Customer Reviews

Ilsa - She Wolf of the SS

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

"Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS" is perhaps one of the better known exploitation films made in the last thirty years. The picture, directed by Don Edmonds and starring Dyanne Thorne in the titular role, is also one of the most disturbing. Oddly enough, I found this movie even more sickening the second time around. The first time I watched Ilsa do her stuff was on an old VHS tape about five years ago, and I didn't think the film was as horrific as many viewers made it out to be. Usually, the disgust factor works the other way around: the first viewing is the worst with the shock value wearing away on subsequent viewings. I should probably question the value of even watching "Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS" more than once, but I wanted to see what the picture looked like with a snappy new transfer to DVD. Moreover, I wanted to listen to the commentary track with Edmonds, Thorne, and producer David Friedman of "Blood Feast" fame (billed here as Herman Traeger). I wasn't disappointed; the picture quality of "Ilsa" is stunning for such a low budget piece of trash. The commentary track too makes this disc a must have for lovers of schlock cinema. Just don't pop this one in the DVD player when the relatives show up or as a substitute for taking your gal out on the town.

Set in the waning days of the Second World War, "Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS" takes place in a special medical camp where the brutal camp commander Ilsa (Dyanne Thorne) and her busty minions wreak havoc on a bevy of female prisoners. There are a few guys around too, mostly to act as boy toys for Ilsa's ravenous appetites. Ilsa's supposed to be conducting experiments on helpless prisoners that will benefit the German military effort, but she's got quite the disturbing side project going on as well. According to the She-Wolf, women possess certain biological characteristics that make them more resistant to pain then men. You can almost guess what happens next. Ilsa sets aside a hidden little laboratory in the basement of her office to test out her personal theories while the approved experiments take place in another building. Both sets of trials are excruciating to watch. The Germans test the effects of high pressure, boiling temperatures, and diseases on the female inmates of the prison. Down in the basement, Ilsa and her two blonde goons strip down to the waist in order to administer severe beatings to selected troublemakers. There's a lot more I could detail, but believe it or not these are the least offensive scenes in the movie. "Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS" is sick, sick stuff.

A sort of hope fills the prisoners' hearts when Wolfe (George Knoph) enters the camp. The new inmate has a "special ability" that allows him to find a way into the frosty heart of the buxom camp commander. Behind the scenes, the prisoners plot to escape from the prison any way they can. It won't be easy, not when one faces Ilsa, her she-wolfettes, her male assistant, a pack of sadistic guards, and machine gun towers. In the meantime, the degradations continue unabated. Ilsa whips up a few special treats for a visiting general (Wolfgang Roehm) that truly turn the stomach as Wolfe, Mario (Tony Mumolo), and Kala (Nicolle Riddell) carefully map out there plan. Will the prisoners escape? Will Ilsa and her handmaidens receive their just desserts? Will the Allies arrive at the camp before everyone perishes at the hands of the Germans? Will tough chick Anna (Maria Marx) withstand Ilsa's experiments and thus prove the commander's theory? Will you be able to keep your lunch down during the hour and a half it takes to watch the movie? These questions, and many others, will find resolution by the time the final credits roll.

What won't find resolution is your utter disgust with the film. A gallon of mouthwash won't remove the bad taste this movie leaves behind in your mouth. I found myself inadvertently comparing Edmond's picture with "Schindler's List," another film dealing with German atrocities during the Second World War. Truth be told, "List" is much more harrowing in its depictions of the concentration camps and the horrible living conditions of those people enslaved by the Germans. What sets "Ilsa" apart, what makes it even worse than "Schindler's List," is that it's all done for cheap, value neutral kicks. Why else play up endless scenes of nudity in a movie about war crimes? Despite Thorne's amazingly campy performance, "Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS" is a ghastly film that should repulse more than it exhilarates. Even more disturbing is the admission on the commentary track that the movie sets come from the television show "Hogan's Heroes." You won't see LeBeau, Carter, Sergeant Schultz, or Colonel Klink in this movie! If you find anything remotely exhilarating about this picture, you've been falling behind on your electroshock therapy treatments again.

Dyanne Thorne does pull off her role with ease, coming across as a heartless, cold monster without an ounce of remorse in her bones. It's quite the contrast to listen to the commentary track and realize the actress seems like an intelligent, sunny personality with a good sense of humor. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your view), the commentary track, a trailer, and a few biographies are the only extras on the disc. If you feel up to it, after you watch Ilsa ham it up as a German camp commander, you can watch her in three other films reprising the character-with slight modifications-in the Middle East and in Siberia. These are classic movies, for sure, but they're upsetting ones as well.

