Double Feature: Amazonia: The Catherine Miles Story and SS Experiment: Love Camp

Not so much the poster that would appear on an actual grindhouse,
 more of the kind of  dvd cover you would see in a bargain bin.

Who is Catherine Miles? The answer would appear to be that she is a marketing gimmick, intended in all likelihood to draw in filmgoers who bought into similar "based on a true story" hype that Amityville, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Snuff and Cannibal Holocaust benefitted from. In fact the film itself fits snuggly into the genre of Italian pre Blair Witch experiments in verisimilitude derived from Ruggero Deodato's famous 16 millimeter excursion into animal cruelty, human torture and social commentary.

The film is constructed as an exhibition of evidence in a hilariously fake trial, complete with pompous commentary throughout and the prosecution occasionally yelling "Objection your honor!" While this kind of narration is common in low budget film-making, it never ceases to be obnoxious. I find it hard to imagine anything more irritating in the context of film than watching a character enter a room and the tacky disembodied voice of that actor announcing "I walked into the room".  However, the biggest problem with providing this kind of commentary is that it is usually quite obvious that there are major errors that this post production bandaging was intended to fix. Without the narration the film is merely a procession of atrocities and banalities sandwiched between a bare bones revenge plot.

I have always found the idiosyncratic cliches of Italian Exploitation films to be hilarious. One trope in particular functions as an excuse to get actresses undressed: Any scene in which there are 'savages' of any kind (the cliche is that these are usually played by Italian men in wigs and grass skirts) the women are forced by some measure of extenuating circumstance to take their top off. My favorite example of this is in Bruno Matei's Hell of the Living Dead. Amazonia follows suit.

While there are a number problems with Amazonia, in certain contexts, its sentimental schlockiness has a certain charm, much less so with the bottom half of this double bill. In stark contrast to the saccharine pretensions of amazonia, SS Experiment Love Camp is extraordinarily nihilistic, at least as far as the subpar acting and special effects allow.

I have previously mentioned the history and evolution of the Italian nazisploitation sex-and-shock film; describing the devolutionary transition from Salo and The Night Porter to Red Nights of the Gestapo, SS Girls, and The Gestapo's Last Orgy. Recently I discovered a flaw in this description. A wider examination suggests that the Nazi exploitation genre originated in Germany. The use of this type of film as a device to dehumanize the Third Riech and separate (and thus absolve of guilt) the average citizen from those committing the atrocities was common in post war West Germany. Due to the apparent similarities of these films to the Italian pictures, in function and content, one can view a much more complex matrix of influence.

SS Experiment Love Camp is somewhat of an amalgam of the aforementioned three films. There is an attempt at the cruelty of The Gestapo's Last Orgy, the inept sexiness of Red Nights of the Gestapo, and a hint of the intended tackiness of SS Girls. There are even moments so insipid as to bring The Beast In Heat to mind (one thermostat control in particular evokes the slipshod, bubble-gum-and-duct-tape approach of that video nasty).

The film's plot involves various excuses to get (mostly) attractive italian women naked and shagging in front of Nazi mad scientists and their diabolical assistants. The driving force behind the picture (pardon the pun) is a Nazi Colonel who had his balls bitten off for unknown reasons and proceeds to order a number of failed transplant operations until he tricks the protagonist into undergoing this surgery, and since this is bad movie, it magically works this time. 

This triggers the perfunctory murder of the SS Colonel and declaration of revenge against the Third Reich, not without some unintentional humor. May I suggest that "It… happens sometimes" is probably the worst thing you could say to someone who just discovered he's been rendered surgically impotent? Similarly "What I did… was very bad" is probably not the best thing to tell the man who you had tricked hours earlier into being castrated, and who now is aiming a machine gun square at your…. chest.

One could criticize the medical basis behind the plot, but I think that would be a matter of being unable to see the sloppily painted thermostat throughout the trees.The film aspires to true nastiness, but ultimately falls as limp as the colonel's pecker.

"You will draw for the master race!"

