Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS
theatrical release poster
Directed by	Don Edmonds
Produced by	David F. Friedman
Written by	Jonah Royston
Starring	Dyanne Thorne George Buck Flower Uschi Digard Colleen Brennan (as Sharon Kelly)
Cinematography	Glenn Roland
Editing by	Kurt Schnit
Release date(s)	1975 (1975)
Running time	96 minutes
Country	United States West Germany
Language	English

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS is a 1975 Nazi exploitation film produced in the USA. The film was directed by Don Edmonds, produced by David F. Friedman and written by Jonah Royston.

Plot

It starred Dyanne Thorne as "Ilsa," commandante of a Nazi Stalag (prisoner-of-war camp); the maliciousness of her character was very loosely based on that of Ilse Koch. Ilsa conducts sadistic scientific experiments designed to demonstrate that women are more capable of enduring pain than men are, and therefore should be allowed to fight in the army. Ilsa is also portrayed as a buxom woman with a voracious sexual appetite for men. Every night she chooses another one of her male prisoners and rapes him; however, due to her insatiable hunger, she gets disappointed when her current victim eventually ejaculates, and promptly has him castrated and put to death. Only an American prisoner, who can withhold ejaculating, manages to use her weakness to his favor.

Location

The film was made on the set of the TV series Hogan's Heroes. The series had already been cancelled and the show's producers let the movie be made on it once they learned that a scene called for it to be burned down, saving them the cost of having it demolished.

History and saga

When Lee Frost and David F. Friedman's 1969 Love Camp 7 became popular in Canada, André Link and Cinepix's John Dunning created a script for Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. After offering to produce it, Friedman (Blood Feast, The Defilers) agreed and brought on Dyanne Thorne to play as the nasty Nazi hypersexual who tortures her prisoners in the film until she is eventually killed by her superior.

All of the sequels are more standard women in prison films which use exotic settings to render the exaggerated sadism of the plots more plausible.

Criticism and acceptance

The over-the-top subject matter of Ilsa has turned the film into a cult movie. Perhaps the best explanation for its notoriety is that it is a cinematic version of the "men's adventure" subgenre of pulp magazine. Nazis tormenting damsels in distress were perennial favourite subjects for the lurid, sub-pornographic covers of sensationalistic "true adventure" magazines such as Argosy in the 1950s and 1960s; the film seeks to be a more explicit reversal of the same sort of sexual fantasy. Overlooking the fact that no woman was ever commandant of a Nazi prison camp, it capitalizes on the very real sadism and hypersexuality^{[citation needed]} of such predatory SS Aufseherinnen as Ilse Koch and Irma Grese (see Female guards in Nazi concentration camps).

Other figures said to be inspired by Ilsa include "The Butcheress" from the video game BloodRayne^{[citation needed]} and the female guards that appeared in the 2007 film Grindhouse in a faux trailer for a film called Werewolf Women of the S.S. by Rob Zombie^{[citation needed]}. The lead female officer, Eva Krupp (played by Zombie's wife, Sheri Moon), can also be seen as an Ilsa-like character. The film won 'Best Alternative Release' at the 1985 AVN awards.

External links

• Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS at the Internet Movie Database
• Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS at AllRovi