Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS



Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, made in 1975 and directed by Don Edmonds, is the Trope Codifier of the Nazisploitation subgenre.

The Trope Maker of the Nazisploitation subgenre was Love Camp 7, made in 1969 six years earlier. When that was a big hit in Canada, André Link and John Dunning of Montreal distributor Cinepix quickly drafted the script for this movie, and secured David F. Friedman (who'd starred in Love Camp 7 and produced Herschell Gordon Lewis's Blood Feast) as a producer.

Former Las Vegas showgirl Dyanne Thorne stars as the eponymous Ilsa, the buxom, sadistic, nymphomaniac commandant of what seems to be an odd combination of a Stalag (prisoner-of-war camp) and a Jewish death-camp. Ilsa has an insatiable sexual appetite and each night takes one of the male prisoners to bed, castrating him when he finally ejaculates before she's orgasmed herself. By day, she conducts experiments on other prisoners, attempting to prove that women can sustain more pain than men and thus should be allowed to fight in the army. When an American prisoner by the name of Wolfe is brought to the camp who can withhold ejaculation, she is finally sated, but otherwise things turn to shit for her when his resulting allowance to live culminates in him rallying an uprising amongst the prisoners and her death.

Luckily for her, she's back alive and well in sequels Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia and Ilsa, the Wicked Warden.

Notable for being filmed on the former set of Hogan's Heroes.


 * Artistic License History: The movie, being an exploitation film, ignores the fact that no woman was ever the commandant of a Nazi prison camp, and capitalizes on the very real sadism and hypersexuality of such SS Aufseherinnen as Ilse Koch (who infamously had gloves and lampshades made from the skin of the prisoners of her husband's concentration camp, and upon whom the title character is loosely based) and Irma Grese (who was incredibly sadistic towards the prisoners of the camp she was a warden of, especially the female ones).
 * B-Movie
 * The Baroness: Three guesses, no prizes.
 * Buxom Is Better
 * Chained to a Bed: How Ilsa meets her end in the original movie.
 * Chainsaw Good: There are arm-wrestling matches in Tigress of Siberia where the loser gets his hand cut off by a chainsaw.
 * Exploitation Film: And how.
 * Nazisploitation: Again, the Trope Codifier.
 * Gorn: You bet!
 * Great Escape
 * Ice Queen: Still no prizes.
 * If You Kill Him You Will Be Just Like Him: The American prisoner and his main female Jewish prisoner love-interest refuse to participate in the killings of the Nazis for this reason, and try to dissuade the others from doing so. Doesn't stop 'em from doing so anyway once they're out of earshot.
 * Those Wacky Nazis: Well yah.
 * Torture Porn
 * World War Two