Women’s Camp 119 – Italian title K.Z.9 Lager di Sterminio – is a 1977 Italian exploitation film directed by Bruno Mattei. It was released in Italy two months after Mattei’s first Nazi-themed film SS Girls (aka Private House of the SS), with which it shares numerous cast members, and stars Ivano Staccioli, Lorraine de Salle, Nello Riviè and Gabriele Carrara.
In the last months of World War 2, at the Rosenhausen Experimental Camp in Germany, Dr. Franz Wieker (Ivano Staccioli) conducts ghastly medical experiments on unfortunate women imported from Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. When not being operated upon, the victims must cope with the attentions of sadistic Oberleutnant Otto Ohlendorf (Gabriele Carrara) and Chief ‘Kapo’ Martha (Gota Gobert), a predatory lesbian. Meanwhile Wieker’s unwilling assistant Dr. David Meisel (Nello Riviè), and Maria Black (Lorraine de Salle), a Jewish medical student forced to participate in the running of the experiments, try to maintain their humanity and to seek a chance to escape…
Women’s Camp 119 contains all the staple ingredients of the Nazisploitation cycle; maniacal ‘Dick Dastardly’ Nazi officers, sadistic lesbian warders, a couple of unwilling doctors plagued with guilt at their involvement, along with sundry beatings, mutilation and torture. In other words, it’s disgusting, exploitative trash wallowing in the worst of human history. What could one possibly say in its favour? Well, I imagine the reason most horror fans watch the Italian ‘Nazisploitation’ films is to gawp at their outrageous violence and gasp in disbelief at their sheer bad taste. That certainly covers it for me. Seen from such a vantage point, Women’s Camp 119 undoubtedly delivers the goods. The gruesome scenes are really quite disgusting, and Mattei creates some truly pathological images of brutality. An early scene depicting a room full of women being killed with Zyklon-B nerve gas achieves a revolting intensity by showing the dead bodies streaked with excrement (victims of Zyklon-B would defecate uncontrollably as they died). Elsewhere, we witness gory uterus transplants, hideously smashed limbs left to heal without treatment, and plentiful flagellation, interspersed with extensive nudity. An atmosphere of madness and degeneracy takes hold here and there, something which Mattei may genuinely have striven for rather than being merely accidental, although it doesn’t prevent other scenes from descending into absurdity. The monstrous Lieutenant Ohlendorff (Carrara, over-the-top star of Mattei’s SS Girls) spits irony-free howlers like “Lick my boots forever, dog!” or “You’ll wipe the asses of every one of us until you turn purple with fatigue!” One ridiculous moment has Riviè and de Salle flicking through repellent colour photographs of skin diseases in a medical textbook while exchanging over-acted ‘significant’ glances. Then there’s the fate of two homosexual prisoners, seen knitting in their cell, who are forced to undergo ‘treatment’ for their ‘condition’, which involves three women diving onto the horrified queens’ beds where they squirm around in a miserable attempt at coitus.
So there’s plenty to laugh at, if you’re in that sort of a mood. If you’re not, then Women’s Camp 119 is just a reprehensible piece of trash from beginning to end, nowhere more so than when Commander Wieker watches real newsreel footage of the death camps, images we’re all familiar with from such programmes as The World at War. It may be splitting hairs when dealing with such a morally bankrupt sub-genre, but for my money this inclusion is altogether the sickest tactic employed in the so-called Nazi cycle (and considering that the footage in question was filmed by Allied forces, it’s not only morally objectionable but historically ludicrous as well.) One is tempted to drive a judgemental tank over Mattei and classify him as the lowest sort of scumbag, though it’s better to try and understand what he was thinking. Perhaps he got carried away trying to outdo Don Edmonds (Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS), Sergio Garrone (SS Experiment Camp) and Mario Caiano (Nazi Love Camp 27)? Maybe he thought he was just joining in with the spirit of provocation, trying to play the game of nihilism for fun and profit harder and better than the others? Or maybe, with a distributor breathing down his neck demanding more nastiness for the Japanese market, he was ‘just obeying orders’?
The offensiveness of Women’s Camp 119 is compounded rather than alleviated by its gestures toward moral seriousness. Despite decent Dr. Meisel and cool-headed med-student Maria acting as crude pontificatory avatars for decency and kindness, one never believes the film’s pose of integrity. The character of Kurt, a deranged slobbering servant of the Nazis whom they allow to molest female prisoners, is presented in the film as the epitome of sick deranged lust. However, for his scenes to be valid Kurt should be less comedic, and the camera much less eager to share his pleasure; instead Mattei presses the lens against the quivering breasts of Kurt’s victims with the same gluttonous glee as the character we’re invited to despise, suggesting perhaps a degree of unconscious self-hatred on the director’s part. Random inconsistencies abound, such as why a cure for sterility should matter to a regime obsessed with genetic purity (surely the genes of the sterile are unworthy of propagation?) and as the final credits roll, a gallery of real-life Nazis still at large after the war founders on careless research: Karl Silberbauer, described onscreen as “the torturer of Anna Frank [sic]” was in fact merely the arresting officer who took Anne Frank into custody. He was not the one who first betrayed her whereabouts to the police, nor was he her ‘torturer’. The brief information presented onscreen about Franz Murer, Josef Mengele and Walter Rauff is broadly accurate, although it erroneously states that Rauff went to live in America in 1949, when in fact he lived briefly in Ecuador before settling in Chile in 1958.
The current absence of a decent digital transfer makes it hard to gauge the cinematography, by Mattei’s frequent collaborator Luigi Ciccarese. Musically, the film benefits from a ponderously dark and doomy score by Alessandro Alessandroni (strangely one of the more memorable cues here pops up uncredited in the Franco De Masi score for The New York Ripper five years later). From a dramaturgical standpoint the film lacks vitality; there is no sense of accumulation to the horrors, and no formal structure to the material. Everything just plods along until the Allied bombings bring the story to a close; within the narrative there is no exploration of tensions between the captors, and only the most cursory of relationships between the prisoners. Yes, there is the usual escape and capture element, which occupies the last reel or two, but as per usual with these films there’s little energy invested in making us care.
It may seem a tad hypocritical of me to attack a film like this for immorality while at the same time enjoying its tastelessness, but it’s difficult to avoid when the film itself is so inherently confused and contradictory. If a director styles his work as a cartoon ‘for mature audiences only’, a live action version of the Italian fumetti (adult comics which often featured Nazi sex-and-horror tales), it’s easy to go with the flow and let the shocking imagery tickle your jaded sensibilities. I would put something like The Beast in Heat in this category. But if there’s an attempt to ‘get serious’, it seems to me right that we should take a more critical position. Women’s Camp 119, with its use of real-life Auschwitz imagery*, and its sententious coda about the Nazis who got away, falls into the latter category, making it a difficult film to defend without falling into contradiction.
Note: Sergio Garrone pulled the same stunt by using photographs from the death camps in the credits sequence of SS Camp 5, Women’s Hell (1976), his companion-piece to the more notorious SS Experiment Camp (1976).
Stephen Thrower, Horrorpedia
