Horror Extreme Movie Review - SS Experiment Love Camp

"You bastard, what have you done with my balls?"...and that my friends is the kind of high quality dialogue you can expect from the dreadfully dire S.S. Experiment Love Camp.

S.S. Experiment Love Camp (Lager SSadis Kastrat Kommandantur) is the everyday story of female prisoners of war who are brought to Von Kleiben's secret camp to partake in unusual (read unnecessary and sexual) experiments with Wehrmacht troops, with the hope of creating the perfect Arian race. These experiments are carried out by the lesbian psycho doctor Dr. Renke (Patrizia Melega) and the old, Jewish (even though he is never referred to as such) surgeon with a conscience Dr. Steiner (Attilio Dottesio). Any uncooperative or ugly POWs are tortured, humiliated and worst of all, subjected to bad dubbing.

There is also the wonderfully bizarre side story of Col. Von Kleiben (Giorgio Cerioni) who lost his balls in a tragic gob job incident with a Russian prostitute. He asks his right hand man, Helmut (Mircha Carven) if he is willing to do anything for his country, he says yes, not knowing that this will mean having his sweet meats cut out and popped in to the elephant skin sacks of his superior later on.

The film opens with two pale and tired POWs being electrocuted until they pledge alliance to the Führer, one refuses and bites it, the other prisoner agrees and pledges. I have seen more convincing acting in a school nativity play, and the props used don't look much better than cardboard covered in tin foil. We then slowly meander in to classic women in prison territory with a mass shower scene which owes more to a Russ Meyer film set in Pontins than the terrors of Auschwitz if the giggling and moans of pleasure are anything to go by.

These lovely, freshly showered ladies, sorry I mean POWs, are then each matched up with a lucky German soldier for all kinds of sexual shenanigans, and one pair even get to do "it" in a glass tank full of water whilst people in white lab coats stand about taking notes, all in the name of Germany! The German soldiers all carry on as if they are in a frat house, horsing around in the barracks, smoking, drinking and frequenting the local den of iniquity. It is in these scenes that the most laughs are raised, and I'm guessing this isn't the reaction that this film wanted to evoke. One hilarious exchange between two soldiers plays out like this:-

Soldier 1 :- "I think every time you open your mouth, you talk shit"

FIVE MINUTES OF SILENCE

Soldier 2 :- "Hey! I don't like that remark you made..... the one about shit"

So as the crème de la crème of the Arians get jiggy with the POWs, old Col. No-Knackers is eyeing up the fittest as a possible donor for a nad transplant. Helmut, the soldier that has been chosen for the unwilling donation is a nice guy Nazi, giving out cigarettes and food, oh and boning one of the prisoners. Col. Jaffa blackmails Dr. Renke in to performing the operation in a scene which is quite grim but then funny when you realize you're just watching some poor unfortunate bulls love lumps rattling around in a kidney dish. Then joy of joys we get to watch Helmut trying to have sex with his POW lover only to realize that HE'S GOT NO BALLS. I'm sure any man reading this will revel in the stupidity of that last sentence, the guy didn't know his balls were missing until he went to get his jollies. Good lord!

S.S Experiment Love Camp then turns in to a revenge flick, one man trying to get his balls back from his Nazi superior. Now THAT is how they should have promoted this film.

I had never seen a Nazi exploitation film before this, but having read lots about them I had far higher expectations for the twisted and perverse nature of the content, but S.S. Experiment Love Camp is pretty much just a women in prison movie with added Nazi costumes. Sure the whole film is grimy, dirty, and reeks of bad taste, but not for the right reasons. The director (Sergio Garrone) seems to not want to offend anyone (strange seeing he chose Nazi Germany as his film's backdrop) and the torture scenes, of which there are very few, seem to be thrown in as an after thought. The sex isn't graphic enough, the lesbianism is just 'Air-lingus' and belly button stroking, the violence tame and un-interesting, and the dialogue stilted and boring.

This piece of Italian sleaze really does not live up to its infamy or Video Nasty status, and probably only ended up as such due to the lurid and tasteless cover art work and the use of real POW photographs in the opening titles. These, fortunately, were not present on the copy I watched.

S.S. Experiment Love Camp is just a bad prison film, with swastikas.

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