Original title: Lager SSadis Kastrat Kommandantur
As noted in the review of Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer (1979), some of the early casualties of the UK’s “video nasties” scare of the early 1980s were victimised as much for their lurid advertising as for their actual content. The video sleeve for Ferrara’s film boasted a close-up of a tramp’s head being power-drilled while Meir Zarchi’s rape-revenge shocker Day of the Woman/I Spit on Your Grave (1978) featured a bruised, battered and anonymous model standing in for lead actress Camille Keaton, knife clutched behind her back, with the strap line “This woman has just cut, chopped, broken, and burned five men 1 beyond recognition… but no jury in America would ever convict her!” A rather cartoony painted image of a cannibal chowing down on a handful of intestines had a similar effect for Cannibal Holocaust (1979).
Joining them as early members of the “video nasties” club was Sergio Garrone’s “Naziploitation” effort Lager SSadis Kastrat Kommandantur which arrived in the UK seemingly determined to rattle every cage it possibly could. Its new titles, SS Experiment Camp, is a starkly menacing one that the film itself simply never live up to. But it’s a sensational, button-pressing label that could only offend and annoy. Coupled to that was the advertising material – a shadowy male face sporting an SS cap looms in the background against which is set the image of a topless woman crucified upside down. It was an immediate dog whistle, drawing much unwanted attention and getting the film banned at the earliest opportunity (an attempt to mitigate against the outrage by reissuing the tape wit a cover that simply painted on – very badly – a bikini top was never going to fool anyone). It also gave the film a certain cachet that it neither deserved nor could ever hope to deliver on.
The film itself is distasteful and unpleasant to be sure but nowhere near as repulsive as some films of its ilk. Indeed in 2005 the British Board of Film Classification was happy enough to pass it completely uncut on the grounds that “the content of the film is in fact very mild and poorly executed. If anything, it was the title of the film and its original packaging that led to difficulties, rather than the content. The idea of the film may, of course, be offensive to some but that is not a good enough reason to cut or reject it. We would only cut or reject a film for adults if the content was illegal or harmful. SS Experiment Camp is neither illegal or harmful, just tasteless.” With a less lurid cover (initially just an SS logo on a black sleeve, later part of the Italian poster for the blu-ray release) it found its way back into the British video eco-system though certain British tabloids used its re-release as an excuse to try to revive the moral panic of the 80s without much success.
Shot back-to-back with SS Lager 5: L’inferno delle donne/SS Camp Womem’s Hell which used many of the same cast and sets (and is rather nastier), SS Experiment Camp really is remarkably tame in terms of on-screen viscera. In fact if you can get past the tastelessness of the basic premise there are some hysterically funny moments along the way, every one of the entirely unintentional. A group of young women are incarcerated in the eponymous “Experiment Camp” where they are forced to take part in sexual experiments with hunky young German troops on leave from the rigours of water. These “experiments” seem to mostly involve having sex in tanks of water or being frozen and/or boiled alive to “cure” frigidity (“this’ll teach you, you frigid puritanical bitch”), though the Jewish doctor conducting them, forcibly it should be noted, is lining up something more ambitious. The camp commandant (Giorgio Cerioni) has lost his testicles to the teeth of a Russian inmate and one of the soldiers, the hapless Helmut (Mircha Carven), is being lined up as an unwitting donor. Unfortunately, Helmut has fallen head over heels with one of the inmates and discovers what has happened to him when he can no longer perform, bursting in on the commandant to angrily demand “what have you been doing with my balls?” (it seems almost churlish to complain about this of all things, but the film’s grasp of medical science is very shaky).
Honestly, if it wasn’t so tacky and deliberately provocative this stuff would be comedy gold. More humour is to be found in the ludicrous shots of prisoners being thrown into an oven, their bodies twitching rhythmically as though they’re performing some weird interpretive dance routine as flames are superimposed over them. It’s easy to be offended by all this nonsense but really it’s so exaggerated that nothing that happens here bears any resemblance to the real horrors of the concentration camps. Terrible dialogue, awful music and acting to match make it much more of an endurance test than it needs to be and most sensible viewers will have given up on it long before they get a chance to be truly offended by it all. It’s a terrible, terrible film and even the accidental comedy moments don’t help you get past just how bloody dreadful it really is.
- it’s actually just four men but who’s counting – clearly not the Jerry Gross Organistion who came up with the ad campaign ↩
The EOFFTV Review 