This is the first and best of the four "Ilsa" films featuring the sensational Dyanne Thorne, who plays the sadistic head doctor in a Nazi death-camp that specializes in cruel experiments on nude women. Sounds too tasteless to be bearable? Well, actually no. If you can retain your sense of humour, you can find this film thoroughly enjoyable. It's mainly down to the hilarious camp acting of Thorn in the title role, whether she is strutting around the camp, spitting insults in a thick hammy accent at all the inmates, or seducing male prisoners in her boudoir using her famous chest to maximum effect. Still, the various scenes of torture are surprisingly convincing, and very realistic, especially those carried out by Ilsa in her secret torture chamber on a prize female subject, so this is definitely not a film for the squeamish. Theres even room for suspense during the climax when Ilsa's cruel reign is finally overturned. Overall, an enjoyable romp for people who have seen everything the mainstream has to offer. But due to such scenes as fingernail pulling, torture by electrified dildo and castration, prepare your friends before you show it to any of them!

Ilsa-She Wolf of The SS is by far one of the greatest sleaze flicks I have ever seen. It is damn near perfect. This movie has everything you would want in a sleaze/horror movie: Graphic Violence (and i do mean graphic), plenty of nudity, un-intentional comedy, and some extras on the dvd to boot. If you are looking for some of the most wicked depictions of torture ever seen on film, well here ya go. This is an extremely entertaining film in many different ways.

First of all, this is a well made film. (for the budget it had) And the acting isn't too bad. The violent scenes are outrageous and extremely entertaining. The transfer was even pretty good for such an old and low budget film.

The reviewers who gave this movie bad reviews clearly are not fans of this genre of movies. Don't get me wrong...if you are not looking for plenty of violence don't buy this one, but if you are a fan of this genre, then this is a buy or die situation. Trust me, you will not be disappointed.

Inlcuding some decent commentary by Dyanne Thorne, trailers and a cast bio, this one is a keeper. Best of the series. (although the other ilsas are pretty good too, but this one's the gem)

Ah, now here's a movie. Ilsa, She-Wolf of th SS. A crazy, exploitiong, horror and blood filled movie depicting a Nazi Concentration Camp and it's Commandant, Ilsa.

The camp has it's share of inmates both male and female. The men have two functions, manual labor and sexually gratifying Ilsa. Of course if you fail to satisfy Ilsa, you will never again be with another woman as she and her two hot blond nurses turn you into a `half-man' with a snip of the steel. Women serve another purpose, medical experiments. Ilsa is a doctor of sorts trying to prove to the Third Reich Command that women are superior to men. They can withstand more pain which makes them more saveage killers.

Among the prisoners are two freaks, one male, one female. The male is an American (of all things) who was studying in Germany's University when the war began. He can control his body until Ilsa (and all her nurses) are satisfied. Because of this his manhood is spared and he becomes a nightly visitor to Ilsa's private quarters.

The woman can withstand any pain the Nazi's can dream up. And they can come up with some very perverted, painful, and unusual techniques, most of them involving private and sensitive areas.

Yes you can plainly see that this was filmed on the location of Hogan's Heros. Also look for the lesbian guard who likes to hang out with the soldiers and guards. She is popular among the guards by providing female prisoners. Then there is the fat male doctor who seems to have TB or something.

Well as always, the prisoners revolt and a decent gunfight ensues. It escalates until the regular German army comes in and blows the place to hell. All the Nazi's are killed, and poor Ilsa ends up tied naked to a bed and has her head blown off by a Nazi officer. That is so that the coming Americans will never know what happened.

Good points:

Ilsa is HOT, this chick has a killer bod and huge boobs. She even turns on her commanding officer who orders her to pee on him.

Ilsa's nurses are both blond and beautiful. Watch them whip two prisoners while they are topless. They beat their prisoners until they can't lift their arms.

The female prisoners are a hit or miss. Some are hot, some are cute, some are butt ugly.

Bad Points:

Watched this movie twenty times. Never found one.

Yes, you have found the infamous Ilsa movie, complete with castration for male prisoners who just can't cut the mustard and bring the camp commandant (Ilsa) to the Screaming O and "selection" of the most "fit" female prisoners. All manner of torture, degredation, humiliation and nudity are included in this film. My wife raised some hell after she saw that I had bought this 1970's exploitation classic, she was expecting another Schindlers List when I told her the movie was about a WW2 prison camp! Dyanne Thorne (Ilsa) struts around the camp in nice tight garments, riding crop in hand ready to dish out punishment for the slightest infraction, and she is good at it. Filmed on the former set of Hogan's Heros the TV show, there are no Col. Klinck or Sgt. Schultz in this movie, only nasty predators and frightened victims. Sweet innocent young girls forced to strip for inspection and punishment...and there is plenty of punishment. The carnage and torture just keeps escalating until of course the tables are turned and Ilsa receives her richly deserved fate. Despite all the gore if you can sit and watch this without cracking up I'd be suprised, it's so disgusting that it is funny. Dyanne Thorne is real easy on the eyes and does a great job. I love all the cheesy fake German accents. Your wife might get pissed too but this film is just to good to pass by, and there is no way you'll find it at Blockbuster. Buy it before it vanishes again.

