I’d known about this infamous grindhouse flick for years before I final tracked down an uncut copy to watch.

Ilsa is the Nazi commander of a prisoner of war camp during WWII, and is helping to conduct brutal experiments on her female captives to prove that women are more impervious to pain than men, and would thus make better soldiers. She’s decked out like a Nazi dominatrix through most of the movie, and also has an insatiable sexual appetite. Every night, she forces male prisoners to sexually service her, but when they cum sooner than she wants them to (and they all do) Ilsa has them castrated. In fact, the film opens with one of those castrations.

She meets her match when new prisoner “Wolfe” arrives. An American of Germanic heritage, Wolfe doesn’t climax during sex, thus sparing himself from her cock-chopping wrath.

Eventually the prisoners rise up and the camp is attacked, killing nearly everyone along the way. Cheery film, this one.

“Ilsa” belongs to an inherently offensive sub-genre of Nazi torture sexploitation movies that wound their way from some sleazy hellhole to the screen in the 1970’s. “Ilsa” is not the first of that horrific type of film (that honor(?) would belong to 1969’s “Love Camp 7”, but it movie is probably the most notorious.

Much of “Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS” is devoted to very graphic sexual violence and mutilation. Typical is a scene where female prisoners have an electric dildo forced into them. We don’t see the actual penetration, but we see everything but that penetration, and it’s not fun to watch. There are a lot of scenes like that in this movie.

The plot itself is sparse, and more time is spent showing the graphic torture of naked female captives than things story development. Strangely, I can watch a film like “Bloodsucking Freaks”, which portrays a lot of the same sorts of sexual sadism as the Ilsa film, but is handled with a campy sense of humor. Black as it is, that sense of humor makes watching “Bloodsucking Freaks” much more palatable than “Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS”.

The 1970’s were a really weird time period, and lots of taboos were challenged. Since the end of WII, Nazis have rarely been presented to American audiences realistically. Instead we grew up watching comedic versions in television shows like “Hogan’s Heroes” and comic book villain style movie Nazis.

I deliberately seek out movies that many other people would be horrified or offended by, and usually they don’t bother me. The Nazis in “Ilsa, She a Wolf of The SS” are in no way realistic characters, but the extreme sex and violence in this film portrays the kind of horrors real Nazis inflicted on prisoners. It’s unsettling and unpleasant to see that kind of realistic horror carried out in a cartoony exploitation film. Imagine if Colonel Klink was doing sexual torture experiments on his prisoners in “Hogan’s Heroes”. That’s the kind of uncomfortable tone of this movie.

There really are no conventionally redeeming qualities in “Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS” other than relatively high production values. Even people looking for especially transgressive and shocking movies to watch will probably be disappointed in this one. It’s certainly shocking, but it’s just no fun. It’s not sexy, it’s not funny, and it’s not good. It’s just sort of depressing.

If I gave out ratings, I’d give his one 4 castrated dicks out of 10.