1975 saw the release of what could easily be called the archetypical Nazisploitation film, Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS. That film featured Dyanne Thorne as Ilsa, a Nazi commandant who tortures prisoners at a concentration camp, while also seeking a man who can give her an orgasm. Those who fail in this task--i.e. all of the male prisoners at the camp--are castrated. As you may well expect, She-Wolf is a miserably gruesome watch, with much of the torture that's shown looking pretty authentic, thanks to the filmmakers only showing what they could technically accomplish, and implying the rest. When making the follow-up, which brought Ilsa to 1970s Saudi Arabia, the filmmakers toned down much of the disturbing content in an effort to seek an audience that wasn't comprised entirely of weirdos and perverts. But they still had to appeal to, y'know, weirdos and perverts, because it was still a film about a big-breasted, often-nude Teutonic blonde torturing people in ways that were occasionally erotic. While many consider this mixture of interests to be a failure, I'm of the opinion that the producers of Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks managed to create an atmosphere of camp which both the original film and this film's followup, Ilsa, Tigress of Siberia, were sorely lacking. This is, generally speaking, a feel-good exploitation movie, where it's just one bit of nonsense happening after another. It grows on you after a while.
Ilsa is now the lieutenant of a powerful Middle Eastern crime lord, El Sharif. El Sharif deals both in human trafficking and in drugs, and he and Ilsa's activities have caused them to be investigated by an international commission led by Commander Adam Scott and a pudgy, wimpy German dude named Dr. Kaiser. The pair have a spy planted in El Sharif's palace but she is captured and tortured before they arrive. Despite knowing that the two are spies, Ilsa falls for Commander Scott when he turns out to be a regular sex machine. Eventually her relationship with him causes El Sharif to sentence her to molestation at the hands of a leprous beggar whom she had flogged at the start of the movie. This causes her to help out a group of rebels seeking to oust El Sharif and replace him with the legitimate ruler of this region, his nephew Prince Ali. In the end Ilsa is betrayed by Ali and thrown in his dungeons to await a hideous fate.
I had to piece together aspects of this plot over multiple viewings, because as far as director Edmonds is concerned, story is as secondary and incidental as a hillbilly's napkins at an all-you-can-eat barbecue buffet. No, we're here to see sleaze, and they are quite insistent on pouring on that sleaze whenever they can. Gore, dismemberment, torture, cannibalism, pedophilia, and rape are all key themes, though unlike She-Wolf none of it is brought "too far." For all that means. For example, they may talk about letting rats feast on someone's vaginal tissues, but they don't show it. We still get a girl whose breasts are crushed in a vice (which is actually a lot funnier than it sounds) and of course there are the women whose vaginas are outfitted with proximity mines. These mines are tested, by the way, by "the love machine"--a piston-driven mechanical arm that ends with an immaculate pewter dildo. (Might not want to use that too much, pewter can be real nasty on the skin I've heard.) Legit gross-out points to the scene where a girl's legs are eaten by ants--and then there's the guy who buys one of the girls, but says over a pair of pliers, "I don't like the scrape of teeth..."
Dr. Kaiser's arc in this movie is, um. Interesting. On the drive to El Sharif's palace he says, "I hope they do not give me...a sheep's eye. I have been all over the Arab world and it is a common gift to give to foreign guests. But they are disgusting, and I do not know if I could eat another one." Then of course El Sharif feeds him "the eye of [his] most beautiful sheep"--Kaiser's spy. Later, El Sharif sends an underage male prostitute to Kaiser's room, and despite initial resistance, there is every indication that he ended up taking him up on his offer! It's equal parts horrifying and comical, because despite its implications, it's so blatantly glanced over that it feels like a background gag! I have no idea what to make of this. I think it's best I move on. It is noteworthy that the same actor played a Nazi General in She-Wolf of the SS who commanded Ilsa to give him a golden shower. So he's always been a class act.
I don't really even know if I can call this film racist, because while it seems to assert that Arabs are vicious and have a propensity for human trafficking, it's not really something that's specifically dwelled on besides the provision of the setting. There are local people fighting El Sharif for presumably noble purposes, and it's not like the white Europeans are much better, with Dr. Kaiser being a pedophile, Commander Scott leaving Ilsa to die after sleeping with her, and Ilsa being, well...Ilsa. The sleaze is universal, and frankly, after watching movies like The Sheik and The Barbarian, this movie is pretty fair in its treatment of Arab folk. Though that's not saying much.
If you want uncut sleaze as only the '70s can deliver it, this is the film to watch. It's the one Ilsa movie I've bothered to go back to, and despite the change in tone, it is the most watchable of all of them in terms of content and lack of boredom. There's always something happening--whether you like it or not.
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