Forgotten and derided Nazisploitation movies expose the lost power of trash cinema and put today’s neutered McMovies to shame.
Of all the overused movie clichés, the inescapable prison doesn’t get anywhere near enough scorn. I lost interest in the recent Star Wars: Andor series at the sci‑fi prison with the electrified laser floor. Don’t start me on The Dark Knight Rises or those terrible Stallone/Schwarzenegger movies. Either these prisons are inescapable, and the film ends, or it’s just a lazy cliché included to pad the run time.
Yet, this inescapable trope hits right at the heart of opposing views of what cinema can be. For Hollywood, the prison represents personal triumph, the happy ending, the overcoming of adversity: the happily ever after. For exploitation filmmakers, it’s a brutal fate you are not going to survive. It’s a clear case of feel‑good versus feel‑bad storytelling. Hollywood has given us Schindler’s List and The Shawshank Redemption. A prison-you-aren’t-going-to-escape movie would look more like Sergio Garrone’s infamous SS Experiment Love Camp.
Nazisploitation
European exploitation movies are a relatively new experience for me. The sheer amount of them is hard to imagine today, as the nature of cinema has changed in the years since their production. Good luck finding them on streaming. The Italians made gore movies; Jean Rollin and Jess Franco made everything from soft‑core women‑in‑prison epics to horror slashers. Rollin’s Zombie Lake – about zombie Nazis – is particularly bad. Franco made a version of the same script. It was worse.
Nazisploitation movies were their own niche, again ranging from the soft‑core to the gory. Ilsa: She‑Wolf of the SS is a particularly notorious mix of both. The stories are all similar: the staff of a camp experiment on mostly female prisoners, all of whom have excellent make‑up and, in the case of the non‑Nazi nudie Gefangen Frauen, painted nails. Most end with either a prisoner revolt or the SS coming in and putting an end to the perversions of the officers. Everyone dies. ‘Bleak’ hardly covers it.
Italian exploitation cinema gave us SS Experiment Love Camp (1976) and SS Camp 5: Women’s Hell (1977) – virtually indistinguishable movies with the same cast. These movies, directed by Sergio Garrone, rank highly on any list of the banned and the controversial. To some extent, these are the crowning achievements of 1970s exploitation.
Garrone’s movies are not easy viewing, nor are they celebrations of the Holocaust or those responsible for it. The reaction to them today remains moral outrage. But why? It’s not as if they are as badly made as the soft‑core movies of Rollin or Franco. They aren’t Citizen Kane, but they competently tell their story. And that competence is precisely why they’re hated. If they were badly done, they could be laughed off. Instead, they slap you in the face. Hard.
While you laugh at Zombie Lake, no one laughs at SS Experiment Love Camp. This tone is why Garrone’s films are a better indictment of the subject than Schindler’s List. What in Spielberg’s movie compares to the barely alive bodies twitching in the cremation ovens in SS Experiment Love Camp? Spielberg goes for a dead child. Yes, it was taken from the book, but it is still almost too easy an image. It deserves the same contempt as having your hero rescue a stray animal. Garrone’s films don’t make you cry; they make you squirm.
From The Chain Saw Massacre to Lifeforce
To understand how the nature of exploitation cinema changed, we must look at two of Tobe Hooper’s films. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is a masterpiece of unsettling filmmaking. It’s not as gory as its reputation would have you believe and its power lies in the lead spending most of the movie screaming. Garrone’s pair of SS movies were clearly hand‑to‑mouth productions and dismissed as trash as a result. Yet, for sheer power, the films should be considered The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s equals. A movie can be irredeemably nasty and a textbook example of powerful genre filmmaking at the same time.
The likes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were designed to be seen publicly on a big screen. They were pure shock, designed to sicken you to the depth of your soul. And then Spielberg, Lucas, and VHS happened. Suddenly, movies were designed to be rewatched at home, wondered at and had the comfortable rhythm of a roller-coaster. Hooper even made Poltergeist (1982) for Spielberg. His Lifeforce (1985) is a sci-fi/horror genre fusion with a Ghostbusters aesthetic and gratuitous nudity, absent the shock and the power to disturb. Spectacle and effects, yes; titillation, sure. It entertains; it just doesn’t affect. We’ve been left with infantilised supernormal stimulus alongside our popcorn. Anyone miss movies that made people vomit?
When we consider the difference between 1970s exploitation and 1980s home entertainment on VHS, we can fully understand why the former terrified so many. Yes, we can even feel some sympathy for the censor. As intentionally shocking as the 1970s films were, they were never intended for frequent re‑viewing. Video enabled us to focus on the lurid details. That’s when such movies got their reputation as pornography and where outcompeted in the marketplace. Spielbergian home entertainment was a different flavour of cinema entirely – Happy Meals with an equivalent decline in quality. They even came with toy lines.
