The actress Dyanne Thorne just passed away in January 2020 at the age of 87. She was famous for her role of Ilsa, a kind of BDSM dominatrix under the Nazi regime. Erotic movies shooted in the 70s…. Please see below a review in the UK magazine Cinema X …
ILSA
SHE WOLF OF THE S.S.
The worst film, by far, of this or any other year !
‘A different kind of X,’ screams the American poster. Damned right it’s different. With no vive difference about it, either. At least not for my money. Ilsa is vile to see, to hear and to preview. A cinematic stench made no less appalling upon reading the sanctimonious statement put out by the producer, a certain Herman Traeger. His message to the global cinema queue indicates that his film — a quick buck trash cheapie about Nazi concentration camp torture, ‘based’, he says, ‘on documented face —was made by him with the hope that these heinous crimes will never occur again.’
Unless, of course, he makes a sequel …
That is fast becoming a distinct possibility, considering the enormous piles of greenstuff Ilsa is pulling in, Stateside. Inside five weeks, the blood-splattered movie has raked in more than £200,000, which is, possibly, as much as ten times its initial budget.
It that sounds good, forget it. That such ‘medical experiments took place within the Third Reich’s evil camps is not in doubt. That they should never be allowed to be forgotten by successive generations is hardly in question either. That such barbarous happenings should be treated as pulp entertainment in this perverted. almost cannibalistic manner — is strictly beyond my ken.
Traeger never made Ilsa as a record of man’s, nor indeed woman’s inhumanity to man and woman and child. Nor as some shocumentary approach to chronicling the worst war crimes.
And certainly, not with the tiniest thought that with a project of this nature, he could, perhaps, make sure that such atrocities would never be repeated in our lifetime. (They’ve been continued in every damned was since ’45, anyway.) No, sir! Let’s get Mr. Traeger’s monstrosity of a movie into perspective. His film is purely a commercial exploitation of these crimes — and thereby of the countless millions of victims of the Nazi filth machine.
We know — and we do not easily forget, even without this sort of sick reminder — that the majority of those victims belonged to one religious faith. Show business, films in particular, has a enormous number of that same faith in high positions in every spectrum of the field. Enough one would think to attack, if not exactly ban, this insult to their memory of their fellow Jews. Not so! What we have is the complete opposite. Among the distributors of America. Jews are vying against each other to deal for the film and run it in their cinemas.
There’s no sign even of the Jew in the street — in fraternity or card-school groups — turning up, to wave banners and picket the cinemas playing Ilsa, in the way the blacks were protesting of late about Coonskin. Ilsa seems to he accepted fare. But then, as far as those exhibitors and distributors are concerned, to say nothing of the no doubt pseudonymous Mr. Traeger, Ilsa is a big money-maker.
Man’s inhumanity to man knows no bounds. Particularly where there is a buck and a half to be made….
Well, all right, Ilsa is not, by any means, the first such exploitation of the Nazis, their concentration camps or their victims, in motion pictures. It won’t he the last, either. The setting, however is not utilised here in the acceptable, dramatic licence fashion of say, Cavani’s The Night Porter, Lumet’s The Pawnbroker or Pontecorvo’s Kapo — or as Pasolini (presumably) intends within his forthcoming Salo release.
Those films had point, art with a certain shock value, a certain honesty. Ilsa on the other hand is a sheer SS M trip from start to finish in either of its well-publicised soft or hard-core versions.
In short, you pay your money and you take your choice. You can either see the vaginas of the various female victims being penetrated with all manner of horrenduous weaponry, or you can see it mutated—implied. Either may leaves a terrible taste in the mouth. Vomit.
Unless you’re related to an Sade Or Hitler.
Dyanne Thorne is the name given to the actress portraying the blonde butch Ilsa — ‘she commits cries so terrible even the S.S. fear her’ is another poster come-on line. She’s commandant of Medical Camp No. 9, and known as the Black Widow for her practise of sleeping with a male prisoner every night and, if unsatisfied, having him castrated before breakfast.
If the horror of the camp and the surgical experimentation were not enough for any sane viewer to contend with (to say naught of the visible acting involved) Ilsa is assisted by two dikey henchwoman in even more fiendish experiment is dementia in her underground torture bunker. Unable to stand weakness in man or woman, Ilsa — a true Aryan all the day down to her Californian blonde rinse — is infatuated with proving that women can stand pain better than men, even at the most excruciating level she doles it out.
Her prisoners are intimidated beyond any thought of escape. Until a new trainload of captives arrive with a pair of very definite leaders. Anna, in particular, proving Ilsa’s torturous theories correct by withstanding unbelievable sadism in the bunker — and Wolf, the first man to completely satisfy the Black Widow in bed. (American — of course!).
And it is his persuasive tongue which allows him to tie Ilsa to her bed on the day set for the prisoner’s mass revolt and — hopefully — escape.
The battle for the camp, and the prisoners’ revenge on their captors, is Fang and bloody and ends in a storm of tank fire as the Nazis raze the camp to the ground, part of their 1945 scorched earth policy of destroying all evidence. Pity the same thing didn’t happen to this frightful movie.
UK Magazine Cinema X
