La svastica nel ventre

Good movie, very 70s, you can not expect much from a film like this,, Sirpa Lane is an actress of erotic films, a nice body but nothing exceptional savant to a pornographic actress from the body disappears, but the '70s were characterized a small breasts and a simple eroticism. Not demand a lot from these films are light years away from the movies today, the world has changed incredibly. The plot is simple and the actors not extraordinary. And the brunette actress has a single body, has one breast slightly bigger. Be satisfied. Papaya also is not great but at least these films have a certain charm ... Download them again but then again who knows what you pretend not to them.

Sirpa Lane stars as Jew Hannah Meyer, whose idyllic life with her German boyfriend Klaus is interrupted by the madness that is war: Klaus is enlisted in the army while Hannah is rounded up and sent to become a prostitute in a 'joy camp'. Plucky Hannah resists her assigned fate and is eventually sentenced to execution, but is rescued by an SS Captain Kurt Von Stein, who admires her chutzpah and takes her to be his lover.

When Von Stein is tasked with operating a brothel for high ranking officers, he gives Hannah a new identity and makes her madam. Hannah plays along, realising it might be her only hope for survival, but fate intervenes, reuniting her with Klaus and spurring her on to fight back at those who have made her life hell…

Just when I think that I've seen all the sleazy Nazisploitation movies available, another one crawls its way out of the sewers, this one making an appearance on YouTube of all places, a fact that is made all the more remarkable given that it is one of the less camp examples of the genre (despite the inclusion of a lesbian commandant), a downbeat, more realistic effort replete with mean-spirited violence and X-rated sex scenes. With events based on real-life Nazi exploits ('joy divisions' really existed, as did experiments on creating a race of perfect Aryan children), the film is not just a good opportunity to ogle countless naked women, but also a harrowing reminder of the extreme evil that mankind is so often capable of.

Even as a hardened Italian trash aficionado, there are two kinds of Italian movies I usually avoid. One is the "mondo" movies that feature real animal (and occasionally human) slaughter. The other is the "Nazi sexploitation" films which are definitely in what John Water's would call "bad bad taste" as opposed to "good bad taste". I have seen a couple of the French Eurocine rip-offs like "Hell Train" and "Elsa, Fraulein of the SS", which were less extreme and much more laughably inept than the Italians films. I've also seen the two serious and arty (and pretentious) films--"The Night Porter" and "Salon Kitty"--which inspired the whole misbegotten Nazi sex "genre". I've even TRIED to watch a couple of the actual Nazi sex flicks like the one in the "Grindhouse Vol.1" DVD collection and the one that's on a disc with "Escape from a Woman's Prison", but I found them both way too vile and depressing and couldn't make it past scenes of the naked "Jewish" women dead in the shower/gas chamber covered with their own excrement (that's too much for me).

I made it through this movie though, which says something about it I guess. It is much better made than most of the others and a little more tasteful. The director Mario Caino is not a talentless hack like Bruno Mattei, Sergio Garrone,or some of the others who crapped these things out. It is a weird(and historically inaccurate) combination of Nazi brothel/"joy division" type film like "Salon Kitty" and a Nazi death camp type film like some of the others. The protagonist (Sirpa Lane)is Jewish, but working at a brothel. I'm not sure that anyone knows she's Jewish, but the movie seems rather confused on this point (one of her fellow brothel workers is named Goldberg and also presumably Jewish). The real Nazis were nowhere near as sex-obsessed as the Italians made them out to be and they certainly wouldn't have countenanced ANY Jewish women servicing German soldiers in brothels. Anyway, the heroine becomes involved in sadomasochistic relationship with the Nazi camp commander (after a highly contrived scene where he strips her naked and tries to entice his German shepherd to rape her, and she defends herself against man and dog with a conveniently handy bull-whip). As a result, she rises to become head madam of the brothel where her Jewishness THEN, of course, becomes a problem.

Sirpa Lane is much better than usual here, but that's not saying much if you've seen her in "The Beast", "The Beast in Space", etc. Cristina Borghi, who later became a fairly respected Italian actress, is also in the cast somewhere--she's listed in the credits as "naked prisoner", but that really doesn't narrow it down too much. There's a lot of female nudity and a mixture of consensual sex, non-consensual rape, and semi-consensual prostitution. A couple naked girls get tied up and flogged, but this movie lacks a lot of the gleeful torture scenes of the others. It's not really very erotic (if that's the intention),but neither is completely repulsive.

