KZ9 - Lager di sterminio

Women are held captive by the Nazis and tortured. One of the women is seen as highly skilled and is forced to help a doctor who is working on a way to cure homosexuality, as well as transplanting uteruses from fertile to barren women, among other things.

The version available from Fortune 5 DVD is grainy, and even though it is in English, it has (what appear to be) Dutch subtitles. This could obviously be improved: cleaner picture, and the original language spoken with English subtitles would be nice.

The film is written and directed by Bruno Mattei, who is probably best known for his zombie films ("Virus") and mediocre efforts in horror and sci-fi. This is not horror or sci-fi, but it could easily be called mediocre.

There are plenty of nude women showering and/or being molested to exploitatively feast your eyes on, if only the film was not so fuzzy. Also a few sex scenes with threesomes, under the guise of an experiment on heat transfer.

In one scene, actual film of concentration camp victims is shown, adding to the realism, but again in an exploitive and indecent manner.

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 is not great film-making. the lighting is poor, the shot composition is nonexistent, the acting is barely passable. and yet i didn't really mind all that. when i say it has something for everyone, trust me when i say my tongue is planted firmly in cheek. personally , though, i would be very selective with whom i would share this movie.

beatings, shootings, cat-fights, drowning, hanging, torture, rape, full frontal nudity (male and female), prison camp, Nazis, forced lesbianism and a threadbare plot are what to expect from this movie. if you are searching for something out of the ordinary, give this a try. just remember to check your good taste at the door.

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.