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Helga: She Wolf of Spilberg (1977) / aka ‘She Wolf of Stilberg’

Dir: Patrice Rhomm (aka ‘Alain Garnier‘)

Some country somewhere, perhaps in South America (perhaps not) is run by a fascist dictator who oppresses the people and throws all those who oppose him in prisons.

One such prison is run by the sadistic Helga (Malisa Longa) and is filled with the female family members of anti-government rebels, some of which are hiding up in the hills.
One of the prisoners, Elizabeth (Patrizia Gori) is in fact the daughter of the chief rebel Vogel….

Ohhh…oooohh…dear. Welcome to the stinky world of Eurociné once again.
Those good chaps who made the worst rip-offs of other rip-offs have here gone and blatantly ripped off the classic Naziploitation movie “Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS” (although avoiding any Nazi connection) and done it with all style you would expect from Eurociné...which is of course no style at all.

Things get off to a stinky start with the opening credit sequence.
The credits appear over a bizarre faded red cloth thing, with what looks like a hat pin lying on it, while dreadful stock music, which sounds like it’s being played on a warped record on a broken gramophone, warbles on for what seems like eternity.

The next aural rape comes in the form of the dubbing.
Even in the world of slip shod dub jobs on Euro trash the dub here stands out as one of the worst. Nothing comes even close to matching the actor’s lip movements and once again it sounds like a bunch of psychotic mice recorded on a crinkled cassette tape.
At one point the dubbing is so bad that when one character whispers to another you literally hear cartoon ‘whispering noises’ instead of words.

Before we ship off to the prison we see that Helga has a personal showering assistant who rubs her bubbles for her before she gets down to a spot of clumsy screwing with her main guy, a thug named Hugo (Dominique Aveline), who’s a hairy dude with a bad porn moustache all of which makes him look like Harry Reems crossed with a Mexican bandit.
The eroticism is of course cranked up big time by the music, which sounds like you’re stuck in a 70’s lift.

When we got to the ‘dreadful’ prison we find it’s actually just an old farm where the prisoners (wearing only grey raincoats) are met by a Doctor, who dresses like a farmer, who likes to leer, cackle and goose the women up their raincoats for, I’m sure, serious medical purposes.
He then like to select a prisoner for some ‘welcome to the farm‘ hay rape.
“Ahhh! No, leave me alone! Noooo”! cries the unfortunate woman in clipped English tones as we take no less than 3 different scenes to finally get her damn raincoat off!
When we finally do though it’s worth it as far as pleasant on the eye nudity goes…but not so welcome when it comes to the less than pleasant sonic assault on the eardrums (yet again!!) when the soundtrack to this ravishing is revealed to be nothing but an excited baboon falling into a drum kit.

A thrilling sequence of bored gruel eating prisoners then follows as the camera lingers lovingly on spoons scooping up mush for about a minute before the world’s most shrieking, nails down the friggin blackboard deafening, food fight breaks out…which would have been at least partly okay if one of those raincoats had opened up.
Mind you at least this culinary transgression results in a punishment scene so sadistic words almost fail me as…as…oh the horror…as the girls have their faces…put under a tap!
There I said it.

Thankfully gratuitous nudity does rear its hairy head in various scenes (including an extended, ever essential, medical check-up) strategically placed to keep the audience awake.
Damn fine naked ladies too. But quite frankly to have such beauty in this film is like putting a delicately sculptured icing sugar rose on top of a turd cake.
Certainly though the nudity here is far greater than that seen in that other Eurociné/Malisa Longa starrer “Elsa: Frauline SS”, and often reaches the heights and explicitness seen in the more widely known, true, Naziploitation films.
Indeed as far as being gratuitously beastly to women goes, “Helga” certainly joins the ranks of those Naziploitation films even if it’s not remotely as violent or generally twisted.

To be fair though the film does come actually come alive at one point, as far as delivering some true exploitation goes at least, during a ‘naked blonde girls gets flogged with a belt’ sequence that does get pretty raunchy due to the fact the whipping (from a teeth gnashing Helga in her nightgown) looks quite hard and is in fact leaving distinctive red lines on the poor suffering actress’s poor pale arse. I’m sure the BBFC would still have a problem with this scene today.

Despite such cruelty Helga still comes off as a rather weak ‘she wolf’ though due to the fact that absolutely none of the prisoners fear her.
Gross defiance and endless disobedience is a constant, as such she has none of the genuine sadistic authority of the character she is trying to copy…that of Ilsa, who was a real she wolf.
But the underrated Longa looks as good as ever and her ‘uniform’ of crimson silk top and tight, black silk trousers looks quite striking, if a little absurd.

But, away from these few grubby lumps of exploitation nutrition that are tossed at us, the movie is hampered not only by its technical ineptitude but by endlessly repeated sequences (of women getting into trucks, soldiers getting wine from a cellar, Helga walking down the cellar steps and the randy farmer-Doctor looking the girls over) which are nothing but blatant padding and also gives you the hideous impression, , if you happened to have looked away for a minute, that the movie’s started all over again and that you’ll never be free of it!
And being stuck forever in the presence of a ceaselessly looped “Helga” would be a cruel fate indeed.

Nothing much at all happens as far as any real plot progression goes in fact until things suddenly pick up right at the end, where all of a sudden (in a burst of plinky plonky piano backed war movie stock footage and brief, badly done, original action scenes) an entire civil war suddenly comes to an end in a matter of minutes.
There are a few moments of revelation as far as characters go, but really “Helga” is just a string of laughably similar exploitation/talky scenes strung together in random order as it slowly unfurls it’s too long (goes past 90 minutes damn it) running time.
And if I thought the end of Eurociné’s “Elsa: Frauline SS” was an anticlimactic mess, then the freeze frame final shot in “Helga” puts it too shame.
You can sort of guess what it means, but why an extra 5 seconds could not be taken to end it properly (given the time wasted on all that padding) is mystifying.

So overall “Helga” is stuck with almost non-existent direction, hysterically random library music that’s all painfully awful, erratic editing , truly horrendous dubbing and a leaden pace,
We do have a certain ‘so bad it’s quite amusing’ charm to things and the constant nudity and occasional exploitation moment liven things up…but really sitting though this non-Nazi Naziploitation knock-off is a dreadful chore indeed.
One for those exploitation completists only again.