Blitzkreig

Escape from Stalag 69

Wild Eye Releasing

Nazisploitation cinema is a genre of exploitation film which has a strong emphasis on sex and violence. It uses World War II and National Socialism as a pretext to explore all manner of sexual and violent excess. The most celebrated in the field is Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S. (1974). Ilsa starred Dyanne Thorne as the Aryan commander who tortures her way through a Nazi camp working to prove her theory that woman were more able to deal with pain than men. Ilsa castrates men who fail to satisfy her (and that is most of them) and enjoys flogging workers who speak to the female slaves, she is cruel but erotic and it is this mixture which made Ilsa such a successful film and so controversial. This mixture has become the foundation of Nazisploitation cinema.

Ilsa was directed by Don Edmonds using the sets from Hogan Heroes after the series was cancelled and hence the sets look far more professional than one would expect from an exploitation film. Ilsa was followed by a range of related sexploitation films in a similar vein such as Ilsa Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks etc but these fall outside the Nazisploitation genre. Ilsa has been regularly heavily censored and unedited editions really only became available with the release of DVD.

Other examples of the genre include the earlier 1969 Love Camp 7, Hell Camp (1977) and Love Train for the S.S (1977) but Ilsa is really seen as the standard for its extreme level of violence and its surprisingly professional acting and presentation.

The genre has always been a sensitive one exploiting an explosive historical event for laughs, sex and violence, at the same time it has produced a wide range of cult films ranging from serious exploitation to comedy.

Blitzkrieg Escape from Stalag 69 is a low budget Nazisploitation from cult director Keith Crocker (Bloody Ape). It is a sort of Mel Brooks come Troma version of Naziploitation cinema filled with humour, weird characters, violence and gore and, strange as it may seem, a musical number.

The film opens as Schultz is in Argentina escaping Israeli agents and he decides that his time on the run may be drawing to a close and so he must confess. As we watch his confession (to a rather bewildered priest), we are transported back in time to 1943 to the POW camp he ran in Germany and we experience his life as a S.S. Commandant who had the final say over life and death.

The film roams through Naziploitation territory including torture scenes, strange medical experiments and, of course, the inmates devising a plan to escape. There is a lot of flesh on show including full frontal nudity torture scenes, a nude catfight in the showers and a sex scene. There is even a very cool and sexy scene of a woman wearing nothing but a pair of boots running around the woods shooting at German soldiers !

This is cheesy, sexy, bizarre and at time just plain gore ridden but it makes damn good cult cinema. If you have a very broad sense of humour and enjoy some sex and violence, then you will love this one !

This review will appear in Volume 2 No.2 (2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

If you came to this page directly (and missed our menu), click here to go to the Synergy Magazine front page. (http://www.synergy-magazine.com)