I’ve been trying to construct a list of every Horror/thriller/exploitation and generally off the wall film I’ve ever seen on IMDb, complete with rankings. So far this is what I’ve come up with:
Slightly over 200 films…damn, what an amateur I am.
Damn.
Posted in Uncategorized on April 13, 2009 by gorenographyBeen a while since I’ve been here!
I haven’t forgotten it, though. Just haven’t really felt like posting. I’ve seen a good number of films in the absence, though…a few pleasant suprises, like Bay of Blood, and a good number of disappointments, as well, like Captivity and Midnight Meat Train.
I’ll have to get off my lazy ass one of these days.
A L’Interieur (2007)
Posted in Film reviews with tags Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, beatrice dalle, the french on February 23, 2009 by gorenography
I’m a guy. There are certain things I like about that fact (I can write my name in urine in a snowbank), and certain things I don’t like about that fact (curse you, refractory period!) One thing I definitely don’t envy the opposite sex for, however, is pregnancy. It looks very uncomfortable to me, and getting beaten/stabbed/mutilated while pregnant looks even more uncomfortable, making Inside a very, er, “uncomfortable” viewing experience.
The plot of Inside is very simple. A pregnant woman named Sarah (Alysson Paradis) gets involved in a car accident a few months into her pregnancy, a crash that kills the father of her unborn child. This is briefly shown in the beginning of the film. The film then moves to one day before her due date. She’s still a huge (both figuratively and literally) grumpasauros rex, takes out her anxiety on her mother (Nathalie Roussel) and employer (Francois-Regis Marchasson), and in general is just a Debbie Downer. It’s like, fuck, we get it, the father of your unborn child is dead, move on with your life for chrissake. Anyway, she goes home for the night, and that’s when the shit starts hitting the fan in a big, BIG way. A mysterious woman (the incredible Beatrice Dalle) invades her home with some very nasty intentions for her baby, and she doesn’t care who she has to eviscerate to get it, including Sarah’s friends and a few incredibly inept cops.
There are very few movies that actually manage to shock me. However, this one did, because I had no idea this film was as extreme as it is. Rest assured: this is a brutal film. In fact, it’s probably the most brutal “mainstream” Horror film I’ve ever seen, or at least one of them. It makes Frontiere(s) look like a movie you’d show at a 6-year old’s birthday party…it makes any fucking SAW film look like something they’d show on Nickelodeon at one in the afternoon. The gore is breathtaking, probably some of the best that I’ve ever seen in a film; definitely believe the hype, as far as the gore in concerned. Of course, the blood and violence isn’t the only good thing in this film…no, the makers of this film are actually competant filmmakers, and this film has some interesting shots and cinematography (almost the entire film is set in one dimly lit house). If these guys were actually making H2, as rumor had it at one point, I might actually have considered watching it when it came out. In any case, I’ll definitely be keeping a close eye on any future work they do.
This is also one of the few films I’ve seen that actually is somewhat scary, due mostly to the presence of one Beatrice Dalle, who’s officially my favorite Horror heroine…the woman screeches like a wounded harpy, chainsmokes, is crazier than a shithouse rat and has insane combat skills! She’s my dream woman!
That’s not to say that everything about this film is great, though. There’s one ridiculous CGI baby that they keep cutting to. Some of the decisions the characters made in the film were beyond stupid. In fact, some of them are so braindead that it screams “HORROR FILM!”, which in my opinion is never a good thing. I’m not entirely sure what to make of the ending…it’s one of those endings that just begs for moronic interpretations, which have been provided for in ample supply. The “twist” involved could be seen from a mile away.
The pros definitely outweigh the few cons as far as this film goes, though. In fact, it’s one of my new favorite Horror films. The only bad part of my viewing experience was the fact that I put it on at a party and there was a group of about thirty people directly behind me playing beer pong and acting like assholes. It was funny hearing all of the “WHAT THE FUCK?!”s coming out of them as the movie went along, though. 
PS: Don’t watch this film if you’re under the influence and/or afraid of scissors.
