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Creating the Perfect EVIL Race Takes Needless Amounts of Surgery and a Good Pair of Balls! “S.S. Experiment Love Camp” reviewed! (88 Films / 4K UHD and Standard Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“S.S. Experiment Love Camp” 4K and Blu-ray is Ripe for the Taking!

Nazi officer Colonel von Kleiben heads a concentration camp where he experiments of young Jewish and Russian female prisoners.  His experiments bore through the encampment lot with unconventional reproductive system surgery for the good of and in the name of purifying the Aryan race, experimentations that also including nonconsensual sexual activities between the women captives and the top physical specimens of the Nazi ranks.  Kleiben’s masked, real intentions are to practice for his own sake in a testicle transplant after a Russian woman castrates him during his attempted raping of her during conflict.  Woman after woman is sacrificed for the surgeon’s rigorous rehearsal by having their uteruses removed and replaced by another and when they expire on the table, their corpses are discarded into the camp’s incinerating ovens.  One Nazi solider is earmarked to be Kleiben’s hope to be whole again and uses the soldier’s affections toward a female prisoner to gain power and control in coercing him blindly into the experiment. 

If pleasure seeking banned films from certain sovereign states, then perhaps “S.S. Experiment Love Camp” should be on your short list.  The 1976 Nazisploitation film from Italy depicts a semblance of torture simulations used from Hitler’s Reich and lays the groundwork for total absurdity with a plot coursed with nonsense motivation at the disadvantage of a minority group under the threat of torture and death.  Also known as “Captive Women II:  Orgies of the Damned,” as more of a sequel in the collective Naziploitation subgenre popular in the 70’s, or most widely known as simply “S.S. Experiment,” the film is from the “Django the Bastard” and “Kill Django… Kill First” director Sergio Garrone, who co-wrote the script alongside “The Weapon, the Hour, & the Motive” co-screenwriter Vinicio Marinuci.  The Società Europea Films Internazionali Cinematografica produced the video nasty venture and expressed no regret the depictions of Nazi terror with the continuation of the subgenre by producing “S.S. Camp 5:  Women’s Hell” as well as other rape-inclined exploitation, such as “Mandinga” between master and plantation slaves and the caged women narrative of “Barbed Wire Dolls.”  

Sifting through the atrocious Nazi experiments, the unabashed sum of nudity, and the ridiculously selfish plot of one Colonel’s lengths to restore his manhood, “S.S. Experiment Love Camp” has a handful of mainstay principals key to the premise’s perpetuation encircled around Colonel Kleiben’s clandestine reasons to willingly and uncompassionately order a new type of surgical procedure on innocent civilian women prisoners.  Played by the square jawed, blonde haired Italian Giorgio Cerioni, who after “S.S. Experiment Love Camp” went on a string of playing a woman abusing Nazi in nazisploitation films between ’76 and ’77 with “Deported Women of the SS Special Section,” “SS Camp:  Women’s Hell,”  “The Red Nights of the Gestapo,” Kleiben’s a stoic, behind-the-scenes force and Cerioni dons the decadence evil well behind German medals and sense of false soldier duty as he works both the known to Kleinben Jewish world class surgeon Dr. Steiner (Attilio Dottesio, “The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine”) pretending to be German and Kleiben’s targeted German solider Helmet (Mircha Carven, “Death Will Have Your Eyes”) sought for his textbook testicles.  Dottesio’s Dr. Steiner is a conflicted man brought to do surgery on his fellow Jews that will result in their certain death and while he knows this, and it weighs on his conscious, the stuck doctor keeps himself from being exposed from other than the Colonel who knows and exploits his little secret for advantage; Dottesio wears a burden upon the surgeon’s face but doesn’t do enough to provide the body language of resistance in being doctor death against his will.  Yet, Carven wholly depicts an outlier amongst the typical German national who rather read books than shoot the sexual gab of his countrymen, which is in itself a nice slice of visual irony with the Nazi being known for burning literature.  Carven keeps Helmut relatively quiet, reserved, and a watcher from afar, noticing blonde prisoner Mirelle as the two fall for each other at the moment of locking eyes.  Carven and Paolo Corazzi (“SS Camp:  Women’s Hell”) sizzle with chemistry that’s left pieced too far apart and with not enough relationship context toward their insta-love connection.  There are other peripheral dialogue characters that keep the story spicy in their debauchery with Serafino Profumo (“Escape from Hell”) who had that perfect thin mustache and bald and stout look that makes him a formidable slimeball as the Nazi Seargent, Patrizia Melega (“SS Camp:  Women’s Hell”) as Dr. Steiner’s sadistic lesbian colleague Dr. Renke, and a handful of German soldiers to be the plug to the female prisoner outlet, such as with Matilda Dall’Agilio, Agnes Kalpagos, and Almina De Sanzio.  One of the more details to gripe about the cast is that they’re all Italian bronze that dilutes the allusion of the nationalities their portraying. 