This is one of the more infamous of the countless Nazisploitation Italian films produced in the wake of Luchino Visconti's THE DAMNED (1969); actually, it's the only one I've watched thus far - though earlier this year I did catch up with Liliana Cavani's THE NIGHT PORTER (1974) but, like the Visconti film, that one is best termed as Art-house.

Still, for such a single-mindedly commercial effort, I was surprised by how effective this film was: after all, it was made by all-rounded professionals who had been in the business for some time - director Caiano (best-known, perhaps, for the Barbara Steele Gothic horror NIGHTMARE CASTLE aka THE FACELESS MONSTER [1965]) and screenwriter Gianfranco Clerici and composer Francesco De Masi (both Lucio Fulci collaborators). The lead role here is played by Sirpa Lane, with whom I was only familiar from Walerian Borowczyk's legendary THE BEAST (1975): as much as I love that film, I had always felt that her contribution was upstaged not just by the horny and furry titular creature but by the nominal lead of THE BEAST, Lisbeth Hummel. Therefore, I had no idea that she could actually act and, indeed, the whole film is anchored by her good central performance; discovered by Roger Vadim, she subsequently worked with a few other noted "Euro-Cult" film-makers - but eventually retired (after making only 10 films) and, sadly, died of AIDS at the young age of 44!

The plot sees Jewess Lane being imprisoned in a concentration camp (thus adding the 'Women-In-Prison' subgenre to the already heady mix for good measure - in fact, the film reminded me a lot of Jess Franco's contemporaneous ILSA, THE WICKED WARDEN [1977]), where she's immediately raped and later selected by a lesbian warden (apparently a given in WIP films) to serve as a prostitute for the gratification of German soldiers on leave. About to be flogged for rejecting the advances of the warden, she attracts the attention of the Camp Commandant and eventually starts a sado-masochistic relationship with him (he frequently asks her to whip him, likes to exchange clothes with her and even wants Lane to pleasure his faithful alsation Axel - but the latter doesn't seem too keen on the idea and promptly attacks her)!!

The finale sees the Jewish girl elevated to the position of a madam in a Nazi whorehouse; the man she was in love with at the beginning of the film suddenly turns up at the establishment as a war hero - but it all ends in tragedy (though not before Lane, her Semitic origins exposed, jokes about Hitler's unemployed 'member'!). I have to say, though, that the gimmick adopted throughout of intercutting black-and-white stock footage with the main action was rather pointless because, although the events are clearly set in 1942, we are never told where all this is supposed to be happening so that said footage could be put into perspective!

I watched the film (which is still unavailable anywhere on DVD) via a DVD-R culled from an English-dubbed VHS edition; I don't know whether it's uncut as the editing seemed quite choppy at times - but the amount of violence and nudity on display was certainly profuse (the former pretty fake but the latter rather graphic, occasionally even stepping into hardcore-porn territory)...

Despite its exploiting English title "Nazi Love Camp 27" and despite the fact that this film belongs to the so-called "Nazi Camp films" (or, even worse, "Nazi porn films", although these films are all not pornographic) that were made in Italy following the success of both "Ilsa - She-Wolf of the SS" by Don Edmonds and Pier Paolo Pasolini's shocking masterpiece "Salo o le 120 Giornate di Sodoma", it is rather an anti-war drama than an exploitation movie.

Unlike the other films of this notorious genre - like e.g. Bruno Mattei's "KZ9 - Lager di Sterminio" or the outrageous "Le Ultime Orgie del Terzo Reich", it focuses on a very depressing story about a young Jewish woman that gets captured by the Gestapo and deported in a concentration camp, only to be taken home by a influential Nazi general with masochist tendencies (of course he only shows these tendencies towards the Jewish woman when they're alone). He makes her the boss of a brothel for Nazi officers, and at first, she accepts the job because it's her only way to stay alive. Needless to say that the story doesn't offer a happy end.

Although there are some scenes of Nazi war atrocities during the scenes in the concentration camp, but unlike similar scenes in other such films, they are never exploiting, but just show up the unbelievable crimes Nazi Germany committed during World War II. The end of the film, which is a very realistic approach to this difficult topic, is pure tragedy and kicks the viewer unpleasantly in the stomach, because director Caiano manages to make one feel and hope with the tragic Jewish woman.

"The swastika in the stomach", how the title translates literally, is an intriguing and depressing film, but also a very powerful one that is much too rare. In my opinion, it should have a status just alongside Pasolini's far more grotesque "Salo", because it's one of the most impressing anti-war dramas that won't let you forget the terrible things that had happened in Europe during World War II.