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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Banned in the U.K., June 5, 2006
And censorship is sometimes the best thing that can happen to a movie. Case in point SS HELL CAMP, a `video nasty' that contained scenes of such perversity it moved a nation to impose sanctions to protect its citizens from its baleful influence. And that's just the stuff that'll get chumps like me to line up around the block to take a gander.
Well, peek away, and try your best to stay awake. The Germans are occupying a town, a band of partisans are blowing up bridges, and the bad guys are rounding up the wimmen folk for interrogation purposes. The chief Nazi doctor on-site is a gorgeous brunette with a dominating air and a caged, half-human, sex maniac in the cellar. To make them talk, the women are either sadistically - and graphically - tortured (a bad thing,) or they're thrown naked in the cage with the neanderthal Casanova (a very bad thing.)
More than half this movie, the half that's spent with the intrepid band of partisans in the field, is impossibly boring and can't be watched without mashing the fast-forward button. The acting is atrocious and the scenes in the field run on forever. Besides, the whole point of the movie is to linger over the shoulder of the beautiful and twisted Nazi doctor.
I'm sorry, this movie is supposed to shock and disgust, but it is done so poorly it's impossible to take it even half-seriously. Its worse scene involves a number of women undergoing a number of tortures. One woman, strapped to a table, is supposed to have been cut open, her entrails exposed and gnawed on by rats. Supposed to have been, but the stage blood was gruel thin, you could see her intact stomach underneath it, and the red sawdust on top failed to convince as innards. Plus, the `rats' on her stomach were a couple of overweight guinea pigs, who scampered away as quick as their pudgy little legs could take them. I gave this movie two stars for the unintentional laughs it provided. SS HELL CAMP is a nasty little exploitation movie, although I'd call it silly rather than shocking, and pretty poorly made.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
By far, the absolute best Nazi Sexploitation movie, March 27, 2005
Sure the torture scenes are, in a way, grisly, but the overwhelming technical incompetence makes this movie a diamond in the rough. This movie is full of fun. Catchy dubbed dialogue: "The light of goodness shines, shining as it does with so much charity on men of good faith"; "Trust God, he's the best!"; and "As for what Jesus taught, I'm not too bright." SS Hellcamp is second only to Craven's Shocker for cast and equipment shadows; viz., a full ten seconds with the complete shadow of both camera and cameraman on a giant orange swastika. Sal Boris is unforgettable as the Nazi Brute/Superman: what is intended as shocking rape comes off as poorly choreographed nude wrestling; laughter is the natural reaction to the various close-ups of Sal's primate/brute face. Another example of this film's incompetence is the awkward integration of washed-out prints of war stock footage into original "war footage" made for the movie. At one point the camera pans across a postcard to show that the Nazis had amassed their forces on the front line. And don't forget about the bomber plane on a string! This film makes Plan 9 seem professional.
Moreover, this film continues the beloved pants-sex tradition of other Nazi turds such as Love Camp 7. Compare the sheer joy of SS Hellcamp with the abject misery of, say, Last Orgy of the Third Reich. Watching the two side-by-side reveals the hidden joys and virtues of the Hellcamp. I first saw SS Hellcamp with Disco Godfather: the perfect bad movie double feature!
(Another movie that goes great with Hellcamp is K Gordon Murray's notorious Mexican version of Puss 'N Boots.)
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Difficult to imagine how this could have been any worse., January 16, 2006
Let me preface this by saying that I bought this film fully aware of the fact that it would be a horrible exercise in exploitation. I harbored no illusions that led me to believe that I was possibly buying a forgotten Bergman masterpiece or a classic John Ford western. I enjoy a good bad movie every now and then, so I figured that this had to be one of the best of the worst. Well, I was half right.
To refer to "SS Hell Camp" as "a" movie is somewhat misleading. In actuality, "SS Hell Camp" is two different movies that happen to be on the same DVD and through an accident of editing, have become inexplicably intertwined in one package. One movie is about a group of Italian partisan rebels in the German-occupied Republic of Salo in the last days of World War II. They sabotage German railroad shipments and work to actively resist the Waffen SS and Wehrmacht detachments in the area. The other movie is about a sadistic bisexual nymphomaniac named Dr. Ellen Kratsch who runs a sexual torture dungeon under the guise of "science." Experiments include the genetic engineering of a bestial naked Italian man with a unibrow who violently has his way with captured females. With a name like "SS Hell Camp," which of these two movies do you want to see?
Either way, it's more of the former than the latter, and is therefore quite slow-moving and only occasionally funny. (My definition of "funny" being "unintentionally hilarious.") There's nothing particularly 'graphic' here other than female nudity and fake blood (neither of which is done very well). The highlight of this movie is a scene in which the country priest remarks "put your trust in the Lord: he's the best!" For a movie that bills itself as being unspeakably evil and extreme, that's not a very good sign. In a movie as bad as this one, it's difficult to know who to root for. The acting is so bad among the partisans that I frequently found myself hoping that Dr. Kratsch would capture them and kill them and then a stray bomb would destroy the dungeon, killing Dr. Kratsch and her underlings. That way, everyone would be wiped out. Even still, I'm not sure I'd have gotten any satisfaction from this movie beyond the feeling of finality that comes with knowing everyone is dead.
If you're looking for a good non-prescription sleep aid, this movie will do wonders for you. If, on the other hand, you're looking for something that's so-bad-it's-good owing to its tastelessness, violence, and sexual perversion, you're out of luck here.
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