Greta - Haus ohne Männer (1977)

... aka: Greta, la donna bestia
... aka: Greta, the Mad Butcher
... aka: Greta, the Sadist
... aka: Greta, the Torturer
... aka: Ilsa: Absolute Power
... aka: Ilsa: Ultimate Perversion
... aka: Wanda the Wicked Warden

Directed by:
Jesus Franco

Dyanne Thorne is back as a sadistic, domineering bitch who gets her jollies torturing naked young women in this sleazy Swiss / West German cash-in on Thorne's highly successful Ilsa series. Despite Thorne's character being named Greta in this one, the film was released in the U.S. as Ilsa, the Wicked Warden for obvious reasons, but elsewhere as Wanda, the Wicked Warden for reasons that aren't quite so obvious. After several minutes of gratuitous full frontal female nudity in a groupie shower scene as well as Thorne showing off her spectacular figure in a bubble bath, Rosa Phillips (Esther Studer) manages to escape into the jungle. A few guys armed with rifles head out after her. Rosa slits one's throat before being shot in the back. She manages to hide out in a cave until the coast in clear and then hobbles along to the doorstep of Dr. Milton Arcos (Franco) and passes out. He brings her inside, where she deliriously pleads for "No more shock treatment!" Greta and her guards soon show up to take the girl back to where she escaped from and claim she dies two weeks later, supposedly of a rare blood disease.

Greta runs the Los Palomas Clinic, which was "established for treating sexual deviations in women; harmless abnormalities such as nymphomania, lesbianism, prostitution..." The institute is highly secretive and is run exactly like a maximum security prison.... only worse! No visitors are allowed inside, no patients are allowed outside and the entire staff seems to be in on making the patients' lives as miserable as possible. Dr. Arcos holds a press conference questioning the clinic and asking for an investigation into their practices, but all the red tape is holding things up. Abbie (Tania Busselier), Rosa's vengeful sister, doesn't have the patience to wait and gets Dr. Arcos to write up a false diagnosis to have her committed to Los Palomas (under the name "Abolina Garcia"). Her first day there, she's stripped by a pair of butch guards, who make fun of her small breasts and "pubic nest" being infested with crabs and then spray her face, crotch and ass with a fire hose. She's then given a short button-up, but no panties, and is taken to the dorms.

The clinic forbids the use of real names and if you slip they brand the number on your "ta-tas" lest you forget. Abbie is called "Number 41" and then goes to meet the other patients. One girl won't stop singing, another cries constantly and "Number 14" (Peggy Markoff) has anger issues, furiously knits and claims to have been a man at one point in her life. The queen bee of the dorms is the tough dyke Juana (Lina Romay), who bullies all of the other women and has her way with whoever she wants. But while Juana may be at the top of the pecking order among the patients, she's still at the whim of Greta, who forces her to give her massages and then uses her as a human pincushion. Still, Juana gets special privileges for the arrangement, like cigarettes and none of the harsher tortures. After getting into a cat fight with Juana for refusing to wash her "cholo" in shower, Abbie is taken to Greta, who immediately shoots acid into her vagina with a syringe, gives her shock treatment and then chains her up in solitary confinement.

The plot ultimately seems to be trying to make some kind of political statement (some of the prisoners kept in solitary in the basement are revolutionaries; a terrorist is assassinated and check the graffiti on the bathroom walls) but it's so scattershot and unfocused no one's really going to care, least of all the target audience for something like this. To up the sleaze quotient, naked ladies in the basement are whipped and administered electric shocks to the nipples, Romay's character makes a woman lick her "culo" (ass) right after she gets off the toilet and Greta occasionally likes to bring in depraved male sex offenders to rape some of the women. Her assistant, Dr. Rego (Eric Falk), tapes these sessions and then sells them to a collector, who's wanting more and more extreme stuff and offers to pay top dollar for a snuff film. The dialogue is often hilariously crude and raunchy ("Piss off you blonde bitch and you can take your brother, jack him off and shove him up your stinking ass!") and this is much more entertaining than the director's other 'captive women' efforts.

Franco's WOMEN WITHOUT INNOCENCE (1977), filmed the same year for the same producer and featuring many of the same actresses, had an identical setting (a nuthouse full of sexually confused women) and recycled many of the scenes and characters from this one.

There's an interesting commentary track on the Anchor Bay DVD with Thorne and husband Howard Mauer, who plays a small role as an officer. Both have (mostly) nice things to say about the director but she states she had a no frontal nudity clause in her contract but Franco snuck and filmed some with her anyway and that he pretty much just made all of this up as they went along. Apparently, this was also pitched to its star as a true story about real-life snuff filmmakers working out of a psychiatric clinic (which ended up being just a tiny subplot in the finished product) and that she had to change her hair color to red so people wouldn't assume that she was playing Ilsa again (though that ended up happening anyway thanks to several later title changes).

