Camp 7 - lager femminile

Love Camp 7 (1969)

** (out of 4)

Maria Lease and Kathy Williams play women who agree to be sent to a Nazi concentration camp to get some information on a scientist doing experiments there. It doesn't take long for the women (and others) to sees the horrors that are going on at the camp.

LOVE CAMP 7 is a rather historic film because it took the women-in-prison genre and took it a step further. This here was the first film to throw in the Nazi side of things and the result would end up leading to the creation of Naziploitation, which would take over drive-in screens for the next decade. A lot of people call this film boring and they call it tame. This might be true but at the same time people need to remember that this here was the first film and everything that followed had a bar that they knew they had to surpass.

For the most part I didn't find this film as awful as some have. I actually thought for the most part it was well-made and it at least looked like a real motion picture unlike so many of the films that were to follow. The film really doesn't have much of a plot but this is exploitation we're talking about so the only "plot" needed is to just get us to the next bit of nudity. Speaking of nudity, there are plenty of women undressed here and that's the whole selling point of the picture.

The majority of the 96-minute running time has women standing around their cell naked or being sexually assaulted by the guards. The women are basically sex slaves so there are countless scenes of the woman being forced to have sex. The camera knows what to focus on and this is certainly clear during a scene where the women are forced to stand in a circle and hold up buckets. The camera is in the middle of this circle and basically just goes around capturing all of the breasts.

LOVE CAMP 7 isn't a masterpiece but it does deserve credit for being the first of its type and it did get the subgenre off the ground.