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SS Experiment Camp (1976)

Dir: Sergio Garrone

Some tasty females are sent to a Nazi experimental camp where some are shipped off to work in the local whorehouse and the more ‘select’ are chosen to be the sexual partners of Nazi super studs in some kind of experiment about something or other.

The camp Commandant (I mean, how camp does one have to be?) is a sadist who has flashbacks to the time he foolishly stopped shooting and got down to some raping and ended up half the man he used to be.
He blackmails a Jewish surgeon into carrying out extremely obscure and hazy operations on the women involving their ovaries.
Now ovaries seem to have no link to missing testicles, but these many experiments on the unfortunate women are supposedly vital. I’m not a doctor, so what do I know!

Meanwhile one of the inmates and one of the Nazi studs have fallen in love (aaaahhhh!) and soon all these crazy threads will come together to make a crazy quilt of Nazi nuttiness…

 

Welcome to a legend! Along with the likes of “Driller Killer” and “The Evil Dead”, “SS Experiment Camp” is one of the mighty kings of the dreaded UK Video Nasty age.
Thanks to its subject matter, it’s general politically incorrect exploitation content and that video cover the movie would become one of the fetid, dripping pieces of celluloid held up by the outraged moralists to show the evils of this naughty new medium that had now crept into millions of British homes.
The video tape!

With no censorship or classification applying to home video almost anything went and in a market literally creaking at the shelves only the movies with the most striking title and cover artwork would be able to poke their heads out above the sea of tape, that the excited new consumer could dive into, and gain recognition.
But strong recognition brings recognition from all and as such, around 1982 when the cry for legislating video rang out, it was the likes of “SS Experiment Camp” that were pounced on.
Pounced on and ripped to pieces for the next 23 years.
It would be 2005 before the film was finally granted an uncut ‘18’ certificate. The time passed had blunted the beast’s teeth and no one really cared anymore.

But what of the film itself? You can understand the shock (and excitement) in the early 80’s when such content (that would never have got passed the BBFC for a cinema showing) was suddenly there to experience and the subject matter and setting still carry a very strong power to upset many even today.
But the fact is the film is now little more than a cheesy, trashy, silly, badly made slice of crudity.

Made almost back to back with the more violent, nasty and effective (though still flawed) “SS Camp 5: Women's Hell” Sergio Garrone used many of the same sets, and many of the same cast, often in very similar roles (the repeated character/plot of the reluctant Jewish surgeon is exactly the same in both films) and even some of the same footage in the two movies, thus making it a rather confusing experience to view both films.
“SS Experiment Camp” basically feels like the less effective first try at making “SS Camp 5: Women's Hell” truth be told!

Despite the setting and plot handing the film makers the chance of terrible realism on a plate, schlock merchant Garrone throws realism away and instead concentrates on pure Sexploitation camp.
All the women look like glamour models for one (the hairy armpits aside) and Garrone wastes no time in getting them into the shower for lost of full frontal fun, where the dubbing has them chattering like excited schoolgirls!

But you can only have so much fun in a Nazi camp and it’s not long before we see the women thrown into the ritual of scientific rape.
Political incorrectness is heightened by the fact the women have to 'perform', which of course means enjoying the sex and reacting as if they are willing lovers.
Quite why some of the couples have sex in a glass water tank though goes unexplained.
In fact the entire roll call of experiments seem utterly pointless and confusing.

And woe to those who don’t take to kindly to this rape, as we see when one unwilling woman is first scolded and then frozen to death in the water ‘sex tank’ as a sadistic female Trustee and German Sgt (played by the same weird looking guy who played the Commandant in “SS Camp 5”) laugh and grin and get noticeably turned on, in a surprisingly rare moment highlighting that exploitation mainstay…the mix of sex and violence.
The evil Trustee also has a choice bit of dialogue here as well; “This is just the beginning you frigid puritanical bitch” she yells at the dying woman. Nice.
Other occasional tortures include compressed air to the ear (!) and electric chair sessions, one of which goes on until the woman wets herself, in the film’s only real scene of nastiness.
The bodies are then trundled off to the furnace where superimposed flames dart over their twitching naked forms as, in a surprising bit of attempted realism, the ligaments supposedly contract in the heat. It’s a nasty idea let down only by the obviously superimposed fire (scenes which Garrone would re-use to much better effect in “SS Camp 5“).

The gore and blood quota comes from the odd operation scene carried out on the women (similar, if not exact, to the ones in “SS Camp 5” where they were done for completely different reasons), the now famous ’testicle transplant’ footage and various wounds inflicted by guards on inmates and a vice versa.
A good ‘forking’ given to one of the Nazis has a delightfully bloody and satisfying aftermath but leads to no good as the film’s most infamous sequence (a naked woman hung upside down from a pole to bleed to death) is played out as punishment. The same scene that would be the influence on that banned UKVHS cover.

But there are a lot of flat scenes in-between the exploitation and lots of tedious dialogue about not much at all and that ‘doomed love’ sub-plot between one of the soldiers and one of the inmates is slow and saccharine to the point of real annoyance. None of this is helped by the dreaful music score either.
Sadly the uniforms are all rather naff too, with no sexy black SS garb here to wet your Nazi uniform fetish. Everyone looks like they were kitted out for a cheap TV war movie. For shame!

Thankfully the finale is a wildly enjoyable exercise in cheesy, unintentionally funny, ultra-melodramatic chaos and violence though and is the only time the film really comes alive.
A situation helped no end by the fact the drawn out and rather confusing ‘lost testicles’ sub-plot is finally given a superbly enjoyable (and rightly famous, though often misquoted) pay-off.
As our kept in the dark gonad donor finally realises (he’s a bit slow) he’s missing certain anatomical details he rages into the Commandant’s room, who has been giving his new jewels a test drive, and delivers the immortal line…"What have you been doing with my Balls"?!

Sums the whole film up really!