“S.S. Experiment Love Camp” comes with a smidgen of notoriety having been banned in select western European countries over its depiction of violence, especially at the hands of Nazis, and its controversial poster of a naked woman crucified upside.  To this day,  Garrone’s film is still shocking and abhorrent with the aforesaid but also the emotion confliction etched into characters like Dr. Steiner or Helmut who must make a choice, weighing the balance of self-preservation over the salvation and safety of others, and that’s what really drives this nazisploitation to have tremendous impact in an absurdist plot of colonel cajones.  Garrone favors a more realistic approach to the tortures and horrors of a Nazi concentration camp by including close reenactments to their torture methods and Garrone also lingers ever so uncomfortably on the complete discard of corpses into the oven without any dialogue, expression on any faces, and even adds a surrealist glance into the oven of the bodies moving, in an artful dance way, when the flames are ignited.  There’s also the given, often gratuitous nudity that accompanies most nazisploitation films and while nudity usually arouses, stimulation stalls under the barbarism that’s present in the air, the context of which the sex acts are being conducted for, and the outcome of ghastly blood and sinew that follows to the end of the mortal coil.  There’s sensuality between lovers and transactions between prostitution and paying customers but even those innocuous instances rapid degrade into unnerving anticipation. 

88 Films’ new 2-disc, dual format 4K UHD Blu-ray and Standard Blu-ray set is a marvel of physical media engineering.  The 4K UHD is HVEC encoded and presented in Dolby Vision HDR10, 2160p ultra high-definition, and stored on a BD100 while the Standard Blu-ray is AVC encoded with a 1080p resolution on a BD50, both brand new 4K remastered transfers stem from the original negatives and displayed in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio.  Between the two formats, there’s identical visuals to the naked eye but the 4K UHD does provide a slightly sharper image that has more an immersive pop when comparing the two formats side-by-side.  Colors are rich with a complete hue saturation that isn’t present in previous, more muted DVD or other Blu-ray editions.  Darker scenes have an intention rough quality about them as well as the concrete and unpigmented concentration camp as intended by director Sergio Carrone to put forth as much realism as possible.  No identifiable issues with compression as the picture quality looks clean through-and-through with blacks retaining an inky bide, grading remains consistent and stable, and the minutiae of fabric and skin color doesn’t contest with any ambiguity as Nazi uniforms distill a gray cotton-wool blend, you can also touch the little fuzzies on their garb, and the stubble and sweat greatly show the length of detail on strained and tense faces during torture or combat scenes.  The formats both have the same audio mixes:  an ADR English 2.0 LPCM and an ADR Italian 2.0 LPCM.  The uncompressed audio brings an unfiltered and considerate quality to the front channels with clean and clear dialogue under a diminutive amount of interference and an ambience track that puts its best foot forward, or rather the front, with distinct, sundry range of electronic voltage, machine gun fire, and the surgical slippery stickiness of organs being handled.  The new translated English subtitles are paced well and have no grammatical or misspelling issues.  Special features include a feature tandem audio commentary with Italian film experts Eugenio Ercolani and Nanni Cobretti.  Plus, Italian audio only interviews subtitled in English, including an interview with the late director Sergio Garrone Sadistically Yours, Sergio G., an interview with music historian Pierpaolo de Sanctis SSadist Sound, an interview with editor Eugenio Alabiso The Alibiso Dynasty (a back cover misspelling error perhaps?), an interview with cinematographer Maurizio Centini Framing Exploitation.  The special features conclude with the Italian title credits for the opening and closing of the film and the original Italian trailer.  88 Films and Joel Robison bring a newly illustrated, censored and uncensored cover art with the censored version on the rigid dual-sided slipcover that’s crazily detailed in all its tempestuous glory with the backside depicting the original poster art of a reverse crucified naked woman, both images are impressed with a pop-pulp coloring and chrome effect. The uncensored version lies within the plastic slip of the black 4K Amaray with a reverse side depicting also the original cover in its more traditional coloring of the horrendous and country-banning portrayal.  Inserted on the left interior is an uncensored illustrative cover, of the original poster art, atop of a 11-page English essay from Tim Murray entitled “Nazisploitation, Punks, and The Nasties…”  The Not rated, 95-minute film is region free for global player use. 

