heaves.
The atrocities of World War II have enlivened the imaginations of more than one filmmaker (and consequently, a cross-section of fans). "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS," "Men Behind the Sun" and "Salo, 120 Days of Sodom" are but three torture movies set against the backdrop of The Big One and in fact, these meisterwerks are only a sampling of what appears to be an entire sub-genre of movies.
"Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS" allegedly takes place in Germany (although it was actually shot on the old "Hogan's Heroes" set in the hills near Los Angeles) at the end of World War II. The anti-heroine of the title (played by Dyanne Thorne) is a sex-hungry wolfette who has yet to be satisfied by the denizens of unworthy POWs she takes into her bed. Ilsa's day job is torturing and vivisecting the women of the concentration camp she presides over, which makes for plenty of shots of naked female bodies, most of them bloodied and/or mutilated, writhing in agony. The reason for this, we find out, is Ilsa's vague "theory" that women are more torture-resistant than men.
The "plot" really gets going when an �bermensch referred to only as "Herr General" shows up to inspect the camp. After a banquet (which features a naked girl strung up in a noose over a melting block of ice as a centerpiece), Herr General opts to sample Ilsa's sexual favors in the form of "golden showers," which, believe it or not, disgusts our heroine. She craves a real man.
Enter "Wolfe," an interred American who also turns out to be a supreme stud, the only one amongst Ilsa's sex-toys who proves to be worthy of her, shall we say, talents (read: who is not castrated and left to die post-coitus). Wolfe, naturally, falls in love with one of the female prisoners and stages a camp-wide revolt, which appears so easy one wonders why it wasn't tried until the third act. Hmmm.
Though the filmmakers take a flying stab at having a "point" (the graphic in the opening moments of the show features a warning about the extreme violence, plus a "lesson" on what these barbaric acts mean to us today), "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS" was made solely to titillate perverts & pain freaks. Name a perversion and you'll find here -- everything from the aforementioned "golden showers" scene, foot fetishes and onanism of the worst kind.
Even as the filmmakers hamfistedly attempt to move the "plot" along, they can't help but throw more fetishes into the mix. You'll see female prisoners (breasts bared) shooting machine guns, getting shot, all the way down to the pi�ce de r�sistance in which Ilsa snaps like a twig under the threat of torture, which simultaneously blows her "theory" and offers the viewer the come-uppance promised to her bad self from the start.
Despite the preamble, this is not a cautionary tale and if you're looking for meaning, look elsewhere. But it is a camp classic with enough great moments of bad dialog and acting to almost make up for its wanton exploitativenes. It should also be noted that "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS" is among a string of "Ilsa" movies, which includes "Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks," "Ilsa, Tigress of Siberia" and "Ilsa, the Wicked Warden."
"Men Behind The Sun" is a Chinese government-funded propaganda movie which takes place in a Manchuria-based Japanese concentration camp at the end of World War II (Asian theatre). The story is told through the eyes of a group of young cadets stationed at the camp to learn to be soldiers. Though this camp exists covertly and its primary purpose is human experimentation on the Chinese prisoners interred there, the cadets are the last to find this out. One of the boys is coaxed by the evil Doctor-San into luring a local Manchurian boy he's befriended to the lab. The local boy is immediately stripped and sedated, and as the Japanese cadet watches in horror, the boy's still-beating heart is removed from his young body.
As the cadets are shown more and more experiments, the eye of the camera grows colder and colder. Unlike "Ilsa," "Men Behind The Sun" is not about titillation and it doesn't come off as make-believe. These scenes of prolonged torture and death were made to be remembered (I suspect that real cadavers were used for many of the sequences, including the ultra-gross pressure chamber experiment). "Men Behind The Sun" reminds all of us of the barbarism which flourished in World War II. China will certainly never forget it. As the legend that opens the movie states, "Friendship is friendship... History is history."
Rounding out the Torture Triple Feature is Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salo, 120 Days of Sodom." Unlike the previous two movies, "Salo" makes no stabs at conventional plot or "theme." In fact, the only exposition at all was in the liner notes of the box it came in.
Allegedly based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade, and updated to (mais d'acord!) the end of World War II (Italian theatre), the film follows four former Fascists on their merry way to a castle in the middle of nowhere where they're joined by four former prostitutes and a menagerie of local peasant stock. In the confines of the castle, the ex-prostitutes spin yarns intended to inspire the ex-men-of-distinction to perform their deepest, most depraved sexual fantasies on the hapless boys and girls they've kidnapped, including sodomy, beatings, mutilation, S&M, B&D and a sh**-banquet. "Salo" is a perversity-o-rama.
The last act shows the final days of the retreat, after every sexual perversion has been explored. As each of the men performs his own version of hell in an outdoor arena, the others watch through a telescope. Pasolini frames these shots of torture and death through a telescope-shaped lens, as though we, the audience, are also the voyeurs here, not only watching the action but an active part of it. If nothing else, the film succeeds on this level -- inspiring the guilty nausea of a fully-glimpsed crime against nature.
Far more interesting than the movie itself is the fate of the filmmaker. Aligned with the Italian new wave but always at the outermost edge of it, Pasolini scandalized Rome when he made "Salo." It was declared obscene by the courts and criticized from every side. Shortly after its completion, Pasolini was bludgeoned to death by a seventeen year-old would-be conquest, then run over by his own hijacked Alfa Romeo. What kind of crazy karma is that?
Twenty years later, "Salo, 120 Days of Sodom" is still shocking and probably the most depraved of the three films reviewed here. While it's a trial to watch, it's also a relic from an era in which art could shock, a power it scarcely holds anymore. Pasolini may end up being the patron saint of the same generation that distanced itself from him when he was alive.
The violence and perversity depicted in these three movies are not for everyone and certainly not for the faint of heart. Each takes torture to varied extremes of voyeurism, from titillation to a slap on the wrist and finally to droll objectivism. Of the three, I can only recommend "Men Behind The Sun," which presents the only sincere effort to comment on the severe inhumanity of which the human race is capable, and not just shine a light on it.
heaves.