Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned

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Without giving away too much about the ending of Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, let's just say that it isn't naturally conducive to a sequel, at least one featuring Dyanne Thorne's titular character (which I must regretfully inform you might be considered a pun). Yet here she is, back and as alive as ever, in Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks. This one trades the World War II setting for a more contemporary tale (contemporary during its original release, anyway) in which Ilsa finds herself part of a despotic regime led by the evil Sheik El Sharif (Jerry Delony, whose other notable screen credits include Richard Linklater's Slacker and a Ray Dennis Steckler porno that sounds even more dismal than the ones I've seen). We know he's evil not just because he relishes any opportunity for cruelty (observed when he has a man covered in oil and lit on fire while he watches approvingly with some pretty sweet sunglasses) and keeps a harem full of sex slaves (among them Colleen Brennan, then sexploitation star and later hardcore pornstar with a pleasingly toothy smile she sadly doesn't get to flash here, and Uschi Digard, the Russ Meyer regular introduced here as a "Scandinavian love goddess"). We know he's evil because he also keeps oil production artificially low.

This naturally raises the concern of America and other western nations, and dispatched to meet with the sheik are a Henry Kissinger analogue and his hunky American aide. Now, to call this a satire of the 1973 oil crisis would be extremely generous, although one might find an inkling of resonance in how the movie shows America's willingness to tolerate repressive regimes when convenient to its own interests, even if the movie doesn't argue this with any elegance. Personally, I'm a sucker for movies that awkwardly shoehorn in real world figures, and in casting the hammiest possible actor as the Kissinger stand-in (whose onscreen highlight is a tantrum he throws by flailing his arms and making teapot-like poses in exasperation) and depicting him as a pedophile to boot...well, folks, I laughed. Sometimes the low blows land.

The hunky American aide catches the eye of Ilsa, and the resulting affair (which features sex scenes with equal opportunity nudity, to their credit) catches the ire of El Sharif, who has both of them tortured (the aide is menaced by a tarantula, Ilsa is molested by an undead-looking hunchback). The two of them then scheme to get their revenge, and the movie climaxes like the original with an uprising, with Ilsa's (mostly topless) harem taking up arms against the palace guards (many of whom have their faces hidden by keffiyehs, I assume to recycle extras and keep costs down). This is followed by an ending that like the original has a certain amount of irony, but is perhaps less dour, depending on which part of the geopolitical arena you sympathize with.

This hits a lot of the same beats as the original movie, interspersing a number of sexually charged torture sequences throughout the plot, and featuring a male challenger for Ilsa as well as an uprising, although Ilsa is on the other side of the conflict this time around. And like the original this is directed fairly artlessly, although the higher production values give this a less dingy feeling, occasionally rising to the ambience of a Middle Eastern themed Playboy photoshoot. And while Thorne, with her arch, forceful screen presence, is again the primary reason to see this, she's paired with a pretty fun foil in Delony, who matches her for sadistic teeth-gnashing glee. And on the whole, this is a lot more palatable than the original, toning down Ilsa's Nazism and turning her into a general dominatrix/authoritarian type (she makes a few references to her preference for Aryan men, but otherwise seems tolerant of the diverse female cast; this does however contain some pretty negative portrayals of Arabs, so it is not without its offensive qualities). The tortures are also less extreme this time around, likely in an attempt to secure an R-rating instead of the X the original was slapped with. (Sadistic highlights this time around include a scene where Ilsa scares some new slaves with a cute little mouse in a cage, explosives jammed into private parts, and a scene where some of the slaves have their chastity belts unlocked, in a shameless ploy to show some bush closeups.)

All that being said, even though this is better made, I suspect Ilsa would not be quite the icon as she is were this the first movie, as the original's junkier construction lets her presence shine in a way this better rounded movie does not. And while the campier tone here makes this easier to swallow for most people, it arguably loses the sense of transgression of the original, which was channeling Nazi atrocities for kicks. I'm not trying to defend the original, which I think is pretty bad, or its genre, which I find morally reprehensible, but merely to note that the earlier movie got a reaction out of me that this one did not.

And hey, why don't I dig up my review of the original.

