Hôtel du plaisir pour SS

Revered schlock-Meister General, Bruno Mattei's enjoyably sleazy reiteration of 'Salon kitty gives sin-seeking viewers a voyeuristic peek into the smuttier machinations of WW2 subterfuge. Set at the end of the war, the German high command desperately attempt to root out the traitorously plotting Generals by erotic means voluptuous! Following a lustful, monumentally boozy bacchanal, the drunkenly revelling conspirators are unmasked and promptly put to death by the plainly psychotic, pseudo Crispin Glover-alike despot, Herr Shellenberg (Gabriele Carrara). Crude, frequently lewd, and morally bankrupt, Mattei's gaudily goose-stepping shunt-fest employs a colourful cornucopia of boorish bonkage and assuredly sordid S&M shenanigans to maintain interest.

Undeniably Nazisploitation gold, cheaply made with impeccably bad taste, notorious plagiarist, Bruno Mattei dutifully delivers the reich stuff with his gorgeously grubby 'SS Girls'. The performances, text, production values, and cinematography are far better than one might expect, but the cinematic competence does very little to mute the triumphant trashiness of it all! While it, perhaps, lacks a truly gonzo climax, it's mostly fun, and the groovy sore by, Gianni Marchetti, is, for me, a genuine highlight of Mattei's mucky master race gang bang!

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 ****

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.

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.

Mad-as-a-hatter Nazi Hans Schellenberg (Gabriele Carrara) is instructed, by the Führer himself, to root out traitors in the Third Reich. In order to do so, he and his beautiful-but-scarred assistant Frau Inge (Marina Daunia) assemble a highly trained troop of whores, whose initial job is to satisfy the sexual desires of some German top brass and then convince them to reveal their true feelings about dear old Adolf.

After (rather easily) getting the group of generals to betray themselves, Hans and his harlots proceed to weed out other undesirables in the Reich, including the sadistic murderer Oscar (whose head wobbles like a Gerry Anderson puppet as he talks) and his equally nasty henchmen.

All is going well for nutty Hans, who loves to bash one out on his organ between orgies (a tune that is—on his church organ), until he unwisely spurns Inge's sexual advances. Miffed, she betrays her boss to his superiors, revealing his desire to become the next Führer...

The Nazisploitation genre spans the gamut from the respected (The Night Porter), to the reviled (SS Experiment Camp), via the soft-core (Salon Kitty), the sleazy (The Beast in Heat) and the camp (Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS). Italian trash-meister Bruno Mattei, never one to miss out on a trend that might prove profitable, decided to jump on the bandwagon in 1977 with SS Girls, which he quickly followed with SS Extermination Camp the same year.

Mattei starts his first foray into the genre with some hilarious scenes in which the hookers are trained to give their all, whatever the situation. We see the girls practicing ballet, fencing and learning fighting techniques, as well as learning how to sexually gratify everyone and anything from the obese, the severely handicapped, to a dog (a German Shepherd, of course!).

The rest of the film is a series of soft-core couplings with tons of full-frontal female nudity and the occasional sadistic whipping scene. Unfortunately, this all soon becomes very tiresome stuff, and the movie quickly loses the bonkers vibe of its earlier moments. A tedious last act, in which almost everyone kills themselves after hearing of Hitler's death, left me more than disappointed.

Whilst SS Girls manages to deliver the requisite sleazy sex that one expects from this kind of film, it fails to deliver the gratuitously gory and sadistic violence that makes its infamous counterparts so memorable. I soon became bored of the endless nookie, and longed for a mad scientist to enter the room and begin experimenting on someone. Alas, this was not to be, and so I feel I can only give SS Girls a decidedly average score of 5/10.