Last Rites: If nazisploitation or Eurosleaze just isn’t what tickles your movie mania, any cinephile can appreciate the pristine transfer, the raw and uncompressed audio, and its physical accoutrements that rise “S.S. Experiment Love Camp” into a must-have release.

“S.S. Experiment Love Camp” 4K and Blu-ray is Ripe for the Taking!

EVIL Just Wants Their Heads Back! “The House of Lost Souls” reviewed! (Cauldron Films / Standard Edition Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Don’t Lose Your Head in “The House of Lost Souls” on Blu-ray!

A group of geological fossil hunters spend their time researching in what is supposed to be the ideal climate of the Italian mountains but inclement, rainy weather has produced all kinds of inconvenient havoc and challenges that have slowed down their darting research.  Mudslides caused by the constant rain makes mountain roads impassable.  They encounter such a mudslide impasse on the way to their next research grounds and do an emergency detour to a remote, vacant hotel to spend the night out of the cold damp night.  Greeted without a single word from their unusual host, they’re given room keys get some rest before the next day’s hike up the cleared mountain road, resuming course toward the fossil hunt, but the geologists quickly discover something isn’t right with the hotel that has a dark history.  Trapped inside the abandoned hotel, murderous spirits appear and aggressively seek more souls to fill the hotel’s vacancy.

The fourth and final entry in The Houses of Doom series produced from Italian television in 1989, “The House of Lost Souls” is the second Umberto Lenzi (“Nightmare City,” “Ghosthouse”) film of the Lucio Fucli and Lenzi stint from the coproduction of Dania Film and Reteitalia with producers Massimo Manasee and Marco Grillo Spina, behind Lenzi’s “The House of Witchcraft” and Fucli’s “The House of Clocks” and “The Sweet House of Horrors.”  Lenzi also created the story concept and wrote the script that feels like a blend of the American-produced, supernatural thrillers “House on Haunted Hill” and “13 Ghosts” but with more bloodshed, color encoded and has that Italian violence flair too graphic for public television.  Italian-titled “La casa delle anime errant,” the film is also a production of the National Cinematografica that produced other Italian Umberto Lenzi cult classics “Seven Bloodstained Orchids,” “Eaten Alive,” and “Cannibal Ferox.” 

Trapped inside the gruesome lore of the hotel’s deadly history and as the focus of the overall dilemma is the group of geology students and friends, plus one adolescent boy tagging along with his older brother.  Further more concentrated on inside the group is Carla who’s been diagnosed, yes – medically identified, as having clairvoyancy with her psychic nightmare visions, sporadic and jumbled frightening images that yet don’t make sense, but guess what?  To no surprise, they will soon! Stefania Orsola Garello, who went on to have a role in the Antoine Fuqua’s period epic “King Arthur,” played the third eye sensorial Carla investigating the hotel’s sordid past along with quasi-boyfriend Kevin, donned by “The Slumber Party Massacre” American actor Joseph Alan Johnson.  Johnson is the extent of international casting, unless you count the hotel host, or rather head ghost who we’ll touch upon later, and the distinct facial features and the significant height of Japan-born Hal Yamanouchi (“2019:  After the Fall of New York,” “The Wolverine”) as a zombified Hare Krishna ghost, one of his many Italian roles while residing within the country since mid-1970s.  The remaining fill out with Garello countrymen counterparts with Matteo Gazzolo (“Specters”) as the group leader, Constantino Melon (“Who Killed Pasolin?”i as the leader’s little brother Giancarlo, and young lovers Guido and Mary, played by Gianluigi Fogacci and Laurentina Guidotti (“Dark Glasses”), as the victimized geologists being hunted down and tricked into slaughter by, too, victims of a hotel proprietor madman, the key perpetrator to all this madness but reduced to only a reflected role through Carla’s flashbacks.  Aside from Yamanochi, there are a handful of former guests and voiceless ghosts, some stuck in a bloodied stasis at the time of their death, some pristine as if nothing happened at all, haunting and hunting down the warm bodies, including Scottish actor Charles Borromel (“Absurd”), Marina Reiner, Dino Jaksic (“Little Flames”), and Beni Cardoso (“Barbed Wire Dolls”).

