Private House of the SS Girls

SS Girls opens with a lot of random shots in a seemingly abandoned house, accompanied by annoying organ music. Evil Nazi Hans Schellenberg is put to the task of recruiting ten women, who are willing to prostitute themselves to learn the secrets of top ranking German officers. Because the Nazi elite are scared that their loyal minions aren't as trustworthy as they should be. Does this seem familiar? If it does, then you've already seen Tinto Brass' superior Salon Kitty which SS Girls steals heavily from. Fortunately, that doesn't really matter since this is a Bruno Mattei film and when watching any of his creations the word "original" is not a word that will cross your path for the duration.

Mattei makes a decent decision in showing the girls' training as a musical montage. What they show of it is mostly completely random stuff, but it works in its limited capacity. Their training in sexual perversions here is nothing special. Salon Kitty managed to make this work to great effect, by actually being competently made. No such luck here.

Schellenberg, played by Gabriele Carrara, is one of the most evil looking villains I've come across in any film. He looks like a young coked-up Steve Martin come to think of it. In all fairness, seeing Schellenberg in full make-up and dressed as the Pope at one point wasn't half bad. I'll give you a point there Bruno. He's more over-the-top than Helmut Berger was in Salon Kitty, becoming a parody of himself. Perhaps it's not surprising, but equally underwhelming and hilarious. The German officers are a horny bunch of perverts. This supplies us with a generous amount of female nudity, which I consider good, yet it manages to about as erotic as a trip to the dentist (assuming you're not a masochist or Jack Nicholson). You know you could and probably should watch porn instead. There is the usual tedious torture, which won't scare or please anyone. What I was hoping would be SS Girls saving grace was unintentional laughter from stupid actions and even dumber dialogue. I'm not saying it wasn't terrible. I'm just saying while being terrible it managed to be so without becoming very funny. The doctor slapping one of the girls for becoming pregnant, calling her "a little slut", made me chuckle though. At the end Mattei decides he wants to give the film the emotional depth it so sorely needs. He appears to make a serious attempt at giving SS Girls some weight, by making it abundantly clear how horrific the Nazi atrocities are. Could this be his Citizen Kane? No, not this time either Bruno. It was a fair try though.

I doubt there is a more tasteless genre than the naziploitation sub-genre. Apart from the excellent Salon Kitty or Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, none of those I've seen have much of what you would call redeeming qualities. Don't get me wrong. I'm truly glad there have been people pushing the limits of taste and stupidity by making utter garbage such as this. My problem arises when this garbage is able to be as tasteless and offensive as it is and yet remains almost completely without entertainment value. Salon Kitty had a pretty good story, decent actors, some excellent costume design and several poignant images of madness. SS Girls has none of these qualities. Granted I've seen way worse than SS Girls, but it remains frequently a dreadful bore. If you, like me, simply have an urge to check out all of the scummiest films ever made then go right ahead, though I highly doubt it will add anything to your life.

In short: There is nothing particularly good about SS Girls or even competent. It just happens to exist, which is about the best thing I can say about the film. Despite all my apprehensions I don't hate it for some reason. Maybe I pity it? For being what it is you could do a lot worse. Bruno Mattei's films deserve to be studied for years to come. For more entertaining trash from Mattei I suggest Hell of the Living Dead or Rats: Night of Terror.

Yeah, it got everything; bad acting, lousy plot, nazis, only the midget mimics are missing. But anyway, it is REALLY amusing in its way, so it just got to be seen. I don't know why, but hey, it's some sort of trashy Ilsa: the she-wolf of SS rip-off. Or Tinto Brasso.

The Nazisploitation/sexploitation genre reaches new heights of frenzied lunacy in Casa Privata Per Le SS (aka Private House Of The SS) thanks to the lead performance of Gabriele Carrara. Making his debut, Carrara gives a performance that probably sets some sort of record for unrestrained dementedness… spitting out lines of awful dialogue with lip-smacking zeal and widening his eyes like a madman at every opportunity. The sex scenes are deliriously over-the-top too, resulting in a film which comes across as a sort of high camp, over-sexed, thoroughly hysterical reboot of the more serious-minded Salon Kitty. Thankfully this one spares us the graphic torture scenes that were so often a staple ingredient within the genre, although this is but a small mercy. As a film it is still absolutely terrible.

Dedicated Nazi officer Hans Schellenberg (Gabriele Carrara) is told that numerous high-ranking officers of the Wehrmacht are plotting against Hitler. To weed them out, he is instructed to recruit a bevy of beautiful whores and train them as spies. Various suspected officers are invited to a house, where these Schellenberg's whores wine them, dine them and indulge in all manner of sexual depravity in order to find out what they really think of the Fuhrer. They then report back to Schellenberg, who in turn acts as judge, jury and executioner in bringing down any conspirators that are uncovered.

In truth, the plot matters little. The film is one long excuse for a whole lot of soft-core sex, bondage and gratuitous nudity, with the story merely getting in the way of all this exploitative excess. No-one seems bothered in the slightest that the whole thing is about as erotic as a stroll through the sewers, nor that viewers would probably get more stimulation watching an advert for petfood. The '70s saw a slew of these sex 'n' torture Nazisploitation entries, and Casa Privata Per Le SS is neither better nor worse than the others. Quite who watched these films and made them successful enough keep the genre going for several years is anyone's guess. Suffice to say that genre addicts (whoever they are) will probably enjoy this, but for everyone else watching it is a thankless ordeal.

The Italian Nazisploitation sub-genre only really lasted for a couple of years between 1976-77. But despite the fact that the quality of the films is of a pretty consistently low standard, it is a genre that has retained a certain interest even forty years on, mainly on account of how biscuit-takingly offensive and taboo-busting they all were. SS Girls is another in this notorious cycle. Like the others it operates substantially as a sexploitation movie but unlike the majority it does not feature the graphic sadism usually also associated with these films. The story takes place at a large villa turned into a high-class brothel by the Nazis, the idea being that certain high ranking officers suspected of being traitors to the Third Reich will let their guard down in this erotic environment and unveil themselves to the prostitutes who are trained Nazi agents.

This one was directed by Bruno Mattei who is a director associated with the z-grade end of Italian genre cinema. He made some agreeably entertaining nonsense such as the post-apocalypse silliness Rats (1984). SS Girls isn't on the same level as that but in fairness it's a middling effort from this mediocre genre overall. Its main problem is that its multitude of soft-core fumblings gets pretty tedious quite quickly and it doesn't have any salacious violence to fall back on to enliven proceedings. There were a couple of interesting characters though. One was a facially scarred and cruel head Fraulein but best of all is a demented organ-playing male deviant who runs the show. In what is easily the best scene in the entire film, the latter pitches up at one point in full Pope Regalia to condemn several Nazi traitors from a balcony. Its scenes such as this that ensure this one has at least some cult value but overall, like the majority of Nazisploitation movies, this isn't especially good.

Interested in Nazi Sexploitation films? You're not? Well, if you were I'd say this Italian film from Bruno Mattei is one of the "better" of this kinky cult genre. The order of the day is depraved sex, sex, sex - and more sex. The story revolves around an SS officer who seeks to discover who the traitors are in the Third Reich. So he finds 10 whores who become fiercely trained to indulge in all sorts of wild sexcapades with every kind of freak of nature imagineable, so they may be able to then seduce the suspected turn-coats, and then get them to confess vital information. There is no point here really other than to indulge in a wide array of nudity and sexual insanity - ranging from S&M to lesbianism to plain old sex done with freaks ... even implied bestiality (yuck). I'm hesitant to say this, but sometimes the cinematography was actually impressive for such a concoction. **1/2 out of ****