Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS

Most here are aware of how this one plays out. Experiments are conducted on war camp prisoners, which are all overseen by our lovely Fraulein Doktor (of title fame). This gal has a nasty habit of collecting male "forget me nots". Some collect stamps. Others, genitals. Call her an eccentric.

Anyhow, politics between the camp and Berlin come into play along with an American she can't figure out (and the requisite escape plans brewing), but those are mere plot details. No sense boring everyone with gratuitous information on the storyline when there's some juicy bits to discuss.

Torture of many respects abound in this one. Castration, gang rape, bacterial/viral injections, human lobster pots, slow hanging (mit eis schmelzen), nipple 'trodes, the list goes on and on. The production values are pretty fair in this one (the sets being left over from "Hogan's Heroes") and the makeup's not half bad. The acting's a bit over the top in "Ilsa", especially with the doktor's blonde henchwomen, but who can really fault topless floggers? Not I.

Thumbs up for me here. It's only single "X", but still some nasty fun.

Charlie.

An exploitation classic that is a surprisingly enjoyable film. Ilsa, the Arian commandant of a secret medical facility, sets out to prove to her doubting superiors that women are able to endure greater pain and suffering than men. She does this by torturing the female inmates in increasingly diabolical ways, while trying to break the American 'sexual freak of nature', Wolfe. Cue lots of gratuitous nudity, castration, strangulation, boiling alive, magnificent pre-implant breasts, softcore sex and gang rape, golden showers, and general bloody mayhem. The German accents are hilarious, and the acting barely one step up from Hershael Gordon Lewis and early John Waters. It even has the ubiquitous 'moral message' at the beginning. But unlike so many of these movies, 'Ilsa' manages to avoid descending into tedious repetition half way through, and builds to a brilliantly ludicrous climax in which an entire camp is gunned down by machine gun fire, without a drop of blood being spilt. Brilliant.

First I read about this movie in an online forum. It sounded quite interesting so I read the article in a well-known encyclopedia and some IMDb comments here too and finally decided to watch it.. people just disagreed in their opinions too much so I wanted to form my own.

If you want to watch 'Ilsa - She Wolf of the SS' for the same reason I can only say: you don't have to. It's not as controversial as it seemed to me in the beginning though some scenes are quite disgusting. After all it is an interesting mix of bad, sometimes REALLY bad acting/dialogues, D-cup tits and some gore elements. But I guess one can die and still be happy not having seen this.

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS is a surprisingly well-made film, given its garish title and unabashed exploitative intent. For all the gore, nudity, and laughter inducing dialogue, the film features good camera work, quality special effects, and a quick moving plot. It follows the travails of an American soldier sent to a Nazi medical camp run by Ilsa, who is obsessed with proving women's superior capacity to handle pain so that she can go to the front lines.

Ilsa represents Nazispoitation at its finest. Throwing the history book out the window, the film gives us a Nazi concentration camp populated by topless female guards and open lesbians. Just for fun, it adds gory experiments which all seem to require attractive nude women. Is it tasteless? Lords yes! But it's also fun.

What takes this a notch above other exploitation films is that genuine talent was involved. Ilsa has quality cinematography and surprisingly good special effects. (This may be because, as director Don Edmonds points out, many of the people involved were mainstream filmmakers working under pseudonyms for a quick buck.) Although no one would mistake it for Oscar material, Ilsa is a worthwhile film for all exploitation fans.

Ilsa is one sadistic mama who tortures men and women to prove that women have a greater threshold for pain and also just for the fun of it. This is the first of a series of exploitation films featuring Thorne, who is endowed with certain God-given gifts that are prominently displayed. In fact, her bra should have received the Oscar that year for best supporting an actress. It is intended to be trash and it makes no attempt to rise above that. There is plenty of nudity and gore. It would have been better if the violence could have been toned down a bit but the blood looks so fake that it is not very disturbing. This qualifies as a guilty pleasure.