★★1/2

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975)

Directed by:
Don Edmonds

Because of the subject matter and the fact it's all done in such an exploitative way, producer "Herman Traeger" / David F. Friedman felt compelled to justify this films existence in an opening disclaimer: "The film you are about to see is based upon documented fact. The atrocities shown were conducted as "medical experiments" in special concentration camps throughout Hitler's Third Reich. Although these crimes against humanity are historically accurate, the characters depicted are composites of notorious Nazi personalities; and the events portrayed have been condenced into one locality for dramatic purposes. Because of its shocking subject matter, the film is restricted to adult audiences only. We dedicate this film with the hope that these heinous crimes will never occur again." Nice try. This sleazefest is simply in very bad taste and that's that. Its mix of graphic gore and violence, gratuitous full female nudity, sex and torture galore turned this film into a huge money-maker and several official sequels and numerous copies (mostly from Italy) followed. It also turned buxom star Dyanne Thorne into an icon of sadism and female dominance, which is supposedly about the polar opposite of the real-life Thorne, who now works as an ordained minister! Despite her newfound career, Mrs. Thorne was kind enough to provide good-natured commentary tracks for the DVD releases. Unlike many others who've done these kind of films, Thorne seems to have few regrets about her portrayal of Ilsa, so kudos to her.

Things begin with Ilsa showing off her fine form while in bed with a prisoner / lover. Not content with just using him for his stud service, Ilsa informs him that "Once a prisoner sleeps with me, he will never sleep with another woman again!" and proceeds to castrate him. The fraulein doktor runs Medical Camp 9, a concentration camp where medical experiments are conducted on the prisoners. The women are divided into two camps: the ones deemed best-looking are forced to service German troops as sex slaves and all of the others are used as test subjects in Ilsa's attempts to prove that women can withstand more pain than men. The male prisoners are forced to dig graves for the others and some are singled out to service Ilsa in bed, usually ending up emasculated in the process. Wolfe (Gregory Knopf), a blonde American POW of German descent, is actually able to satisfy the insatiable commandant so she decides to keep him around, manhood left intact. But little does she know, Wolfe really has eyes for the sweet Rosette (an unbilled Jacqueline Giroux) and is plotting, along with castrated prisoner Mario (Tony Mumolo) and others to revolt.

While some - namely those who actively seek out sick flicks - might not be too shocked by what goes down here, the vast majority of filmgoers will find this one nasty and repulsive (and possibly even offensive). The film has dated well, In fact, the grisly, almost-non-stop torture inflicted upon fully nude victims basically makes most of today's mainstream torture movies (Hostel, et al) look like episodes of 7th Heaven by comparison. Eyeballs are plucked out, toes are ripped off, maggots are put on wounds, bones are snapped and women are hung, boiled alive in a vat of bubbling water, gang raped, electrocuted with nipple clamps and electrodes placed on their privates, violated with burning hot vibrators and infected with syphylis, flesh-eating bacteria, typhoid and gangrene. Pleasant stuff this is not. Anna (Maria Marx), who unwisely talks back to Ilsa, spits in her face and refuses to show signs of fear or pain while being tortured, naturally gets it the worst. You should see what the poor girl looks like by the end of the movie!

The movie certainly isn't without its faults if one wants to get technical. There's very little plot, the acting is highly variable, the accents (at least from those who even both trying with one) are ridiculously bad, the attempts to make this feel like it's actually set in Germany are paltry (in fact, the sets from Hogan's Heroes were used) and there's so much nastiness to go around that the last ten or so minutes of breakout action (explosions, gunfights, etc.) seem almost like an afterthought. However, no one in their right mind will be watching this looking for depth and quality filmmaking, so none of that really matters. The movie is an efficiently-made smörgåsbord of sex and violence; precisely what it was intended to be and remains a must for those into this kind of stuff.

George 'Buck' Flower plays a skeezy doctor and Richard Kennedy (as "Wolfgang Roehm") plays a degenerate Nazi general who makes Ilsa piss on him. There are many uncredited sex film stars in the cast too, including Sharon Kelly (who'd later do hardcore under the name Colleen Brennan) getting whipped to death and strung up, and Uschi Digard, who surpasses even Thorne in the endowment category and dies a bloody death in a pressurized chamber. Both actresses would go to larger roles in the first Ilsa sequel: ILSA: HAREM KEEPER OF THE OIL SHEIKS (which is much more camp than the original). Flower and Kennedy both have roles in it, as well. The other Ilsa movies were Jess Franco's ILSA: THE WICKED WARDEN (which featured Thorne in a similar evil / dominant / sadistic bitch role and was originally called "Greta the Mad Torturer" but was re-titled as an Ilsa movie for U.S. release) and ILSA, THE TIGRESS OF SIBERIA (1977). Joe Blasco provided the special make-up fx.

★★★