KZ9 - Lager di sterminio

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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-