Gore rating: 10/10
Overall rating: 9/10
Ebola Syndrome (1996)
Posted in Film reviews with tags anthony wong, cannibalism, CAT3, exploitation, herman yau on February 4, 2009 by gorenography
If you’ve ever seen The Untold Story, you already know about the greatness that is the Wong-Yau duo. No one can deliver stories involving bloody murder, rape, cannibalism and Chinese food better than they can. I only saw The Untold Story a few months ago, and it’s probably one of the sickest films I’ve ever seen, combining comedy and black humor along with gritty, bloody violence (which seems to be a classic formula for many Asian extreme/exploitation films). Perhaps nothing was better in the film than Anthony Wong himself, who won a Hong Kong film award in the Best Actor category for his portrayal of the psychotic chef Wong. He really nailed the crazy, raving lunatic role, almost scarily so.
Anyway, when most discussions of The Untold Story come up, this film is usually mentioned. In it, Wong plays another asshole, this one named Kai. Kai is a worker who is very, very underappreciated, and he attempts to assuage his pain by having sex with his boss’s wife. The boss (Fui-On Shing) walks in on them one day while they’re getting it on and, enraged, kicks Kai’s ass, before demanding that Kai cut off his cock. Kai instead decides to stab his boss and his boss’s friend to death with the scissors, however, before cutting out his wife’s tongue. He almost sets the boss’s daughter on fire, but ultimately doesn’t, and he flees to South Africa.
Once in South Africa, he gets work at a Chinese restaraunt (nice nod to The Untold Story here). The white South Africans price-gouge their meat, so Kai and his boss (Meng Lo) go into the countryside in order to buy cheaper beef from an African tribe. The tribe they visit is severely afflicted with the Ebola virus, and many dead and dying Africans lie scattered around as they barter for the meat. After leaving, their car breaks down, and Kai wanders off, coming across an African woman dying of Ebola. Kai can’t seem to help himself, and proceeds to rape her as she goes through death spasms and vomits mucus into his face. When she doesn’t respond to his command to “Let go of my dick!”, he smashes her head in with a rock and leaves. Little does he know that he has just contracted EBOLA!
But, as fate would have it, he is one of the one in ten million people who’s immune system successfully fights off the Ebola virus, although he continues to carry it. After taking so much shit from his boss’s wife, he decides to rape her. His boss walks in on the rape and attacks Kai, despite threats from Kai that he will rape the boss as well if he intervenes, LOL. Kai stabs his boss in the face and smashes his head into a pulp between a door, before raping his wife a bit more, sucking her eyeball out of her skull and beating her to death with a table. Her cousin suffers the same fate. Then he uses their bodies for, er, “commercial gain”, in another nod to The Untold Story.
On the run again, he flees back to Hong Kong, where he infects a couple of hookers with the Ebola virus. The police are unto his ass this time, though, and time is running out for our hero. When Kai goes to visit his former wife and daughter, the police close in, and in the climactic conclusion runs through the streets ranting “EBOLA! EBOLA!” and spitting blood in random people’s faces, before being set on fire. The film ends with a nice little “oh-it’s-not-over-yet” shot that leaves open the possibility that the Ebola menace is far from over…
Ebola Syndrome is quite the entertaining CAT3 feature. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone other than extreme/underground film fans, though, as it’s quite sick in parts. There’s rape, dismemberment, sex with inanimate objects, a gruesome autopsy scene, ebola, and tons and tons of blood n’ gore. However, if you like crazy, offbeat films and have a sick sense of humor, you could do a lot worse than this film. Anthony Wong, who I was first acquainted with as Johnny in Hardboiled, once again plays a total douche nozzle, and no one plays the douche nozzle role quite as well as he can…he’s probably one of my all-time favorite exploitation film performers. I thought that the film was quite similar in a number of ways to The Untold Story: the direction, the funny (often unintentionally so) dialogue, and the sick gore were all reminiscent of Yau’s former masterwork, which was supposedly based on a true story.
Anyway, I highly recommend this is you haven’t seen it already.
