Wolff rating: EVIL
Plot summary: A 70s, free-love take on Nazi camps. This is the kind of movie that puts a stacked woman in a blond wig in a tight SS uniform as the camp Kommandant and makes all the prisoners nubile young women.
Biased, pithy comments: It's sobering to realize that the sulfa drugs you got to cure your staph infections, help you recover from your surgery, or even clear up that pesky syphillis were made possible by the Third Reich. Dr. M'engle and his mad scientist minions sacrificed thousands on the altar of science to get data on maximum dosages (using the tried-and-true start-with-too-much-and-lower-the-dosage-'till-they-don't-die technique), human tolerance of temperature and pressure extremes, and even just how to most efficiently burn a human body. This movie takes that fact and subverts it to make a cheesy women-in-prison exploitation film. The acting is atrocious, the writing pathetic, the women largely nude and frequently tortured, and the camerawork bland at best. The best things were the uniforms (which looked nearly new) and the sets (which were apparently the old ``Hogan's Heroes'' sets). Dyanne Thorne has a nice rack, but is slowly aging and sagging, and since it's the 70s she hasn't had a lot of surgery to fix that. The rest of the female cast are quite cute when not covered with red paint and latex, and the leading male actor is so bad you can see his eyes move as he reads the cue cards. No, this isn't a great film, but if you feel the need to be shocked (or you're so desensitized you need something shocking to feel anything at all), you'll want to see this film. Also, if you're on a historical bent, you can see this film for what it was---a signature film from an era before VHS, when people actually had to go to movie theaters to see naughty stuff. Me, I found it a little boring at times, but not really very shocking (despite the fact that I saw an uncut version---the cut version has to be the epitome of Hell---all the crappy acting and none of the sex, blood, or nudity). It would be a great film to MST3K if your crowd could handle the gore---it has enough slow dialog to come up with great one-liners.
Other Notes: NC-17, or at least the cut I saw. This movie has a lot of fans with the splatter-and-gore set. It's worse than, say, ``Big Doll House'' from a shock point of view, but it ain't got nothin' on ``Angel of Darkness''. This movie was such a big hit that it spawned numerous equally improbable sequels set in harems and whatnot.
How many times I have seen it:
Starring: Dyanne Thorne, Gregory Knoph, Tony Mumolo, Maria Marx.
Directed by: Don Edmonds