A different ghost house picture than Lucio Fulci’s “The Sweet House of Horrors’ but still contributes the same inhuman intensity of one person (or one ghost person) can against another person.  Yet, for Umberto Lenzi, his story thrives through the house’s, or rather hotel’s, ability to dispatch the innocent with household items.  Decapitating dumbbell waiters, a cabinet with a ripping chainsaw blade, a head-eating washing machine, and almost even a walk-in freezer become the tools of fatal terror.  Lenzi depicts little in the way of person-on-person violence with only implied deaths at the hands of another person; instead, the personification of ghost house miscellany is definitely more exciting, very unexpected, and a lot of fun to watch the hapless have their heads fall prey to household items that are supposed to be helpful, not hurtful.  Perhaps, Lenzi’s intentions were to explore the negative dependency of gadgets or appliances and how easily we’re allured by their safe nature marketing and profound assistance to our daily lives that it makes us easy targets with our guard down.  Lenzi also doesn’t believe in nepotism when casting young actors as the two child characters become fair game for the house’s thirst for slaughtered souls, dooming them with an equal risk to a brutal death.  The storied hotel’s notoriety serves as the vessel that drives ghosts to go berserk but the story’s miss is bringing back to the killer hotel owner who chopped the heads off of his guests to rob them, stowing them away to hide his transgressions, only for them to be the root of the ghosts’ reason for revenge against any and all who trespass through the lobby.  As the origin of the ordeal, the omitted owner serves as just flashback fodder that fuels the floor-by-floor fiends. 

Spiders, skeletons, and severed heads make up, but are not limited to, Umbero Lenzi’s “The House of Lost Souls” now on Blu-ray as the last The Houses of Doom release from Cauldron Films.  Presented in the European widescreen aspect ratio 1.66:1, the new 2K scan was restored and released uncut from the original film negative, inviting a clean and beautifully vibrant pictures for a dark, haunted hotel feature.  However, like with many Lenzi pictures of the time, the final product has softer image detail that’s brilliant for producing color but relaxes the stringent textures to a still better than mild palpability that’s more than enough beyond the bar of image quality.  There are no compression anomalies to speak of as Cauldron Films, again, produces an excellent high-definition encoding, much like with the other three Houses of Doom installments.  Audio setup includes an encoded English and Italian 2.0 mono with optional English subtitles for the English track and forced English subtitles on the Italian.  The ADR hits and misses the mark with vocal ranges seemingly too mismatch with the actors, such as with Massimo who looks like a tenor but has a bass voice, or the boy Giancarlo with an unsettling falsetto and you can lipread those who are actually speaking English compared to those who are not native English speakers.  The overall track has no compression issues with a powerful dialogue projection and an adequate ambience that hits every keynote to bring the composition together.  “Demons” and “Tenebrae” composer Claudio Simonetti produces a charming little synch rock trap-threat and of a score that becomes essential to “The House of Lost Souls” snare and stalk of the geologists caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Special features include Cauldron Films’ exclusive interviews with FX artist Elio Terribili Working with Umberto and composer Claudio Simonetti The House of Rock along with two audio commentaries, one with Samm Deighan and the second with Rod Barnett and Adrian Smith, and bringing up the rear is a 2001 interview with Lenzi going through points in his lustrous independent career of exploitation, poliziotteschi, and giallo contributions to Italian cinema in The Criminal Cinema of Umberto Lenzi.  The not rated, region free Cauldron Films standard Blu-ray release, encased in a clear Scanova Blu-ray case with original Matthew Therrien and Eric Lee illustration cover art and logo design, has a runtime of 87 minutes.