Gore rating: 6/10
Overall rating: 8/10
The Bizarre Ones (1969)
Posted in Film reviews with tags black and white, bondage, sexploitation, weird shit on January 16, 2009 by gorenography
(Old review)
The Bizarre Ones (not to be confused with the much superior The Exotic Ones) is an obscure black and white sexploitation flick from the late sixties, involving a self-described swinger named Diedre. The plot involves Diedre picking up a hitch hiker, restraining him with handcuffs, and bringing him to a house nearby where some, well, “bizarre” events are taking place, including a mostly naked woman who is tied down and tormented with candles, hammock bondage, and a weird sex machine operated by her fellow swingers. The hitch hiker finds himself involved in this vanilla S&M weirdness. Later on, two of Diedre’s friends become angry with her after finding her doing something with the female prisoner (I saw this film a while ago, and don’t remember exactly what made them angry, if anything significant). They tie her to the roof of the car, and drive down to a river. It’s around this time that the hitch hiker decides to take matters into his own hands, which leads to the particularly weird ending, which you’re going to have to see for yourself. I will say that it involves drinking out of a river and bleeding.
I was given a secondhand copy of this on VHS produced by Something Weird video, who I believe are the only ones currently peddling this obscure piece of sleaze anymore. Honestly, the film itself wasn’t that interesting, but the movie was made a bit better by the fact that there was a lot of truly awful “grindhouse” type trailers tacked unto the end of the film. Thank you, SWV, for rescuing these films from the collective memory hole, as well as providing the masses with timeless classics like Blood Freak, Love Camp 7 and Olga’s Girls.
UPDATE: It appears that SWV has actually put this film to DVD, strangely enough. Interesting trivia: the director of this film would later go on to direct a film called Enema Bondage. Sounds like a must see.
Gore rating: 1/10
Overall rating: 4.25/10
Frontiers (2007)
Posted in Film reviews with tags foreign re-hash, neo nazis, the french, xavier gens on January 11, 2009 by gorenography
France has been coming out with some fucked up shit recently.
First we had Haute Tension. That film was not particularly shocking, or even good…in fact I hated it. Don’t get me wrong; a lot of the atmosphere in the movie was quite good, and there were a couple of gory, brutal scenes, including a throat slashing that ranks right up there with The Prowler, in my opinion. But there was no real character developement, and with the moronic plot twist at the end we were left with plot holes that you could fly a jumbo jet through. The plot twist was probably the part that pissed me off the most…if you haven’t seen it, I won’t ruin it for you, but let’s just say that if you’ve seen Fight Club, The Machinist, Hide and Seek, Secret Window, or a million other similar films you’re already familiar with it. If Haute Tension had concluded differently, I’d probably have a different opinion of it.
Next came A l’interieur (Inside), a film that I’ve never seen, but I hear is suitably sick and demented (and, like Frontiers, features violence against the pregnant). It’s on my list of films to see, maybe I’ll get around to it one of these days. If anyone who is reading this has seen the film, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
Martyrs was the most recent notable French film to come out (in 2008), another one I need to see. It should be out on DVD in 2009, from what I’ve heard. (And again, if you’ve seen it, I’d like to hear your opinion on it.)
Anyway, I saw Frontiers a couple of weeks ago. Going into it, I didn’t know that much about it, except for the facts that 1) it was French, 2) it was rated NC-17, 3) it was gory as hell, and 4) the plot was derivative and outlandish. All of these things turned out to be true, but despite the derivative and incoherent plot, I liked this film quite a bit. It takes a bit to really kick into gear, but once it gets going it’s a relentless, brutal ride, and the blood doesn’t stop flowing until the last couple of minutes of the film. It may actually be one of the more full-throttle Horror films that I’ve ever seen.
The film is set against the backdrop of Parisian riots and demonstrations after the controversial victory of a far rightwing candidate in the French elections. A pregnant girl named Yasmine (Karina Testa) hooks up with her ex-boyfriend Alex (Aurelien Wiik) and his two friends (David Saracino and Chems Dahmani) who get intangled in a robbery gone awry, in which Yasmine’s brother (Adel Bencherif) gets shot and killed. Fleeing Paris with the stolen cash, Alex’s friends hole up in a inn near the border with Belgium and await Yasmine and Alex.
Little do they know that the inn they are staying in is inhabited by insane neo-Nazi psychopaths who don’t like none of them Parisian car burners around their turf.