ILSA makes it to DVD! And what a great presentation it is! The film has never looked better, clean, sharp, colorful, letterboxed and completely uncut (the full 96 minute version - previously only available on VHS from long-gone Videatrics). The film looks 100 times better than any of the previous VHS versions as well. Yes, it is a truly sick and sleazy movie and definitely not for all tastes, but you can't deny it's well-made and effective. Dyanne Thorne is one incredible villainess and the many torture scenes will satiate any jaded sleaze-horror viewer. The DVD also features the original theatrical trailer and has a full-length commentary track featuring director Edmonds, producer Friedman, Dyanne Thorne and some annoying humorist guy who moderates. Thorne is witty, friendly and smart --- her Ilsa persona is completely opposite. This DVD must have the most gruesome and vile menu screens ever on a DVD. Go Anchor Bay!

Ilsa's a movie that you kinda feel guilty enjoying(a guilty pleasure if I ever saw one). I mean, it's in such extremely bad taste to take the atrocities of the third reich and make it into a sleazy sex and violence flick. So, yeah I feel kinda bad that I like this film. It's kinda like laughing at a racist joke when you're not racist. Ilsa's plotless plot is pretty much Ilsa running a smaller scale Auschwitz that caters to torturing women and sleeping with/castrating men. A new male arrival at the camp turns out to be just the superman Ilsa's been looking for and she gets taken with him as everyone else plans their Great Escape. That's the plot. The running time is padded with numerous torture and softcore sex scenes, sometimes a mix of the two. I didn't know that female SS officers whipped people while topless. I might have to get thrown into a camp like Ilsa's. Dyanne Thorne is not the most beautiful woman in the world, but she pushes the sexy needle right into the red. She can be my She Wolf any day. A real high point to this dvd is the commentary. It's very funny. The makers of this film(including Thorne) realize the kind of film they've made and have no problems heckling it, very funny. They do get a little sidetracked from the action onscreen(I would have liked to hear Thorne's take on some of the scenes if you know what I mean), but do manage to cover almost everything you want to know about the making of the film. It won't hurt to check this out if you're curious. I wouldn't pay too much attention to one star reviews, coz anyone who knows the film's title, looks at the cover and reads the back of the box knows what to expect-And it's not Schindler's List!! As a matter of fact I'm puzzled as to what the one star reviewers were expecting from a film called Ilsa: She Wolf Of The SS, and why they even watched it if they were already offended by the subject matter. Oh, well, I don't claim to know it all. I do know, however, that you should check out Ilsa just to say you saw it.

I think too many people gave this movie a serious review, I mean come on, its ILSA, SHE WOLF OF THE SS. The title just smacks of tastelessness. A softcore porn/exploitation film set in a Nazi camp, lets meet our heroes: There is of course the She Wolf, Ilsa who when not torturing various women and castrating male prisoners that fail to satisfy her, struts around in her stylin nazi boots barking with a fake German accent. She predictably falls for this American (Wolfe) because he can hold off orgasm indefinitely and has blond hair. Then there is Anna, a rebellious brunette who refuses to have her spirit broken by Ilsa. Ilsa spends a lot of time torturing Anna and screwing the American. When not having sex with Ilsa Wolfe is plotting the escape of the prisoners with Mario who is this Italian guy that seems like he was teleported in from a grade B romance film. Mario wears the same stoic expression throughout the movie, even as he dies at the end.
There are other characters than this, I just don't care about them.
I appreciate some of the loving details in this movie, like the fake blood that looks like red paint, random shots that have a picture of Hitler in the background and of course the music. When it doesn't sound like a high school band did the soundtrack they pasted in bits of real German music including little kids singing at the end. Oh and lets not forget the death/torture scenes, some are quite inventive thought not as inventive as say...Cube Zero! Though she is over forty the busty Ilsa manages to exude a kind of sadistic sexiness which makes the character even funnier. Somehow this movie wasn't that bad to me, I mean bad taste yes, low budget yes, but it is a good film for what it is. (whatever that may be) On one Listmania this movie was under "TRASH: You will learn to eat garbage like a dog and poop shiny lumps of gold" If you are stupid enough to drop acid while watching this you might do just that.
I spent most of my time watching it laughing like a hyena and eating hamburger helper. Shame on you some would say, for laughing at nazi war crimes! my answer to that would be why cant we treat a subject as serious as this with humor (albeit tasteless) without it I think we would give the nazis more dignity than they deserve.

