She Devils of the SS (1973) Directed by Erwin C. Dietrich
I have to admit, I prefer Erwin C. Dietrich more as a producer than as a director, his exploitation filmmaking works immeasurably better when helmed by raunchier, more eccentric directors. However, that’s not to say that She Devils of the SS – his first and last directorial foray into Nazi sleaze – isn’t racy and eccentric per se, but rather that the material is so salacious and goofy that the implicitly farcical tone never seems to mesh with the ambiguity of his informal style. Instead, I get the impression that if only this tawdry content had been executed by someone like Byron Mabe or even Jess Franco with whom he made a plethora of women-in-prison pictures, the result would have been a different, more straightforwardly funny sex comedy movie. Yes, just as you hear it, a Nazi exploitation movie as a sexy comedy.
That tonal abnormality in She Devils of the SS struck me the most; I’ve seen many films of the genre -I’m not so proud of it by the way– and most if not all of them are torture porno, some more earnest some sillier, sometimes they are well made and other times they are downright appalling, but the pornographic proclivity they all have in common is to show off transgressive sexual violence in the most depraved fashion imaginable. Yet, She Devils of the SS is the exception, there is no murderous BDSM and even less graphic violence! What a novelty! Erwin Dietrich’s Nazisploitation is just plain absurd. It’s the Nazi exploitation flick that has the audacity to be just a clumsy Nazi sex sketch. And it does it well, only up to a point. The film embodies a whole series of anomalies, this is the strangest Nazi sleaze film I’ve ever seen for that very reason. Even the plot does not adhere to the narrative pattern laid down by the canonical Nazisploitations. Nurses, housewives, secretaries and ordinary German women join the battle lines to answer the call of the Third Reich in its final years of dominance and imminent defeat.
This ensemble of women – beautiful, frisky, voluptuous and vivacious, like straight out of a Playboy mansion – are transported to a Nazi military base in combat zone where they will fight against the enemy lines. There is no concentration camp in She Devils of the SS, the conscripted male and female soldiers are meant to fight, but no, that’s the last thing they do, first they have sex European screwball style in a sundrenched idyllic countryside. And that’s the whole movie. Lots of flesh, lots of pubes, yummy food and fine wine. While this military base is exploited as a hedonistic barracks, the firearms symbolized as phallic instruments and the shooting as passionate orgasms, the Nazi troops on the battlefield are losing the battle, the Third Reich is on the verge of its utter collapse. The jocularity of the lovemaking and carnal entertainment that Dietrich evokes with the same lustful passion as the wet dream of an inhibited pervert shapes the sublimity of a mirthful satire. But this one is dysfunctional, plotless and utterly ambivalent, filmed in a dithering manner that doesn’t treat the humor of situational naughtiness with the same impropriety with which the characters imply they’re having a blast. It’s amusing under the lens of irony, but its charm is lost just as quickly as the premature climax of the sexual shenanigans.
The hilarity that She Devils of the SS engenders is all about perspective, it’s the contextual framework and the ideas it brings up, such as the thought that while Nazi Germany is being ravaged by the enemy, this group of male and female soldiers are more engaged in carnal action than bellicose action, features like this render Dietrich’s awkward nymphomaniac routine all the more delectable. Furthermore, I find supremely funny the fact that the satire of She Devils of the SS in a nutshell is telling you: “The Nazis lost the war because they were fucking instead of fighting”. Ridiculous stuff, but I’ve seen worse.