(Actually, as a note of aside, they probably wouldn’t have caught shit from the neo-Nazis had Tom not called two of the women who ran the inn and engaged in a bout of casual fornication with him whores. Even though they pretty much were, calling women you don’t know whores is bad manners.)
The shit hits the fan in a big way for those two, and when Alex and Yasmine arives it hits the fan with renewed gusto. This is where the movie really gets good, and we’re introduced to the family patriarch, a bona fide former Nazi (Jean-Pierre Jorris) with a penchant for cutting Achilles tendons with bolt cutters. He’s probably my favorite character in this movie. They decide to keep Yasmine alive because they want the baby inside of her. This fateful decision is what ultimately fuels the rest of the film, as Yasmine exacts bloody revenge on the family, in classic “last girl” fashion.
Does the plot sound derivative? If it does, it’s because it is. This film has been called “the French Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, and I think that’s about right. The whole “unsuspecting travellers go out into the middle of nowhere and encounter crazy inbred freaks” has been done to death…that’s not to say that this film is bad, or that I dislike this theme, far from it, but I will say that it’s not terribly creative. And, like TCM, it also captures a kind of dirty, claustrophobic atmostphere at times, often literally so (two scenes in particular feature a cramped tunnel and a pig pen/prison).
That said, though, I really liked this film. Maybe it was the steady, slow build up during the beginning, followed by the whirlwind of bloody violence. Or maybe it was the fact that it seemed like the filmmakers tried to cram as many Horror plot devices as they could into the running length of the film…I mean, we’ve got cannibalism, inbred Nazis, axe murder, gallons of blood, even a little shaky cam action. The acting wasn’t great, but it wasn’t particularly bad, either…I thought that Karina Testa was pretty good as the lead. The part where Yasmine grabs an axe, hacks into one of the Nazis before slamming him into a running table saw was nothing less than a masterpiece, and one of my new favorite Horror deaths…in fact, the girl who I was watching this film with at the time actually started gagging a little during that scene, making it the first film I’ve watched that has actually illicited a physical reaction from someone I’ve watched it with.
So, in conclusion, this was good. Nothing particularly awesome or inventive, but good. Recommended.
Gore rating: 7/10
Overall rating: 6.5/10
Cobra (1986)
Posted in Film reviews with tags action films, badass cop, George Cosmatos, Sylvester Stallone on December 31, 2008 by gorenography
As far as Sly Stallone movies go, they don’t get any better than Cobra. Filmed in the 80s, this film really is an exploitive, violent masterpiece which is by far his best work, in my opinion. If I had to chose between watching Cobra, Rambo, Rocky, or getting hit in the head with a shovel, I would totally watch Cobra. (After recovering from the blunt force trauma, of course.)
Stallone plays Marion Cobretti, a man who’s main hobbies include eating healthy and wasting scumbags. His turn ons? The aforementioned wasting of scumbags, shooting the breeze with his sidekick Gonzalez (Reni Santonez), and speaking in a monotone voice, no matter what the situation. His turn offs? Little annoyances like due process, parked cars, rules, the fact that judges have the gall to let criminals out of prison, and the whiny Detective Monte (Andrew Robinson, of Hellraiser fame), who he later punches in the face in front of the police chief. The criminals don’t play by the rules, goshdarnit, and the Cobra will be damned if he has to!
The Cobra’s competition is a serial killer known as the Night Slasher (Brian Thompson). The Night Slasher has been terrorizing the Southern Californian city in which the movie is set, but what the cops don’t know is that he isn’t working alone. Oh no, he commands a small army of other serial killers, who like to hang out and bash axes together in their spare time. The axe bashers seem to chose totally random victims, going to town on them with axes, knives, and hammers, with no apparent motive or pattern. When a model named Ingrid (Brigitte Nielson, Sly’s former flame) happens upon them one night as they’re in the middle of a murder, they decide to hunt her down and kill her. This part doesn’t really make a whole hell of a lot of sense, being that she didn’t see anything anyway, and thought nothing of the Night Slasher until he decided to kill her, but whatever. Stallone is assigned to protect her, and decides to move her to a safe-house in Northern California, as he suspects that the axe bangers had infiltrated the police department. (And, lo and behold, he was right! You don’t learn that kind of intuition in the academy.) The rest of the police department doesn’t take him seriously, though, and refuse to believe that there is more than one killer at work (even though two killers attacked him outside his apartment, and he got into a wild car chase/drive by shooting with a bunch of goons while transporting Ingrid. Sly even kills some of ‘em with a machine gun while driving in reverse.