Are exploitation movies – The Texas Chain Saw Massacre included – art? The naysayers miss that a dirty protest has something in common with a Jackson Pollock. They’re mistaking valid execution for comfort‑zone entertainment. Too many people conflate art with pictorialism and pretty landscapes. Caravaggio knew good art should also kick you in the feels. The exploitation movies we’re discussing are not family entertainment and not for everyone – but consider the ethics of what is.
Schindler’s List
The thing with sacred cows is the lingering aroma of bullshit. I’ve never been a fan of Schindler’s List, despite it being stunningly well made. I saw it the week of release and have never been fully convinced of its merits.
Many claim it is “serious drama”. Is it? Playwright David Mamet argued at the time that the film was Jewsploitation, based on the spectacle of Jewish humiliation. The first words on the screen are ‘Amblin Entertainment’. Terry Gilliam weighed in against it too.
The ending is terrible – Liam Neeson, whose acting has always been of questionable quality, having a good cry and perfectly articulating his feeling. Pretty sure nobody ever spoke that way. It’s the sort of subtext-free writing elementary writing courses deride. Furthermore, I hate how Ralph Fiennes’s Amon Goeth character has moments of self‑doubt. It’s a clichéd study of evil for liberals who think everyone is one rational argument away from being a Guardian reader. In Garrone’s films, the guards are all irredeemably psychopathic. Read the biographies of Rudolf Höss, Eichmann or their like – these people were true believers. That common humanity we all supposedly share is much rarer than you think. Some people are beyond redemption, which is a message liberal populists and screenwriters need to relearn.
The difference between Spielberg’s and Garrone’s films is that Garrone’s aren’t framed in Hollywood clichés. Schindler’s List is beautiful to look at, and it shouldn’t be. Your reaction shouldn’t be “Wasn’t the photography lovely and the music moving?” It should be: “I feel fucking sick.”
Read George Stevens’s accounts of how walking through a death camp felt, or Primo Levi’s about surviving one. See how you feel about it then. For six million Jews, the experience of the Holocaust was Rudolf Höss and Josef Mengele, not Spielberg’s vision of Schindler. It’s Spielberg who sanitises. All honest Holocaust movies should end in death. SS Experiment Love Camp is an obscene movie about obscene events. It’s about sadists being sadistic towards powerless victims. Nobody says it’s easy viewing. But isn’t shying away from the historical brutality obscene in itself?
Schindler’s List is palatable popular entertainment. It’s Jurassic Park with Nazis, with all the concessions to the Hollywood formula. I dare someone to make a movie about Mengele where he evades the consequences of his actions and lives long enough to drown on Bertioga Beach in 1979. That’s reality.
Either all movies on the Nazi topic are exploitation or none are. Should evil and suffering be depicted for entertainment value? How should atrocity be depicted, and in what medium? Should we censor the work of Robert Capa? Don McCullin lost his job at The Times because advertisers didn’t want his photos of dead children opposite their full‑colour adverts. Doesn’t that sound like what happened to the movies? Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and The Truce – despite being among the most powerful books ever written – have never been adapted for the screen. I suspect this is partly because of Levi’s insistence on how much luck played in his survival. His message – that only the worst of us survive – isn’t very Hollywood.
The Industrial Domestication of Cinema
Consider The Shawshank Redemption: “Hope sets you free.” Justice is done. Then consider the “If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgiveness” message etched on the wall at the Mauthausen concentration camp. Doesn’t that seem more in tone with Garrone’s films? Many Nazisploitation movies end with one group of fascists killing another – and most of the victims. This trope seems far more reflective of the real world than everyone riding off into the happily ever after.
My maternal grandfather served on submarines protecting Atlantic convoys during the Second World War. He would never watch war movies, except for Das Boot, which he considered a documentary. My paternal grandfather thought the BBC’s farce about the French Resistance – ’Allo ’Allo! – was hilarious. It laughed at much that he remembered. From such examples, we can see clearly how creatives should approach the subject – honest depiction or ridicule. Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) knew this and so did Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1967). I fully appreciate that nobody wants a sitcom set at Auschwitz, but in Spielberg and his legions of imitators we can sense a reverence that is, in its own way, pornographic as it sanitises and packages real world horrors for conservative family audiences. Some crimes are so truly awful, making them accessible starts to miss the point.
The video‑nasties moral outrage of the 1980s blinded us to what exploitation cinema achieved. What needs rediscovering isn’t mere Spielbergian spectacle; it’s cinema’s lost power – the ability to disturb, confront, and offend without sanitising the message. The producers of today’s vanilla offerings have forgotten that we like being scared, shocked, and outraged.
We are not a high‑minded species; we like cheap and nasty if we are honest with ourselves. Cinema seems to have forgotten where it came from – and that it was always a vulgar medium. If the movies are to survive, then they’ve got to get under people’s skin again. Or as Hooper and Garrone taught us, they need to run around wearing it in prisons that cannot be escaped.
Lee Russell Wilkes 