have you reaching for the fast forward after just a few minutes. Everything is awful - the acting, the script, the dubbing, the sets...one hilarious moment occurs early on when a railway bridge is blown up. I guarantee you've never seen anything so lame. I swear they had the camera zoom in wildly on a STILL PICTURE of a very small detonation and even added extra hand drawn flame effects directly onto the celluloid. If it wasn't for the unbearable tedium of the rest of the film, you could at least spend a few happy minutes laughing at this type of stuff.

But of course, somewhere in this mess lurks the reason for the film's true appeal - the scenes of SS officers torturing naked women prisoners. I'll give this film one (just ONE!) compliment - it does star a very foxy leading lady in the shape of Macha Magall, as the sadistic "Doctor Kratsch". Sadly no match for Dyanne "Ilsa" Thorne in the charisma stakes, but it's impossible to tell if she's any good as an actress due to the inept dubbing she is saddled with (along with the rest of tha cast).

That aside, the "cruel" experiments that she is in charge of are real bottom-of-the-barrel trash. Making most shock value in the cheapest way possible is easy - have everyone naked. Right, what next? Well from there the flaws really start to pile up. The central "experiment" of the film is a sex-crazed dwarf that Dr Kratsch keeps in a cage, and whom she occasionally whips up into a frenzy of over-acting by throwing a naked woman in with him. What follows each instance of this is a montage of the worst possible face-pulling and general pantomime style rape attacking from the dwarf, and plenty of screaming from the hapless naked actress while she tries to look as though she is being overpowered by the crazed mini monster (rather difficult, as he is so small!) The camera zooms in wildly on splashes of too-red tomato sauce being liberally spashed about, as the beast carries out his assault. In one sequence, the dwarf even ups the outrage stakes by lifting his cross-eyed face from woman's lap to show a mouthfull of torn-out bloodied hair...ugh! Don't worry, there's not even a hint of realism to any of this. All the while, Dr Kratsch and her attending guards watch silently, occasionally licking their lips in apparent arousal at the gruesome sight (I don't know where all the unusable footage of them laughing their heads off is, but there must be loads of it).

Realism fares no better in other scenes as still more naked prisoners are tortured, eaten alive by rats (yes they are gerbils), or have stuck-on fingernails pulled out, The dubbing in these scenes is the worst synched dialogue you have ever seen. "Stop it...you're hurting me..." the soundtrack burbles while a bored looking actress's lips move in completely unconnected directions. Even throwing a baby in the air for rifle target practise or shooting a naked woman directly between the legs can't raise a gasp with production values as low as these.

Due to the sparse placement of the torture scenes within the rest of the generally boring war and resistance action, it's rare for anyone to manage the feat of sitting through this rubbish to the bitter end, so should you fail, I'm sure you can guess the well deserved fate that awaits our cruel SS lady doctor...have a guess where she ends up. Sadly it's presented very half heartedly...you'll be only too happy to see the end of the film roll up on your TV. To realise that such a waste of space as this has been given a DVD release is more entertaining than actually watching the thing. They could at least have kept the original cover ( a hint of which can be seen in the lower left corner of the sleeve), it was a masterpiece of trash cinema promotion.

The irony is that the British politicians and press who campaigned for films like these to be banned have ultimately succeeded in prolonging their shelf life far beyond that which the films deserve. This should go back to the obscurity in which it belongs.

It seems we have a civil war here.......2005-09-16

One side thinks it's a great nazi-sexploitation flick, while the other thinks it's a tame, over-rated, boring PoS. So which side should you listen to? Being an exploitation movie fan myself(with the likes of Porno Holocaust, Images in a Convent, Entrails of a Beautiful Woman, Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, House on the Edge of the Park, The Beast, etc) I have to say I agree with the 3-stars-and-under reviews(although I agree with everyone, the woman playing the lead nazi interrogator looks seductively alluring). This may be considered the best of the nazi-exploitation films, but that's not saying much(I haven't seen most of the Ilsa films so I can't even vouche for that claim by critics/fans).

Since I own this movie, I can vouche that it is not that exploitive(except for maybe one long multiple-tortures scene), and worse, it's not even that enjoyable or very interesting to watch(the beast guy rapist is just too silly and campy). Rent it to kill your curiosity if you must. But I doubt you would want to own it and rewatch it(if you do, I gotta copy ready to go for ya). It's presented nicely in a widscreen transfer, but with no major extras to its credit, the dvd itself is not even worthy of collecting. Maybe worth a rental, but I'd put this on the backburner and go straight to the 2-disc collector's dvd of D'Amato's Images in a Convent. Now THAT'S worth a purchase!

Average customer rating:

SS Hell Camp
Director: Ivan Kathansky
Manufacturer: Exploitation Digital
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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