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Brooks roasts Mein Kampf as the dreadful libretto it is while Syberberg imagines Der Führer as a smoking sphincter, and then there's Dyanne Thorne in kommandant cap and unbuttoned swastikas as the grindhouse elucidation of Brecht's "bitch in heat." The pneumatic fräulein is a diesel-fueled wanton dilated out of Russell's Mahler, an abyss forever looking to be plugged. The prisoner camp is sterilization farm, gruesome laboratory and cardboard Playboy manse, she runs it "for the cause of medical research." Gyno-abuse reigns, the bloodier and more pubic the better: Women are whipped, boiled and mangled with such gusto that even the Mengele manqué (George "Buck" Flower) sheepishly asks for less, less. "The strong one" (Maria Marx) is the defiant Jewess picked to embody Ilsa's theory on how much torture the female body can stand, the General (Richard Kennedy) contemplates the gory results and arrives at Major Bergmann's conclusion of "superior race" from Roma, Città Aperta. (A golden shower from the grimacing Valkyrie follows.) On the masculine front, the Yankee fuck-machine (Gregory Knoph) and the vengeful castratto (Tony Mumolo) realize that the uprising must start in the warden's boudoir, and raid accordingly. How to speak of the unspeakable? A thousand miles from the Kapo tracking shot that so disgusted Rivette and Daney, Don Edmonds insists on monstrous images for monstrous history—a moral position in spite of itself. A degraded pop document about degraded representation, an excoriating text too fittingly scratched on crumbling Hogan's Heroes sets. Next stop, imperialism and Mesopotamia (Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks). With Nicolle Riddell, Jo Jo Deville, Sandy Richman, and Rodina Keeler.
--- Fernando F. Croce |