They move to the safe-house in Northern California, but as luck would have it, they were also being tagged along by the fat axe bashing snitch (Lee Garlington) in the ranks. The Night Slasher leads an army (literally) of psychopaths armed with shotguns, pistols, and machine guns against their position. Unfortunately for him, he drastically underestimates the Cobra’s bad-ass factor. After Cobra turns about fifty motorcycle riding lunatics into bullet butter with his automatic rifle, he and Ingrid hit the road, and flee to a nearby foundry. This is where the climactic showdown between the Night Slasher and Cobra takes place (well, after Cobra blows up a few of his goons with a grenade, of course). Here we get to see Thompson’s method acting in action. “Let’s bleed, pig!” our valiant hero grunts as he lunges at Cobra with his combat knife, before being impaled on a swinging hook and set on fire. Justice is served, bitches!
Several films are interesting about this film. One thing is the great one liners in it, my favorite being when Sly douses a thug with gasoline, and right before he sets him on fire says “You have the right to remain silent.” Or another scene where one of the Night Slasher’s “hunters” threatens to blow up a grocery store, and Cobra says, “Go ahead. I don’t shop here.” It’s a goddamn disgrace that he didn’t win an Oscar, if for nothing else than those lines alone. This film also makes me wonder how they managed the size difference between Nielson, who stands over six feet tall, and Stallone, who stands at 5 foot 9 inches. And, of course, when you watch this film be prepared to suffer through a bit of horrendous 80s music. Did people actually have ears in the 1980s? Maybe it was just their sense of taste that was conspicuously absent, I dunno.
Anyway, this movie is awesome, bottom line. It will make you want to go out and waste some lowlifes.
Gore rating: 1/10
Overall rating: 6.5/10
Singapore Sling (1990)
Posted in Film reviews with tags black and white, crazy lesbians, exploitation, incest, Nikos Nikolaidis, various bodily fluids on December 23, 2008 by gorenography
Well, I didn’t really get to watch anything tonight. I found out that my roommate hadn’t seen Fight Club, so we got wasted in celebration of my last day of finals and watched. Since I don’t feel like writing down my thoughts on Fight Club, which I’ve seen at least seven times now, here’s an old review I did for Singapore Sling, one of my favorite films of all time. Enjoy.
Singapore Sling was one of my very first forays into the world of underground and/or extreme cinema. Years later, I’ve seen many, many such films, but SS still holds a very special place in my heart, simply because not only is the film truly demented, but it’s also very well done, which is rare for an exploitation film.
The plot concerns one anonymous detective (Panos Thanassoulis) who, in search of his long lost lover, gets shot (the exact circumstances surrounding him getting shot are never explained.) He manages to crawl to a nearby house, where he is found by the mother and daughter (Michele Valley and Meredyth Herold) who live there.
It should be noted, at this point, that the mother and daughter are sick, kinky, incestuous lesbians with sadistic streaks.
Anyhoo, after he has the fortunate opportunity of falling into the aforementioned duo’s clutches, the real action begins. He is nicknamed “Singapore Sling” by the pair, is tied to a bed, and is humiliated in various ways (one particularly interesting one being when the Mother urinates in his face while administering electroshock.) After a while, the film just kinda drifts off the deep end, as if it wasn’t strange enough already…illustrative of this are the famous “dinner scenes”, which have to be the most memorable parts in the movie, and the Daughter furiously ramming a kiwi into her vagina. All this is set against the backdrop of the Mother-Daughter team seriously screwing with Singapore Sling’s head by pretending that the Daughter is Laura (the woman who he is looking for). This all comes to a head in the ending, however, which has to be one of my favorite endings in any movie ever. I WILL SAY NO MORE! Overall, SS is excellent. Shot in beautiful black and white, it’s pure sleaziness combined with genuinely good acting skills on the parts of the characters involved make it a treat to watch.
