"Elsa: Fraulein SS"http://www.beardyfreak.com/rvelsa.php"Salon Kitty" on a choo choo.
Welcome to the world of Eurociné!
If many (though certainly not all) horror/exploitation flicks of this time were low-end rehashes of the current American cinematic trend…Eurociné were making rehashes of those rehashes!
“Elsa” opens with upbeat classic music playing over stock footage of Hitler shouting a lot and his armies goose-stepping merrily along.
After this we are thrown into even more cheap padding footage taken from newsreels of various battles before the movie jerks into the film proper as we see a handful of bored, skinny, extras in baggy (and rather dubious looking) German uniforms shuffling down the road.
Almost all the extras in this are awful though. They either stand there slouching and looking bored (not good when dressed as a soldier) or staring at the camera with a look that says
“how long till the lunch break”.Thankfully the look and production design of the film improves a bit after the opening as we enter a chaotic Nazi headquarters in a mansion which is of course complete with multiple swastika flags, Hitler photos and a smug git (with a gloriously theatrical twitch) in a groovy looking Black and silver SS uniform (I’ll say it once again…say what you want about those damn Nazis, but the bastards sure knew how to dress) who sets the plot up.
So if nothing else we at least have some essential iconography on display.
After this scene setting sequence we have the ever essential ‘medical check-up sequence’ to pick the prostitutes.
The luckiest actor in the film?
The guy who plays the examiner who spends his time opening the women’s legs (as they lie down naked on his table) and getting right in there with his beady little eyes to check that all Nazi vagina’s are up to snuff. Or sniff.
So far so trashily good.
As we move onto the train all the delightful Naziploitation cliché components are here, from much groping in stiff uniforms, sexual humiliation (only mild though here), preening Nazis, shifty spies, theatrical fanaticism and a spot of Dietrich like singing involving piano perching, see-through lingerie and a big feathery boa.
But then unlike the train, the film loses steam as we watch numerous extras get bloodlessly shot in the head for saying nasty things about Adolf with their trousers down.
The dead direction, amateur staging, laboured dubbing and repetitiveness of it all starts to make the mind wander.
Thankfully Elsa’s rather magnificent breasts (Malisa Longo is no Dyanne Thorne but she looks damn hot and is willing to let it all hang out, and get zoomed in on, for the cause) bring our minds back to the movie.
It’s not long though before we’re back to a slow crawl again and get hit with blatant padding when we get to spend time with wimpy Frantz (dubbed over by someone doing an impression of James Mason. But even at his lowest career ebb I don’t remember James Mason licking the boots of a sadistic Nazi bitch with no knickers on!)
Sadly we have now come to the conclusion that, despite the high camp value and genuine ‘so bad their good’ moments, the film is often very slow, lacking energy and mired in too many flat dialogue scenes.
We do get a few dialogue gems though.
Frantz: “To spy while making love! Disgusting! But no one compels you to have orgasms”!We have a little bit of violence to liven things up slightly that comes in the form of some rather mild torture (a bald old guy) and a brief bit of naked woman flogging.
The various shootings are ridiculously bloodless though and the weapons mostly sound like cap guns.
And boy! The action scenes are bad.
Those bored looking extras I mentioned just stand around in the open pointing guns in a confused manner pointing their cap guns and going ‘pop’.
Then occasionally one of them will clutch their chest and slowly and carefully fall to the ground in what passes as the horrors of war.
The lack of any real bloodshed, inventive torture (I know, I know, but we are talking Naziploitation here) or general sadism (I know, I know, but we are talking Naziploitation here) in “Elsa: Fraulein SS” is a let down as far as good old fashioned cheap thrills go and we only have the frequent nudity (and its lovely collection 70’s pubic bushes) to keep our interest up , away from the more unintentional joys of course at the sheer wonderful badness of it all.
And as for the end, well, what can one say except…Heh?
Worst stock footage explosion ever leads into a bizarre open-ended finale that seems to hint at a damn sequel! As if! Talk about wishful thinking.
Definitely one for Naziploitation completists (and fur lovers) only.
