This is the fifth Nazisploitation film that I've watched after the arty THE DAMNED (1969) and THE NIGHT PORTER (1974), and the more exploitative NAZI LOVE CAMP 27 (1977) and THE RED NIGHTS OF THE GESTAPO (1977); it's reputed as the most infamous of the lot, but I was disappointed to discover that the version I ended up with was shorn of about 10 minutes of "sick footage" (which, reportedly, includes a woman being burned alive and a cannibalistic sequence where the prisoners serve as dinner for the Nazis)! That said, what's left in would still alarm and profoundly disturb most conservative viewers.
The film opens with an audacious voice-over of a Nazi war-crime trial as a man (later revealed to have been the Commandant of a concentration camp-cum-makeshift brothel for German soldiers returning from the front!) is making his way by car to a rendezvous with his lover (a Jewish girl he frequently victimized during the war); the meeting place, in fact, is the ruins of the camp itself - thus resembling most closely the central relationship within THE NIGHT PORTER. During the course of the film, we're treated to several instances of inventively depraved physical torture - most memorably, one where the heroine, hanging upside down, is hovered above a slew of hungry rodents and another in which a character is made to slide into a deadly lime pit. Characterization is particularly of interest here (though this element was even more successful in the afore-mentioned NAZI LOVE CAMP 27): the protagonist faces the myriad beatings and constant degradation with utmost stoicism - believing herself responsible for her family's capture, she has no desire to live (she's played by Daniela Poggi - who, years later, would become the conductor of a long-running TV show about the search for real-life missing persons and now, obviously, prefers to totally exclude the picture from her curriculum!); the Commandant is a closet masochist who's frequently willingly dominated by his female (if masculine-looking) warden; the latter, then, is a standard figure in this type of film - though she's curiously absent for much of the mid-section (returning, in fact, merely for her hasty comeuppance).
Events constantly switch from the present, as the two lovers wander about the place and then give in to their passion for one another, to the past (including the girl's liberating bed-romp with the sympathetic camp doctor, her eventual ascension to position of the Commandant's favorite - even turning down a plea of help from her former prison companion - and culminating in the 'loss' of her child because it has no place in the Nazi-ruled 'perfect' world of the future); incidentally, the abrupt downbeat ending is predictable virtually from the get-go. Despite featuring a haunting theme, augmented by half-spoken German lyrics, I reiterate that the end product (pompously renamed CALIGULA REINCARNATED AS Hitler in some quarters!) is inferior to NAZI LOVE CAMP 27 - or, for that matter, the director's other work that I've come across. Incidentally, I'll be checking out presently another notorious example of the Nazisploitation genre i.e. Tinto Brass' SALON KITTY (1976)
The film opens with an audacious voice-over of a Nazi war-crime trial as a man (later revealed to have been the Commandant of a concentration camp-cum-makeshift brothel for German soldiers returning from the front!) is making his way by car to a rendezvous with his lover (a Jewish girl he frequently victimized during the war); the meeting place, in fact, is the ruins of the camp itself - thus resembling most closely the central relationship within THE NIGHT PORTER. During the course of the film, we're treated to several instances of inventively depraved physical torture - most memorably, one where the heroine, hanging upside down, is hovered above a slew of hungry rodents and another in which a character is made to slide into a deadly lime pit. Characterization is particularly of interest here (though this element was even more successful in the afore-mentioned NAZI LOVE CAMP 27): the protagonist faces the myriad beatings and constant degradation with utmost stoicism - believing herself responsible for her family's capture, she has no desire to live (she's played by Daniela Poggi - who, years later, would become the conductor of a long-running TV show about the search for real-life missing persons and now, obviously, prefers to totally exclude the picture from her curriculum!); the Commandant is a closet masochist who's frequently willingly dominated by his female (if masculine-looking) warden; the latter, then, is a standard figure in this type of film - though she's curiously absent for much of the mid-section (returning, in fact, merely for her hasty comeuppance).
Events constantly switch from the present, as the two lovers wander about the place and then give in to their passion for one another, to the past (including the girl's liberating bed-romp with the sympathetic camp doctor, her eventual ascension to position of the Commandant's favorite - even turning down a plea of help from her former prison companion - and culminating in the 'loss' of her child because it has no place in the Nazi-ruled 'perfect' world of the future); incidentally, the abrupt downbeat ending is predictable virtually from the get-go. Despite featuring a haunting theme, augmented by half-spoken German lyrics, I reiterate that the end product (pompously renamed CALIGULA REINCARNATED AS Hitler in some quarters!) is inferior to NAZI LOVE CAMP 27 - or, for that matter, the director's other work that I've come across. Incidentally, I'll be checking out presently another notorious example of the Nazisploitation genre i.e. Tinto Brass' SALON KITTY (1976)