I do, however, have two minor complaints. My first is that the movie could have been a bit shorter. My second doesn’t have to do with the movie, but the DVD. I got the Synapse DVD of this film, and the original burnt in subtitles that the film originally had are covered by large, annoying black boxes in the altered version. This is far worse than the original version, so I just turned that feature off. The DVD in itself doesn’t have anything on it, other than the feature film, a photo gallery, and trailer. That’s it…it’s really a quite bare presentation. I would’ve like to know a little more about the background of the film, personally.
All in all, though, it’s great. Highly recommended.
Gore rating: 4.5/10
Overall rating: 9/10
House by the Cemetery (1981)
Posted in Film reviews with tags Eurotrash, Lucio Fulci, mad doctors, spooky house on December 22, 2008 by gorenography
I liked this one a good deal, suprisingly. This was my first Fulci film, Fulci being a director I had put off watching mostly because some people I know had some less than kind words about his work. But, when I finally got around to seeing this, one of his more famous works (along with The Beyond), I was pleasantly suprised.
The film started out really solid for me. A girl (Daniela Doria) wanders around a spooky house calling for her boyfriend. When she finally finds him in bloody disarray, it’s already too late, and she gets stabbed in the back of the head with a steak knife. It was at this point that I was like, “Hells yeah! Maybe this isn’t such a piece of crap after all!”
The plot shifts to a couple, the Boyles (Paolo Malco and Catriona MacColl) who are planning to move to the same house where the girl was skull stabbed with the knife (suprise suprise!). The house was recently put on the block after a murder/suicide had recently took place there. The couple has an annoying little boy named Bob (Giovanni Frezzi) as well. Bob has encounters throughout the film with a ghost named Mae (Silvia Collatina), who warns him to stay away from the mansion he and his family are about to move into, which we later learn was previously owned by one Mr. Freudstein. Lucy Boyle herself is unsure about the house, and we also meet Anne, the weird babysitter (Ania Pieroni). The house is a real dive, and their unsurity is only increased when a bat attacks Mr. Boyle’s hand, which he defends himself against by stabbing until the bat is a veritable cherry gusher (a bat that looked like, in my roommate’s words, a “fuzzy potato”), and when a mysterious tombstone is found in the floor of the house bearing the name of “Freudstein”. Mr. Boyle decides to do some amateur detective work and find out who this Freudstein character was, but his search in a local cemetery is in vain.
Later, a realtor comes over to the house while the family is away. She gets her foot caught in the tombstone and is stabbed to death by an unseen figure with a metal spike in the stomach and neck. Blood and gore galore. Anne the babysitter also gets herself killed as well in a grisly decapitation when she goes down to the basement to find Bob. When Bob actually goes down to the basement, he comes in contact with Anne’s severed head, and freaks out. His mother rescues him, but he decides like any kid to go down to the basement and check out the head again, where he gets trapped behind a locked door like Anne. This is the part where that annoying little fucker should have been taught a lesson and receive an axe to the face, but he manages to alert the attention of his mother, who fails to open the door. His father manages to open the door with an axe, though, and also manages to chop off part of the demonic Dr. Freudstein’s arm (who is the killer, btw).
The confrontation between the family and Dr. Freudstein in the basement is perhaps my favorite part in the film. They face off in Freudstein’s chamber o’ death, with chopped up bodies everywhere. Apparently Freudstein needs to feed on human flesh to “regenerate his cells”, according to Mr. Boyle (maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but I don’t recall the part of the movie where he comes by this interesting tidbit of information). Boyle comes at Freudstein with an axe, is disarmed, then shanks him with a knife. Gravy covered maggots come pouring out of his wound as he one-ups Boyle by grabbing him by the neck and bloodily ripping out his throat. Mrs. Boyle tries to escape, but she gets dragged down the stairs. The kid does manage to escape, however, with the aid of Mae and the ghost of Mrs. Freudstein.
The movie ends with an inane quote about children.
I felt that this movie was, overall, fairly decent. Two scenes in particular: the basement standoff, and the scene where Mr. Boyle listens to an old recording of the doomed Mr. Peterson ranting, coupled with wandering shots of butchered and mutilated corpses and blood. For some weird reason, it reminded me of the part in Evil Dead where the recording is listened to coupled with wandering shots from the perspective of the menacing presence. Don’t ask me why. The film was atmospheric and gory, coupled with conventional horror devices like extreme closeups of the actors faces with dramatic “DUN DUN DUUUUNNN!” sounds in the background. Fulci sure seems to like Sergio Leone style eyeline closeups.
