Hôtel du plaisir pour SS

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.

This film is a blatant low budget rip-off of Salon Kitty. The story is very similar, several scenes have been directly lifted and in one of them Mattei even uses the same actor (Salvatore Baccaro playing the freak, as usual). Clearly, the producers did not have the same amount of money to spend on production design and good actors. Mattei tries to work these limitations to his advantage and frequently crosses the borderline to the grotesque. His Nazi officers are even less believable in their roles than John Wayne was as Genghis Khan, and the male lead (Gabriele Carrara) is more a raving lunatic than the menacing Nazi played by Helmut Berger in Salon Kitty; the physical exercise scenes are so clumsy they border on self-spoof.

Still, this is a Nazi-sexploiter and not a comedy. Its biggest asset is undoubtedly Frau Inge, played by Marina Daunia with great enthusiasm, both beautiful and cruel, both strong and mad; enough to melt the brain of any S&M fanatic.

Yeah, it got everything; bad acting, lousy plot, nazis, only the midget mimics are missing. But anyway, it is REALLY amusing in its way, so it just got to be seen. I don't know why, but hey, it's some sort of trashy Ilsa: the she-wolf of SS rip-off. Or Tinto Brasso.

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 ****