Garotas da 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 ****

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.

SS Girls is from cult favorite director, Bruno Mattei. It features Macha Magall who was ravishing in her role in the filth-ridden classic The Beast in Heat. Her role is smaller and much less interesting here though she does get naked. The plot is a rip-off of the not especially good Salon Kitty. A brothel is set up to root out SS officers trying to oust Der Fuhrer. One of the highlights of the film is the training montage of the brothel women. They do normal things like exercising and fencing and this is intercut with scenes of their sexual training. This includes whipping, being raped by Sal Boris (The Beast from The Beast in Heat in an unfortunately miniscule role), sapphism, sex with fatties and even an unfortunate man with one leg and a horribly deformed upper torso, they have to train for every kind of sex so even a dog is included in a not very graphic scene. This montage ranges from hilarious to gross but is never erotic. The leader of this camp brothel is pasty and effeminate and very obviously a closeted homo, the best kind. At one point he wears an outfit that makes him look like a member of the mediocre modern band, Ghost. If they were inspired by this movie I might actually come to like them. Even through the silly dubbing you can tell he gives an especially unhinged, maniacal performance. The women here vary in attractiveness as they always do in this sort of thing with no one really standing out too much in beauty.

Dirlewanger even shows up. He's to be eliminated by order of Der Fuhrer for being too brutal even for the Third Reich. He's been accused off all manner of atrocities with the film seeming to go easy on him. One of them being the routinely debunked "human soap" myth that went back to even World War I. The actor playing him doesn't really resemble the real man as he probably looks more like an ugly John Steiner who was probably in at least one of these NSploitation films. This part seems to be added to make the characters here seem less than "total evil". It's all undone though with the lame and overly moralizing ending which kind of torpedoed the film for me. This isn't especially violent, gruesome or bloody. We do get some war action late on, most of which had to be from a different film. The ending involves a self-righteous frontline soldier who wants to save the "whores" and an SS orgy at the brothel.

This film is saved by a crazy performance by the main character, lots of nudity/sex and some perversion. There's no Human experimentation here or interpretive dances in "gas ovens" unfortunately. This gives the film a less cruel and reprehensible vibe than many of these. I wish Italy had made many more than the couple dozen or so of these slanderous, wonderful sleaze-fests about their former ally. I also wish the Soviet Union had been on the losing side of WWII so we could have gotten filth like Cannibal Holodomor and Cheka Cocaine Slaughterhouse.

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.