Red Nights of the Gestapo

"One of the aspects that emerges in a study of this kind of cinema is a devolutionary trajectory running from a 'high' or artistically informed culture (which is de facto bourgeois) to a more vernacular cinema that 'reduces' the artistic and intellectual complexities of the antecedents into base forms of exploitation. Following from that, however, when these films are placed within a cinematic historiographic context, a different discourse opens revealing how the Nazi sexploitation cinema engages with the historical period it exploits."

- Ernest Mathijs, and Xavier Mendik. Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema since 1945.

The above quote, for me epitomizes an interpretation of the Italian film industry I've found to be very characteristic. It has been especially helpful in explaining to those unfamiliar with Italian exploitation cinema certain incongruities of style or content. Typically I use the entire quote because it implies, when taken as a whole, the ambiguities which complicate this process of exploitation of themes. To view every excess or irregularity as the direct byproduct of consumer demand, or capitalist impulse, would be to overextend the scope of a useful model for understanding the seemingly absurd choices made in the Italian exploitation films of the 70s and 80s.

Definitions tend to be necessarily ambiguous, but I tend to view the transition from genre films to exploitation films beginning in earnest with the cannibal cycle. One of the features that I use to define exploitation is the aforementioned derivative nature of the majority of the projects. There is a sense that to be commercially successful, a film must exploit the aspects of another picture that made it commercially successful (whether or not this is actually the case). 

One of the myriad reasons Nazi Sexploitation cinema is so reviled is that there is a sense, in viewing these pictures, that the directors looked at films like Salo or The Night Porter and thought to themselves "This could be improved with more exposed breasts". There is no concern that the subject itself is serious, although perhaps this reflects the displeasure of the filmmakers with their subject rather than their lack of knowledge with regard to it. 

If one accepts the concept of a devolutionary track with regard to exploitation cinema the lineage of a film such as Red Nights of the Gestapo would be Salo and Salon Kitty. The film also follows a similar path to Bruno Mattei's SS Girls, with a shift in the ratio of violence to titillation (more breasts, less torture).

 Both Red Nights and Mattei's film start with a conspiracy against the German reich, and a bordello constructed to ensnare those complicit. Whereas Mattei displays a certain self aware goofiness in his Charlie's Angelsesque gaggle of females, Red Night's director Fabio De Agostini (whose sole credits as a director include this film and two others, one of which contains the tagline "The Remarkable Story of a Small Boy Who Belonged to a Giant Dog!")  displays his remarkable ability to retain knowledge from Pscyhe 101 by having each of the prostitutes chosen for pseudo-Freudian traits. One of the members of the "German Intelligentsia" had his mother die at a young age, naturally he gets a lactating woman. Another  is a gluton; he recieves multiple women at once. There's even a disturbing bit where one of the men from the group misses his daughter, so the SS acquire a young (think six-year-old young) girl. Luckily all they do is sit on a bed for about a minute of screen time, before he gets shot by the SS.

Aside from a sub-plot about an SS officer whose wife makes puzzles of Hitler (they had those in the Germany of the 1940s?) and the discovery of a wireless microphone hidden in a cigarette lighter (once again, they had those in the Germany of the 1940s?!), that's about all that happens. The SS captain (or officer, or whatever) tries to get information out of these "German Middle Class Intelligentsia", they force them to sign a piece of blank paper, and then the SS come in and kill everyone, including the SS commander.

Cut to a freeze-frame with an arbitrary fact about the German-Russian conflict, and then "The Sleep of Reagon Creates Monsters". Yeah. The last time I saw a film with a typo that prominent was Ultra Warrior (major points if you've sat through that one).

So that's it. I didn't particularly like the film, but I wasn't as tough a sit as, say,  Gestapo's Last Orgy. The phony bologna psychologist and his untreated sadists, masochists, and nymphomaniacs, are good for a couple laughs, however, on the whole most of the humor is pretty terrible (flatulence humor seems, oddly, to be a common trait of the general nazi-exploitation genre). Overall there was nothing particularly offensive about it (unless you are unsettled by the presence of Italians in Nazi regalia pretending to shag), but there's also little to recommend it. If nothing else, the film is exemplary as a generic case of Italian nazisploitation filmmaking.

-Ryan