This film takes place in a Nazi concentration camp dedicated to pseudo medical experimentation on its prisoners. Ilsa, the commandant is portrayed in ruthless fashion by the stunning Dyanne Thorne. The protuberant image of Thorne is strikingly juxtaposed between her stunning blonde hair and the black Nazi uniform and regalia that adorn her person. Thorne designs and carries out the most excruciatingly painful and torturous experiments on her helpless victims for the sheer whimsy of impressing Nazi ideology and the gratification of her own views on the endurance of the female of the species. The buxom beauty and haughtiness of the barbarous Thorne perversely fixates the viewer as she doles out tortures in nonchalant and indifferent fashion. Thorne is the essence of cruelty for cruelty's sake. Thorne is the screen's incarnation of pure evil. I can think of no other film that is as disturbing as this one. The explicit sadism portrayed in this film may or may not have actually occurred as depicted. But unthinkable sadism, torture, cruelty and debauchery did actually occur in Nazi camps. The power of this film is that it shocks the viewer. It puts the viewer in the place of the helpless victim. And the viewer does feel helpless. The viewer gets the idea of what it may have been like to be subjugated twenty-four a day to unspeakable fears and horrors. What form of corporal suffering and humiliation for the mere amusement and pleasure of these Nazi captors is next? This is an unbelievably difficult film to watch because the brutality depicted is extremely graphic. After viewing this film I was shocked and I had a feeling of just how brutal the Nazis actually were. I wonder if producer David F. Friedman did not have this in mind when this film was being shot. Brutal, the Nazis were unbelievably brutal and intentionally or not this film depicts this.

The exploitation film using Nazi Germany as a framework had its roots in The Night Porter, Love Camp 7, and then Salon Kitty, but Ilsa, She Wolf Of The SS, topped them all in sheer blood and brutality. So when producer Herman Traeger's onscreen message that the events of the movie were based on fact, the medical experiments in camps--(q.v. William L. Shirer's The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich) is concluded with "We dedicate this film with the hope that these horrors will never happen again", I have to raise an eyebrow of skepticism. With the new film rating system six years old at the time this film was released, what's the purpose of this movie if not to show scenes of naked women being tortured in the most horrific way?

When Ilsa, the powerful, well-built, towering blonde commandant of Medical Camp 9, tells the women prisoners, that this isn't Dachau or the notorious women's prison Ravensbruck, well, that's true enough, but the following belies the pseudo-science the Nazis conducted on millions of prisoners. "Your stay will be short but you will be a help to the Reich. That is your destiny." Ilsa is hard-pressed to prove her theory that women can withstand pain by torture more than men. One of the prisoners, a woman named Anna, becomes her selection. Her gradual deterioration is directly proportionate to Ilsa's obsessiveness.

Of the prisoners, the men are workers, the women are patients, of which a few are sent to the brothel to service the soldiers. As for the rest, they are subjected to medical experiments, such as Kala, whose face is horrible to watch.

One of the newly arriving workers, Wolfe, a blond American, may be the commandant's Achilles heel, as he is able to satisfy the insatiable Ilsa, who has castrated previous others who haven't, including Mario, a prisoner Wolfe befriends who kind of resembles Dustin Hoffman. Together, they team up with the girls to break out of the camp at the right moment, as Wolfe is expecting the Allies to close in anytime soon.

As stated in the intro, many of the people were composites of actual people. Ilsa, for instance, was partially based on Frau Ilse Koch, the wife of the commandant of Buchenwald, in terms of name (Ilse/Ilsa) and her having absolute power of life and death over everyone. There's also a lot of Dr. Sigmund Rascher at Dachau, where he conducted decompression chamber experiments as seen at one point in the movie. BTW, the victim in there is unbilled but is played by Uschi Digard, who made many underground exploitation flicks in the 1960's.

And this rivals Dead Alive and Terror Firmer in sheer bloodiness, the difference being the brutality and torture. Many of the experiments are shown and are pretty gruesome to watch, so please don't eat anything before you watch this. The plenitude of full nudity is tame compared to what goes on. Ilsa is pretty callous too. When asked why she doesn't use anesthesia on a victim, she says, "Does one give caviar to guinea pigs?"

This was the first of four Ilsa films, the other ones being The Wicked Warden, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, and Tigress of Siberia, of which Dyanne Thorne played all four Ilsas. This pretty much fits the definition of what the British call a video nasty.