Even as a hardened Italian trash aficionado, there are two kinds of Italian movies I usually avoid. One is the "mondo" movies that feature real animal (and occasionally human) slaughter. The other is the "Nazi sexploitation" films which are definitely in what John Water's would call "bad bad taste" as opposed to "good bad taste". I have seen a couple of the French Eurocine rip-offs like "Hell Train" and "Elsa, Fraulein of the SS", which were less extreme and much more laughably inept than the Italians films. I've also seen the two serious and arty (and pretentious) films--"The Night Porter" and "Salon Kitty"--which inspired the whole misbegotten Nazi sex "genre". I've even TRIED to watch a couple of the actual Nazi sex flicks like the one in the "Grindhouse Vol.1" DVD collection and the one that's on a disc with "Escape from a Woman's Prison", but I found them both way too vile and depressing and couldn't make it past scenes of the naked "Jewish" women dead in the shower/gas chamber covered with their own excrement (that's too much for me).
I made it through this movie though, which says something about it I guess. It is much better made than most of the others and a little more tasteful. The director Mario Caino is not a talentless hack like Bruno Mattei, Sergio Garrone,or some of the others who crapped these things out. It is a weird(and historically inaccurate) combination of Nazi brothel/"joy division" type film like "Salon Kitty" and a Nazi death camp type film like some of the others. The protagonist (Sirpa Lane)is Jewish, but working at a brothel. I'm not sure that anyone knows she's Jewish, but the movie seems rather confused on this point (one of her fellow brothel workers is named Goldberg and also presumably Jewish). The real Nazis were nowhere near as sex-obsessed as the Italians made them out to be and they certainly wouldn't have countenanced ANY Jewish women servicing German soldiers in brothels. Anyway, the heroine becomes involved in sadomasochistic relationship with the Nazi camp commander (after a highly contrived scene where he strips her naked and tries to entice his German shepherd to rape her, and she defends herself against man and dog with a conveniently handy bull-whip). As a result, she rises to become head madam of the brothel where her Jewishness THEN, of course, becomes a problem.
Sirpa Lane is much better than usual here, but that's not saying much if you've seen her in "The Beast", "The Beast in Space", etc. Cristina Borghi, who later became a fairly respected Italian actress, is also in the cast somewhere--she's listed in the credits as "naked prisoner", but that really doesn't narrow it down too much. There's a lot of female nudity and a mixture of consensual sex, non-consensual rape, and semi-consensual prostitution. A couple naked girls get tied up and flogged, but this movie lacks a lot of the gleeful torture scenes of the others. It's not really very erotic (if that's the intention),but neither is completely repulsive.