Last Rites: That’s a wrap on the fourth and last film on The Houses of Doom collection from Cauldron Films and it’s a beauty scanned onto a new high-definition transfer that brings doomed television features back to life, to live again, to breathe its hot breath of death all over a new generation of viewer unfamiliar to Lucio Fulci, Umberto Lenzi, and even Italian horror!

Don’t Lose Your Head in “The House of Lost Souls” on Blu-ray!

A Eurotrash Mosaic of EVIL. “Jailhouse Wardress” reviewed! (MVD Visual / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Jailhouse Wardress” now on Blu-ray!

After the fall of the Nazi Reich post-World War II, one of the more cruel SS-Officers, Muller, is dispatched to South America where he establishes a women’s prison camp and appoints a likeminded, lesbian female warden with strict punitive measures if the inmates don’t fall in line and follow the rules or instruction.  While Muller governs the area, disorder courses its way through the camp when a plea letter to the state, describing in detail the horrors inflicted upon the women at the camp, such as torture and private cells for sex with the inmates, is intercepted before leaving the premises.  At the same time, a young, newly processed inmate, who had killed her rapist uncle in self-defense, plans a daring except.  The once well-oil authoritarian sex prison quickly becomes unraveled by unruly prisoners who’ve had enough with the eternal inhumane debauchery and with the exterior assistance of Jewish liberators and assassins, freedom is all but knocking at the door.   

Hot off the heels of Neon Eagle Video’s Blu-ray release of “Kill Butter Kill,” a Taiwanese rape-revenge narrative that’s been jumbled up with re-edits to engender a whole new structure, we dip into another Blu-ray remix, soaring from Asiatic East to the Western Europe with “Jailhouse Wardress,” a Alain W. Steeve hardly directed women-in-prison schlocker pieced together from three earlier Nazisploitation and caged-women exploitation features with barely any new footage used a binding agent to construct a concentrated concentration camp plot.  Steeve, a pseudo-surname for Alain Deruelle, a pornographic director who did helm “Cannibal Terror” under the name Alain Thierry, hodge-podges a new sordid camp exploitation picture out of already near the bottom-of-the-barrel features that sparked very little lewd cheekiness of sleazy Nazi oppression and the perversities of a hard labor with hard bodies in a women’s prison camp.  France’s Eurociné is listed as the production company but unsure if there was any company backing or shooting the new spliced-in footage since Eurociné outfitted the trio of features used to make up more than half of “Jailhouse Wardress;” these films included “Barbed Wire Dolls,” “Last Train for Hitler,” and “Elsa Fraulein SS.”

Unlike “Kill Butterfly Kill,” much of the new material shot for “Jailhouse Wardress” incorporate different actors into already established roles of the component films and with the scenes going back and forth between new and archive footage, keeping up with a fluent narrative is more difficult than said.  For instance, two different actors play Nestor; Germany’s Eric Falk (“Blue Rita”) footage from sparingly used from the “Barbed Wire Dolls” and most of Nestor’s scenes lie with X-rated and softcore French actor Didier Aubriot (“Naked Lovers,” “They Do Everything”) barking the orders and taking what he wants from the freshly instilled and scantily uniformed actresses inside the cages with Pamela Stanford (“Blue Rita”) and Nadine Pascal (“Zombie Lake”).  You can tell their scenes are newer, fresher, with more color emitting from a different film stock and camera combination compared to the brief, desaturated appearing scenes of Eric Falk who never touches the women prisoners in Beni Cardoso (“Scalps”), Lina Romay (“Female Vampire”), and Martine Stedil (“Marquise de Sade”) who bare a lot of undercarriage bush as a gratuitous rite of exploitation culture.  Much is lost not only in a re-dubbed soundtrack of the source films but what’s also lost heavily are the character attributes that left behind from the original films, such as the prison director’s (Monica Swinn, “Love Camp”) brutish lesbian demeanor with “Last Train for Hitler’s” Ingrid Schüler.  This type of devolving reshapes the characters for worst, takes away much of their cruelty and passes it along to predominantly to the newer footage of Teresa and Lola at the naked mercy of the newer Nestor.  “Jailhouse Wardress” fills out the archive and new footage German, French, and English nationals cast with Eugénie Laborde, Bob Asklöf, Michel Charrel, Peggy Markoff, Paul Muller, Sylvie Darty, Ronald Curram, Maria Cavour, and the archive presence of Jess Franco in a normal camera speed slow-motion flashback death scene as Uncle Jess in this particular feature.

