Convoi de filles

Convoy of Girls (1978)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

This Eurocine production is all over the map and who is who is just as confusing as anything else. The movie is credited to directors Pierre Chevalier and Jess Franco with Franco's name appearing first in the credits. Looking at the film there's nothing that really jumps out saying anything here was actually shot by Franco. I've seen over a hundred of his movies and usually some sort of trademark goes from one film to the next but I didn't see any of it here. With that said, Eurocine was known for having a director shoot something and then replace him the next day (or probably next hour) so who knows who really shot this thing. The movie centers on a German soldier and his Jewish girlfriend who are separated when Hitler demands his youth into action. The two eventually meet up a few years later as she was forced to work in a whorehouse after her father was caught hiding a Jewish woman. The German soldier then has a decision to make as he really loves her but he also loves his country. No matter who the director was this picture is pretty much a stinker from scene one to closing. From the credits at IMDb, this film borrowed footage from at least three other pictures and the print used here makes it fairly easy to spot the "alternate footage" because of the varying degree of the quality. For a naziploitation flick this thing is pretty tame and would probably get an R-rating without much trouble. The violence is very low with only a few whip scenes and the nudity is pretty low as well with most of the stuff being just topless women. I guess the lack of real nudity should be the first sign that Franco wasn't behind most of this as he surely would have laid that on. The story itself is just too weak, too stupid and has too many plot holes to really work but then again, people don't come to a film like this for a tender love story. The performances are all rather bland as is the direction and even the music score doesn't add anything. Fans of the genre would do themselves a favor by just skipping this one.

Apart from a couple of notable exceptions (like "Helga, She Wolf of the SS" and "Salon Kitty") Nazi Exploitation flicks are pretty much the worst kind of cult movies. This is mainly due to a combination of dull or even a complete absence of story content and an overload of randomly tasteless and perverted sleaze footage. Jess Franco's "Convoy of Girls" hardly features any smutty images, strangely enough, and thus all that remains is the totally uninteresting storyline and a whole lot of irrelevant stock footage that doesn't make a lick of sense. "Convoy of Girls" tells the supposedly heartbreaking story of the successful Nazi officer Erich Von Strässer (seriously, you can't get an more Arian than this guy) who suddenly turns against the Third Reich regime out of love for his high school sweetheart Renata. When he signed up to serve his country in battle, she and her father illegally hid a Jewish girl in Berlin. He later meets her in a brothel where she's forced to work as a prostitute whilst her father got sent to a concentration camp. Von Strässer uses his influence and power as a decorated Nazi officer to save her, but nevertheless discovers afterwards that she was put on a convoy train to Russia. Where's this world coming to if you can't even trust the Nazi regime? This is a very boring film with bleak characters you honestly don't care for one bit. The narrative is extremely incoherent and the footage borrowed from other movies is all too easily recognized. The opening shows Von Strässer fighting in a tropical desert and later on he's supervising German troops in snowy Russia. The lack of sleazy and nudity is particularly bizarre since IMDb credits both Jess Franco and Pierre Chevalier as directors. They're genuine masters of sleaze and other deviance. The film only features a couple of (ugly) topless brothel girls and one too many images of Von Strässer's naked bottom. So, even the most die-hard fanatics of Euro-sleaze have absolutely no reason to track down this film.

Brigitte Parmentier plays Renata, a beautiful Aryan woman forced to become a whore after the Nazis discover a Jewish girl hidden in her family home. Jean-Marie Lemaire plays Renata's blond-haired, war-hero-boyfriend Captain Erich Von Strasser, who vows to rescue the woman he loves from her degrading predicament. Reunited by chance on the Russian front, the pair make a daring bid for freedom.

Another cheapo Eurocine Nazisploitation film pieced together with the use of scraps of several other equally dull movies and assorted grainy WWII stock footage, Convoy of Girls is an extremely weak addition to the genre. Apparently directed in part by legendary Euro-trash director Jess Franco (he must've done the fast zoomy-in-and-outy bits), this clumsily assembled mess is very dull, consisting of numerous unexciting battle scenes, some mild torture, a few not-too-decadent Nazi parties, a smattering of softcore sex, and a singer in a German officers' mess who repeats the same lyrics over and over again.

This "A.M. Frank" movie about a nazi soldier who has lost contact with his jewish fiancée and meets her by chance in a war whorehouse is a real waste of time. Jess Franco used a pseudonym, probably because his final work was this bad, and even uses stock footage of the desert battle we get to see in his unfamous "Oasis of the zombies". The actors are terrible, the places are always the same, and we even get a drunk german whore screaming the same thing all over again during the two whorehouse sequences, yet separated by 2 years and about a thousand kilometers in the story. Believe me, this movie isn't worth a viewing and I shall repent for buying it.