8. Nazisploitation
The Nasty Nazi or Nazisploitation genre is an acquired taste. Would I recommend watching them? Only if you have a very broad mind and are not easily offended. Again, a mainly Italian affair, Nazisploitation was sparked off by the success of notorious Nazi themed film - The Night Porter. The kinky relationship at the heart of the Night Porter, and the scenes of brutality and degradation in the death camps, gave Italian film makers great inspiration in how to craft thoroughly offensive, Nazi concentration camp-based, pieces of filth. I should add here that the influence of the Canadian produced Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS was immense. Most Italian Nazisploitation films feature wicked female wardens. Nazisploitation is the most abhorrent sub genre of cult films. If you can suspend your initial disgust that these films are exploiting the Holocaust for thrills, you can begin to look at them objectively and assess them with a frank eye. Most of them are very poorly made and laughable - SS Experiment Camp has recently been given a certificate from the BBFC, probably because they finally realised it is completely inane - so much so, that it is past being offensive. The Beast in Heat is another Nazisploitation film that is hard to take seriously, although it was one of the most sought after Video Nasties. It appears to consist of two movies that have been spliced together. One of them is a really boring combat film with partisan fighters. The other is concerned with the titular 'Beast' - a creation of an icy cool Nazi female commander. The main action in the film consists of women being fed to the Beast for him to rape to death. Yes you read that right. The icy cool Nazi gets her comeuppance when at the end of the film, she is turfed into the cage the Beast is kept in for a little bit of 'jiggy' with her creation. On the other side of the Nazisploitation spectrum, we have The Gestapo's Last Orgy which is supremely distasteful and downright offensive in its portrayal of Jews and the horrors they go through in the film. Lise Cohen will not speak a word or react to anything - including extreme torture - because she believes she is responsible for the death of her family. When she finds out from the camp doctor that she isn't - she inexplicably starts an affair with the camp commander - wearing a girdle of scalped inmates' hair and generally behaving like a Jezebel. Along the way, we are treated to 'Jewish baby stew', a Jewish woman flambéed in brandy, constant smears on the reputation of the Jews and non stop violence against Jews. So The Gestapo's Last Orgy is really scraping the Nazisploitation barrel and it is made all the worse by its relatively high production values. Thankfully, the Nazisploitation cycle ended nearly as soon as it was started. Such films would have disappeared into obscurity in the wasteland of cinema had it not been for the Daily Mail's vigorous Video Nasties campaign in which they paraded the lurid VHS rental cover of SS Experiment Camp - thus making thousands of people wanting to watch it because it was banned. SS Experiment Camp became a cult object along with a bunch of other Nazisploitation titles - Love Camp 7, The Beast in Heat being among them.