S.S. Experiment - Love Camp

I saw this film in the 1970's in Leeds at a cinema showing at which members of the police were in the audience to see whether the viewing should be allowed to continue as it was deemed a very risky film. What was all the fuss about, or have times changed so much that if it was released today would it even get a viewing! To me the film is very dated and is only worth watching today if you are into curiosity films.

As a horror and trash-film fanatic, SS Experiment Love Camp (1976) was on my ‘to see’ list of formerly banned video nasties. As with a lot of these films I was not expecting decent acting or complex plot lines but this was just awful! It wasn’t even good in a bad, ironic way and the title is probably the only shocking thing about it. It has the production values of a bad 1970s porno but with no real porn in it, despite the high volume of full frontal female nudity. As the only real ‘horror’ scene in the film is a badly executed segment where a young (naked) girl is boiled and then frozen alive in a large tank of water by two diabolical yet unconvincing Nazis, which by the time you get to you’re so bored you feel the need to fast forward to see if anything good happens or just give up completely, I would hardly categorise this as a horror at all.

The BBFC banned this and many other titles under the Video Recordings Act of 1984, intended to stop the large number of low budget horror films or video nasties as they became called, getting into the hands of children on the then new format of VHS tape. Some of these films are now considered horror classics by fans of the genre like my self such as The Evil Dead. SS Experiment Love Camp however is defiantly not one of these and should have been banned for its poor quality rather than anything else. Less a video nasty, more a video terrible. Give it a miss!

More of a video disaster than a video nasty. I watched this back in 1982 and thought I would re-watch it, to remind myself of what all the fuss was about at the time. Despite being one of the less entertaining Naziploitation films, this is an appalling copy. Taken from video rather than film, the quality is terrible. The film itself is as tame as it was back in 82 and doesn't work on any level. I always thought that there was an uncut version of this lying around somewhere, but according to reports, this is released uncut. In which case the BBFC need shooting for ever classing it a video nasty in the first place. Just shows what a hysterical committee and a volatile title can lead to.

What a horrible film. Bad quality so its the first film I never fully watched.

One of the most notorious excursions into exploitation Garrones' SS Experiment Camp has to be seen to be believed.

When the U.K was under a censorship dictatorship in the 1980's (that lasted unfortunately until approximately the late 1990's) this was banned under the puritannical Video Recordings Act. What was failed to have been seen by the censor at the time was we have a movie that is not obscene but an exercise in pure titilation and bad taste.

SS Experiment Camp features an array of concentration camp cuties at the mercy of fiendish Nazis which is just an excuse really to show hysterics, soft porn and a bit of misogynistic 'roughing up'. This was part of a spate of Nasty Nazi flicks churned out by the Italian film industry between 1976-1980 inspired by art-house yawn-a-thon 'The Night porter' and the 'we-will-never-see-legally-in-England' 'Ilsa She-Wolf of the S.S'.

The O.T.T acting is a hoot and the dubbing deplorable but despite overall turgidness it is also highly watchable. 4 stars not for the production but for it's sheer audacity. The print is uncut but looks like it has been dug up from Hitlers bunker, check out the pristine region 1 release if you can be bothered. For exploitation fans only; not for the prudish and unfortunately the mass of the population lacking in humour that favour fussy prudishnes over liberal understanding. A small milestone in British censorship history , thank you for treating us like adults BBFC.