Despite my love of cinema in even its less reputable forms, one genre that I’ve hesitated to dive into is Nazisploitation. Quite frankly, a genre built around milking one of the worst crimes in human history for sordid entertainment value seemed a little too tasteless, even for a wildly undiscriminating viewer such as myself. I’ll admit to even having been bothered by allegedly respectable takes on such material (The Night Porter might be one of my most hated films). Yet, as one does when stuck inside during a raging pandemic with limited ways of keeping oneself occupied, with one’s interest piqued by a viewing of a documentary on the subject (Fascism on a Thread, available on Tubi, the best bang-for-your-buck streaming service in that it’s free and actually has a decent amount of good shit), I figured that perhaps I should give it a chance. (I have previously seen Salon Kitty, although I understand that might be a borderline case with its relatively high production values.) And what better way to get acquainted with the genre than by seeing one of its best known and most notorious entries, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS? After all, the film opens with text telling us that it’s “based on documented fact” and is dedicated with “ with the hope that these heinous crimes will never happen again.” Perhaps it wouldn’t be as disrespectful as I’d expect?

That sentiment lasts for about as long as the opening text is displayed. We first meet Ilsa as she’s getting it on with a prisoner. After they finish, in a wild overreaction to a lousy lay, she has him castrated in the first of many graphic torture sequences and says she’ll be sending off his dismembered…member to some kind of museum dedicated to Aryan superiority. (Depending on how often she does this, I wonder if she ships them in bulk?) The rest of the movie follows a similar pattern. Lots of admiring nudity of both the female prisoners and the female guards, with Ilsa’s cleavage subjected to an especially loving gaze. Various torture scenes with an undeniable fetishistic element: shaving pubes, insulting the male prisoners’ penis sizes, an electrified dildo. (Less overty fetishistic but still notable: there is a scene of a pressurized chamber containing a busty prisoner played by none other than Russ Meyer regular Uschi Digard.) Ilsa herself is undeniably a dominatrix-type figure, her Nazi uniform practically serving as fetish gear. The atrocities depicted in the film are an extremely objectionable step or two beyond what some might call a good time, posing a kind of challenge to the audience: how low will you sink to enjoy some T&A?

The film does have some sense of arc, driven by two primary developments. One, Ilsa beds an American prisoner who not only is able to bring her to climax but can refrain indefinitely from climaxing himself, which results in her becoming the female equivalent of “whipped”, so to speak. (The two funniest moments in the movie involve the drum-and-fife music that plays after this scene, a cross between “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Dixie”, and the shocked reaction of another prisoner upon learning his abilities. The American is also tested later with a threesome.) Two, a visit from a general (during which he is entertained by a naked woman hanging over the table onto a block of ice while he has dinner) who seeks to learn about Ilsa’s progress with her experiments but strongly objects to her “private research” (which doesn’t seem all that different from the rest of her handiwork). At the end of the night, he begs Ilsa for a golden shower, an act which manages to repulse even her (despite, you know, everything she’s done in the movie up to this point). The movie climaxes with a revolt by the prisoners led by the American, featuring some low rent action and a fetishized comeuppance for Ilsa (in lingerie, tied with stockings to her bed), followed immediately by the German army putting down the revolt immediately, a downer ending to an overall pretty dismal affair.

On one hand, Ilsa is undeniably a pretty offensive affair, trying to exploit the Holocaust for schlocky entertainment. On the other hand, it’s pretty hard to really be offended by. The movie, despite the opening text, makes little pretense of dealing with its subject in any serious capacity, meaning that any insult to its real life inspirations doesn’t hold water the way it might in a more serious film about the subject. (The Night Porter filming its concentration camp scenes like softcore is more objectionable than Ilsa doing the same as the former actually expects you to take those scenes seriously while the latter is clearly going for thrills, albeit of an extremely degraded kind.) The film was made fast and on the cheap, shot in under two weeks on the sets of the recently canceled Hogan’s Heroes, but the artless, rudimentary filmmaking gives it a certain stylistic purity. The movie delivers exactly what it promises you, no more, no less, without any attempt to alleviate it with style or class. A certain campy quality results from juxtaposition of the bargain basement production values with the slipping German accents of the cast, so that the movie plays like a sketch comedy where the jokes have been replaced by war crimes. If you think the worst thing a movie can be is boring, this certainly isn’t guilty of that.

And it must be said that as Ilsa, Dyanne Thorne is quite watchable. She definitely looks the part, having landed the role after she showed up to the audition dressed in her uniform from her day job as a chauffeur. She plays the character through enthusiastic teeth gnashing and grimacing, doing justice to her character’s dominating and sadistic qualities. (I understand the director Don Edmonds thought the script was the “worst piece of shit [he] ever read.” If she had a similar low opinion of the project, it doesn’t come off in her performance.) She figured heavily as a talking head in Fascism on a Thread, and from her interviews she comes off as a sweet lady who I’m glad got this moment in the spotlight. I understand she reprised the role in a few sequels (one of which was directed by Jess Franco) which mostly sound less morally objectionable than this one, and I can’t say I’ve ruled out seeing them at some point.

