Recently, as Adam Mudman's A-List has come up on around thirty posts, I've gone back and reflected on what I've presented these last few months, and in doing so, I've tried to think of ways to make this blog relatable while also fulfilling my eternal mission of relaying the alien qualities of the movies I tend to highlight. After all, weirdness obtains greatness primarily in the context of normalcy, as insufferable as that context can be. In essence, I need to compare more of these movies to movies you're likely to have ever seen, like The Great Escape and Salon Kitty. Okay, there's a smaller chance you've seen Salon Kitty, which is unfortunate given that SS Girls (or Private House of the SS, I guess) is basically a remake of that. Except it's made by Bruno Mattei, he of Women's Prison Massacre and Hell of the Living Dead, and so this is like The Great Escape if there were prostitutes, blood-drinking, and Gabriele Carrara.
Brilliant and shining Gabriele Carrara! He is the star of this film, as he plays enthusiastic Nazi fanatic Hans Schellenberg. The line in the sand is drawn at him--there's no point in making comparisons from here on it. By merit of its star, SS Girls transcends any sort of expectations one can have for a World War II film.
It's 1945, and the Wehrmacht has been invaded by a buncha lousy Hitler-haters. The SS employs Hans Schellenberg to rip the truth out of five officers suspected of a plot to betray the Fuhrer, and so with the aid of Frau Inge and Professor Jurgen, Schellenberg acquires a group of prostitutes who are swiftly conditioned for any sort of sex, unnatural or otherwise, and likewise honed to physical perfection. Schellenberg then invites the officers to a proper Third Reich orgy, where people do all sorts of things that I'm sure the Nazis really did at their orgies, like lick wine off of people. As this occurs, Herr Schellenberg climaxes while playing the organ, and caresses nipples creepily but never does the deed himself. The plot succeeds and the officers, in throes of passion, confess to hating Hitler. They are put on trial by Schellenberg dressed in a Nazi Pope uniform, and promptly disposed of. Movies over, right? Of course not! We haven't yet gotten to see the next batch of officers Schellenberg and his girls are given to work on, including a blood-drinking guy and a Japanese Nazi with a Swastika drawn in permanent marker on his dishcloth headband. So it goes.
Claudio Fragasso wrote this, and so basically it's the same type of dialogue you'll see in Troll 2. Despite the subject matter, it surprisingly doesn't have someone exclaim, "They're eating her! And then they're going to eat me!" But instead, we do get gems like a quip by General von Kluger, the eyepatch-Nazi: "I may only have one eye but I've seen the orders and it's a fact...we're abouta get more pussy than we can handle." If you've seen any Italian movie from the '70s or '80s you will hear the same voice cast/accents, and it will be like coming home. No one is a European, and no one is as excited as Gabriele Carrara's dub actor, who, judging from the flawlessness of the performance, may well have been Carrara himself.
It truly is Carrara who makes the entire thing dodge any description but "operatic." I'm sorry, I know that's a pretentious thing to say, but this is the kind of acting I feel I need fancy glasses to watch. Perhaps Schellenberg himself says it best when he says, "It's almost like a play...that's it...a play." This line is followed immediately by his snarfing down a mouthful of roast chicken, clearly representative of the scenery. Either Carrara was a secret acting genius whose great talent allowed him to produce such a confusing performance (he only appeared elsewhere in Mattei's Women's Camp 119 and a Mondo flick called Mutant Sexual Behaviour), or he believed this was how Nazis really acted, and he believed in realism so much he was willing to die for it. The man does basically kill himself throwing his body and voice into the level of camp to which he stoops. I've never seen anything even fucking close to it.
Fortunately, it is generally comparable to other Nazisploitation movies, at least on the surface. There's the sex aspect, and gross sex at that. Schellenberg's girls learn to screw German shepherds and circus freaks in scenes that will make you cringe, then laugh your heart out. It's not Joe D'Amato at the wheel, so everything's softcore and none of the ghastly stuff is real. But at the edges of this seemingly normal abnormal sexuality is something greater. A normal Nazisploitation film wouldn't include a scene of a Little Person SS Officer lip-syncing to the Headless Horseman's laugh in the 1949 Disney Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Nor would it feature a scene in which a Nazi Pope shrieks "Am I funny, huh? Am I funny, huh?!" at a crowd of confused onlookers. So even if you have entered the deep levels of Nazisploitation and that has become your norm, this is even farther away. Farewell, Great Escape, I guess.
SS Girls is marred by one of the traditional faults of Nazisploitation, which is tedium. After the first and second batches of traitorous Third Reich Benedict Arnolds are done away with, we're left with a long half-hour in which the brothel reacts to news of Hitler's death. Not much of interest happens here, but that's okay. As long as we have that first hour, all will be well. The world will keep being a better place.
I was introduced to this movie about six months ago, but it feels like I've known it for lifetimes. The images strung together that make this movie are so random and wild that they always come out of nowhere, even when I know they're on their way. It's so relieving that this is emblematic of most of Mattei's movies, even some of his crasser and grosser ones.
And here, I started by saying that I wanted to take about being relatable. I chose a poor movie for the job, given that it's best measured in degrees of inverse relatability. Basically: take everything you know about a World War II movie. Then, translate your understanding of those movies into an equivalent amount of confusion and unfamiliarity. From there do everything you can to accept that anti-comprehension. Once you do accept it--you'll be free to laugh endlessly.
I can't say I'll be able to promise grounding and stability the next time around. My tastes have become too distorted for that. But again, if you can turn yourself inside out, you will find a great bliss. Bruno Mattei will guide you down this Stygian river more smoothly than anyone else, so if you can stand a lot of boobs, a lot of dubs, and a lot of tasteless exploitation, spend an evening with this one.
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