The Rosetta shot: “Deported Women of the SS Special Section”
Yeah, more boobs. It always gets worse before it gets better, etc.
Seriously, though, look at that shot. What do you see? Breasts, naked flesh, a large phallic nightstick. You know what you don’t see in that shot? Swastikas. Uniforms. Nazi paraphernalia. Things like that. You’d think that, if I am to capture a film that openly traffics in Nazi symbols, I’d have to include an actual Nazi somewhere in the shot. The fact that I don’t should tell you something very important about the particularly rancid chunk of sputum horked up by writer/director Rino Di Silvestro, and here it is:
Deported Women of the SS Special Section is dismal, an absolute failure on every artistic level right down to that awkward mouthful of a title. Most importantly, though, it is not a Nazisploitation flick. Not really, anyway - I mean, it’s got the costumes and the German accents and everything. But it plays out like a standard Women-in-Prison film. I get the feeling it was intended to be one, but Di Silvestri got a great deal on Nazi uniforms halfway through writing the script.
I suppose this gets into what we expect (or should expect) from this nasty-ass genre. The way I see it, there’s two options when making a Nazisploitation film, and the more I think about them, the more I consider the genre to be thoroughly unworkable. The first is damn the torpedoes and barrel full speed ahead into the uncomfortable area beyond the pale. If you do this, you are clearly a terrible person who does not need to be holding a camera. The second is what we have here - palette-swap a WIP flick and dot it with little soupcons of outre ugliness. Either way, you’re not going to end up with something that most human beings would consider palatable just by virtue of your subject matter. But you, the theoretical filmmaker, know that going in - you’re using one of the 20th century’s darkest moments as fodder for base titillation. So if you make a point to set your exploitation film in a Nazi camp, then proceed to use that solely as window dressing, you’re a huckster and a charlatan indulging in the lowest form of carnival barkering. Deported Women uses the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust as a simple financial hook and nothing more. This strikes me as far more obscene than a sick, horrible atrocity exhibition would.
That then calls me to answer whether I would really want to see the kind of film that the former tactic I delineated would create. To which I can only say: Of course I don’t. Di Silvestri’s shockingly tame, incoherent constructed sad-sack shitheap may not have offended me, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I need to be offended. I don’t need a film to throw Mengele-style medical experimentation, gas chamber massacres and shit like that alongside lesbian revelry and big ’70s bush, thanks all the same. This is why I think the genre in and of itself is an untenable proposition - the audience gets slimed if the premise delivers on its horrid promise, but they get cheated if it doesn’t. Best to simply leave it alone, let it gather dust in the bin of bad ideas. (That said, Eloy De La Iglesia’s In a Glass Cage is a fine film, probably the best film you could make in said genre. But Eloy’s aim was art, not commerce.)
(Also: Despite my misgivings, I still want to see Love Camp 7, which invented the genre. Why? Because Lee fucking Frost directed it, that’s why. You make a film like The Pick-Up and I’ll pay attention to whatever you do.)