Didn't @Kayden Kross have an avatar from that back on RT once?

Sorry if this has been covered already, but have you heard of the streaming site Cultpix? They've got some Vinegar titles as well as Something Weird.

I came across it while trying to locate Toomorrow, Olivia Newton-John's other sci-fi musical.

But yeah, lots of old public domain horror plus some nudie movies.

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Thanks, will give that a look.

costs $6.66 a month, lol

You had Rock at “plus some nude movies”.

Hey, I read the whole post!


Only because the part about the nudies was at the end.

This was a movie we owned on VHS as I was growing up, so I'd seen it a number of times, even though I remembered very little little outside of a magnificently mustachioed Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot and the sweltering Egyptian atmosphere. I also wouldn't call myself a great Agatha Christie fan, although I did inherit some secondhand appreciation thanks to my dad. When I was volunteering at my high school library (in my province they make you do a certain number of hours of community service in order to graduate from high school; I think the idea is to instill in our youth an appreciation for public service, although in my less charitable moments I sympathized with the annoying Marxist in this movie and thought they should have just paid somebody to do these things), my dad insisted that I bring home all of the old Christie novels they were going to throw out. So I did end up reading a number of her books in my teenage years. (My favourite as I recall was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, for reasons that will be readily evident to anyone who's actually read it. I wouldn't dare spoil it myself.)

All of this is to say I felt a certain pang of nostalgia when I revisited this, even though (as I indicated above), I remembered next to nothing about the story and observe it playing out as if I was figuring it out along with Poirot, nodding along as he noticed clues and confided his observations to his friend played by David Niven. Yes, yes, I was thinking that too. Now, as a kid, my familiarity with the movie's stars probably didn't line up with most people of my generation, and was also the result of my dad's taste. Which is to say, I recognized Ustinov from Blackbeard's Ghost, Niven from The Guns of Navarone, and pretty much nobody else. I had no idea who people like Mia Farrow, Bette Davis, George Kennedy or Angela Lansbury were. Now I've grown to be easily dazzled by the presence of actual movie stars, so when the camera panned across a number of them in one of the introductory scenes, I felt a little awestruck, especially as this wasn't even half of the principal cast.

This was made a few years after Sidney Lumet's adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, which featured Albert Finney as Poirot. There might be some childhood nostalgia playing a role here, but I much prefer Ustinov in the role. For one, Finney looks like he had a mustache pasted over his lip, while Ustinov looks to have been born with one. But I think Finney had a certain gruffness in his portrayal, whereas Ustinov seems gentler, more gleeful and a little paternal. You can hear the disappointment in his voice when he tries to warn a jilted Mia Farrow away from the path she's chosen.

Or notice the discreet smiles he affords himself as he twirls his mustache or notices something that no one else does. Or how carefully he times his pauses, especially when he reveals the culprit. I am not a smart man and won't pretend I can solve these whodunits faster than their genius detective heroes, but I appreciate a flamboyant reveal as much as the next person, and like when the person doing the revealing relishes it as much as I do. This is a guy who loves his job.

This was directed by John Guillermin, of whose work I'd only seen his jaded, extremely '70s take on King Kong. (That movie co-starred Charles Grodin, who would have killed it in this movie. Imagine him as the sleazy lawyer played by George Kennedy and lament the missed opportunity.) Guillermin is likely not as good a director as Lumet, but he understands the assignment, and is able to juggle the extremely impressive cast and let them all have their moments. (The best bit of casting is likely Lois Chiles as the wealthy murder victim. I think back to watching the film version of The Great Gatsby during high school English and hearing my teacher wax rhapsodic about her aura of old money, a quality that serves her well in this role.) And it helps that the production design is impeccable, there's a Nino Rota score, and the movie is shot by the great Jack Cardiff, who captures the proceedings with effortlessly handsome cinematography and every once in a while produces a bit of that old Powell Pressburger lighting magic. And while the movie arguably runs a little long at almost two and a half hours, it's a nice excuse to hang out on this set with this colourful cast.

This thread has settled into a nice rhythm of watching abject garbage for weeks at a time, and then sweating profusely near the end of each month as I try to watch as many films about to leave the Criterion Channel as I can.

The on-location shoot also looks SO much better than the new version, too: ?t=rwlXTARYojdn-kxgPz4okQ&s=19

Yeesh! That looks like an SNL sketch.

"Live, from the pyramids, it's Death On The Nile!!!"

"Ladies and gentlemen..."


*shrugs*


"Nile."

Heh, I do love that record, as you can see here: http://web.archive.org/web/201205040...kened-shrines6