Grindhouse Fest: Captive Women 4 (1977)

-Grindhouse Fest is the special section in Celluloid Dimension where you can discover all the goodies…and baddies from the golden age of exploitation cinema. Have fun!

Captive Women 4 (1977) Directed by Patrice Rhomm

Choo Choo! All aboard the Nazi express! During the golden age of Euro sleaze, Spain was doing its thing with exploitative erotica and its proto slashers, German cinema was at the pinnacle of its most transgressive arthouse filmmaking, UK genre cinema was competing with the new wave of independent horror films from North America, and Italy… well, when talking about European exploitation cinema in its most important period, the Italians exerted their cinematic hegemony over the continent with their endless genre film productions; the boot-shaped country was the capital -the Hollywood- of European sleaze, not only operating from European soil but also exporting precious talents to the American territory where they would shoot some of the most essential pieces of Italian genre cinema. And what about France? Well, frankly, let’s just put it this way: the French film industry is not the first one that comes to mind when we mention Euro sleaze – with all due respect to Jean Rollin, nor was it the most prolific at imprinting depravity on celluloid. But against all odds, Patrice Rhomm’s Captive Women 4 expresses with boisterous aplomb that they also did their own thing by dabbling – with little success – in Nazi exploitation filmmaking.

If North America has the protruding breasts of Dyanne Thorne, then Europe has the curvaceous nymphomania of Malisa Longo. If the Americans have the redoubtable Nazi sadomasochistic officer Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, the Europeans have the freaky sadistic nasty officer Fräulein Devil. Sounds like Captive Women 4 aka Fraulein Kitty is a great time at the movies witnessing rampant immorality. However, and I’m sorry to let you down after the pompous opening I gave this review, Patrice Rhomm’s film is downright lousy, one of the dullest Nazi exploitation flicks I’ve ever seen, and trust me, I’ve seen many, and none are as somniferous as this one. The plot is a shoddy facsimile of Tinto Brass’ Salon Kitty, but instead of taking place in an extravagant brothel, the events unfold on a train. Malisa Longo plays a former prostitute who now has the role of a Nazi officer on a train, intended primarily as a whorehouse to entertain Nazi officers. But this is only the façade, in reality the purpose of this brothel is to catch traitors, deserters and any enemy of the Third Reich. While the high-ranking Nazi officers get intoxicated in the orgasmic pleasures that pretty undercover Nazi prostitutes offer them, Fräulein Devil spies on them and if she detects anything that raises suspicion of their loyalty to the Führer, she executes them in cold blood.

As is to be anticipated in a humdrum film of this sort, violent pornography soon appears and dominates most of the recycled plot. While the violence is at times tame and minimalist, the sex always remains maximalist. The procedure may be correct – it devoutly follows the tropes of the genre – but the incongruities are too many, leaving empty spots that are only replenished with amateurish softcore and plodding melodrama. Malisa Longo’s risqué performance overflows with photogenic sexiness, and in the sequences of profuse sadomasochistic terror, her wickedness is superlative. This gives the film dramatic merit – there’s an intriguing drama going on behind the dull, exploitative surface – but the direction the film takes feels more like a duty than a natural, committed move. Nothing should be tedious in Captive Women 4 – if you shamelessly enjoy this subgenre – yet there’s an overt pressure on the visuals that lends an ugly artificiality to the mood of the drama, which leaves Patrice Rhomm’s monotonous camerawork in a perpetual state of hesitation and indeterminacy. The attempt is valid though.