I think that Rob Zombie was also influenced by this film, also; the concept of a horribly disfigured mad doctor who lives underground sounds suspiciously like Dr. Satan from House of 1000 Corpses. Which just goes to continue to prove that Zombie is the Quentin Tarantino of Horror. I don’t think that I’ll ever forgive him for his “remake” of Halloween.
So, yeah. It’s good Eurotrash fun. I plan on seeing more Fulci films.
Gore rating: 6.5/10
Overall rating: 7/10
SS Girls (1977)
Posted in Film reviews with tags bruno mattei, Eurotrash, exploitation, Naziploitation, sleaze, world war two on December 21, 2008 by gorenography
Usually I tend to avoid buying DVDs. However, I succumbed to pick up the “SS Hell Pack!”, a three DVD set which was on sale at my local video store for ten dollars (how could you pass up a deal like that?) This charming collection includes three Naziploitation films, including SS Girls (unfortunately it neglects the gold standard of Naziploit, though…it doesn’t have Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS). Is Naziploitation the sleaziest subgenre of film imaginable? I think that it just might be.
The plot of this film, like most films of its nature, revolves mostly around Nazis and sex, specifically orgies. Basically, de Fuhrer suspects that some of the top Nazi brass are conspiring against him. So he gets a particularly sneaky looking dude named Hans (Gabriele Carrara) to round up a crack team of whores to screw the conspiracy out of the rat Nazi bastards. In Hans’s words, he wants to round up “the prettiest whores in circulation.” Incidentally, if those women were “the prettiest whores in circulation”, I’d say that Germany has more problems than just the Red Army, but whatev. He trains his whores with the help of Inge, his sadistic deputy (Marina Daunia), and puts them through a variety of fun activities, including fencing, jumping around, getting chased around naked by a similarly naked fat hairy dude, and bestiality (implied only…damn it!) When he feels that they’re ready, he unleashes them on the suspect saboteurs, who spill the beans in their relaxed drunken state, and are executed.
Next, he is assigned to kill “the divine Oscar”, a distinguished Nazi who was largely responsible for the Warsaw massacre. Orgies and drinking commence. Oscar has an hallucination, and goes apeshit shooting his pistol. He dies, then his two associates are gunned down in absurd fashion with a machine gun. To celebrate, Hans gets a whore and Inge to engage in a little girl-on-girl. This scene had my favorite line of the entire film: Hans, intoxicated on a power trip, denounces Hitler, grabs Inge and the other girl, forces them toward his crotch, and says “Come, my slaves, and feast on your new Fuhrer!”
Anyway, World War Two is quickly coming to an end, and the project is spiraling downward. Hitler kills himself, Hans stabs Inge after she betrays him then stabs himself later on, and the Red Army is busy kicking Nazi ass. The general who ordered the whole affair in the first place decides to stick around in the whorehouse with his men and engage in a little debauchery before the war ends for them. The whole film ends with everyone in the whorehouse committing mass suicide, and one officer who tried to save them realizes just how naughty the Nazis were.
When this film first started, I knew it was true trash, because the title of the DVD (SS Girls) was different from the title displayed at the beginning of the film (Private House of the SS). The only other film I remember that happening with was Caligula: The Untold Story, which was labeled as The Emperor on the VHS I have of it. Besides that, though, this film is just really strange. Besides the obviously exploitative elements (the constant nudity and orgies with omnipresent swastikas in the background) the film seems to try to hamstring a kind of message along with it. Needless to say, it doesn’t work at all. Bruno Mattei (Women’s Prison Massacre) was behind this, and all in all it wasn’t that good, especially not when compared to the much more famous and notable Ilsa. Some of the dialogue was funny (“My funny, huh? My funny, huh? My funny, huh?!”), but all in all, this film wasn’t particularly entertaining.
(Note: There was no real gore in this film, and only a small amount of blood.)
Gore rating: 1/10
Overall rating: 4/10