“Jailhouse Wardress’s” old, new, or however you wish or feel compelled to describe the mismatched footage ultimately compromises the plot by the cut-and-paste hack job.  A slight attempt can be seen made to align new and old footage for sequence editing but without a seamless grading and more similar costuming, the events never feel in the same space, creating more a schism between the two material footages rather unifying for a common narrative.  Subplots, such as the imposter prison doctor or the Jewish hit on the Governor, are more prominent than the actual foundational plot so there’s a hindrance of uncertainty to what should be the main premise, including the Nazi angle that seems to vanish without much of a fuss, and the brain works in overtime trying to follow one scheme to then have to jump to another without traversing that pivotal straight line that connects the dots, leading to a complete mental shutdown due to exhaustion and confusion.  What doesn’t help matters is the arterial lifeforce, the purposeful exhibition of exploitation, the whole reason why we watch through our subconscious sadistic eyes women become slaves to ruthless perverts, is severely castrated on a couple’s sexploitation scale.  Much of what is shown is solo work; women lying in bed bottomless or are stripped nude for only a few moments of touching or taking by force without much of a fight.    

The ”Jailhouse Wardress” receives the high-definition Blu-ray treatment from our friends at MVD Visual as part of their MVD Classics label.  The AVC encoded, 1080p, BD25 suits the patchwork Alain Deruelle (and Jess Franco in archive footage only) feature.  While the 2K scan looks pretty darn good for a schlocky eurotrash pastiche, the print used is a gut-punch to videophiles hard-pressed on image quality and preservation.  Presented in a more consolidated pixel count of 1.42 aspect ratio, the print, or at least the “Barbed Wire Dolls” was originally in the European aspect ratio of 1.66:1 as you can see the letterboxing during the titles and they eventually expand out, stretching the image.  The print is in rough shape in its spliced up format with its seam-showing different graded parts that creates a back-and-forth inconsistency.  “Barbed Wire Dolls” is shades darker, grittier, and less definable than inserted shoots.  There’s an abundance of print damage too from frame damage to vertical scratches, mostly early into the runtime.  With the inconsistent picture quality, grain never looks healthy as the amount fluctuates and, often times, becomes more an interference of higher contrast exposure in darker portions.  Both audio options are in an uncompressed PCM 2.0 mono format and you listen in with dubbed English or in the combined original and dubbed French.  Not the flawless audio to ever come across but neither is the worst but what’s inlaid is untouched mix that contains all the hissing, crackles, and pops that blight the audio thread.  Yet, dialogue remains intelligible, thanks mainly to the dub work I suppose, but if you don’t mind Pamela Stanford’s sounding like Smeagol than this audio dub is for you.  English subtitles are optionally available and they synch well enough with a couple of grammatical errors.  The theatrical trailer for “Jailhouse Wardress” is the only direct bonus content available with other eurotrash trailers accompanying.  The packaging is quite eye-catching of an illustrated Nazi-patronized burlesque show front cover inside the traditional Blu-ray Amaray case.  The back cover has the more confounding composite artwork with still captures from neither of the films used and stock image marketing that have little or nothing to do with the film itself.  Inside content is barebones with the BD25 disc stamped with the same front cover art.  The Blu-ray comes not rated, region free, and has a merciful 75-minute runtime. 

Last Rites:  Exploitation fans will find “Jailhouse Wardress” lacking that je ne sais quoi.  The interlocking of multiple prints is like unwelcome visible scar tissue, glad it’s there to heal the wound but unsightly to look at.  As for filling in one’s gap in the Naziploitation and Women-in-Prison collection, “Jailhouse Wardress” isn’t a must-have main ingredient for the diehard fans but for an aficionado completist, MVD supplies the goods with a Hi-Def option.

“Jailhouse Wardress” now on Blu-ray!