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SNUFF, the genre's most controversial con-trick
SS EXPERIMENT CAMP, Nazi sex 'n' violence nasty
 

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SHOCK
THE SLAYER
  

 
 
 

SNUFF
aka The Slaughter (US pre-r); Michael Findlay/Monarch Releasing Corp, USA/Argentina, 1971/1976; 82 min

Despite its laughably inept mis-en-scene and sub-Herschell Gordon Lewis gore effects, a clever promotional campaign managed to turn this — one of the most tedious features ever committed to celluloid — into one of the biggest controversies in exploitation history.
    Variously advertised as being “The film that could only be made in South America...where life is CHEAP!” and “The bloodiest thing that ever happened in front of a camera!”, the whole thing is of course a big con. Husband and wife tack-meisters Michael and Roberta Findlay took a confused and rather amateur shocker (reportedly described by Ms Findlay herself as “really awful — it made no sense”) and tacked on an ending purporting to show the real-life disembowelling of one of the actresses by the film crew. They released the film without credits and manufactured protests outside the cinemas who stooped low enough to exhibit it in an effort to establish the picture (in the public mind, at any rate) as a bona fide snuff film. An America reeling in the wake of the Manson killings, and awash with rumours of a south-of-the-border snuff film industry was all too prepared to buy it. The con worked and made the Findlays a bundle during a limited run before being hastily withdrawn.
    Controversy aside, the film itself is indeed “really awful”. The ramshackle plot is almost impossible to follow, there is no real action (or acting, for that matter) and as if that wasn’t enough to sink the picture, crucial technical aspects such as the special effects and dubbing demonstrate such breathtaking incompetence that it makes one wonder how the project was ever completed in the first place.
    Michael Findlay met with an untimely death shortly afterwards when he was decapitated in an horrendous accident on top of a New York skyscraper. Roberta Findlay continued working, usually making low-grade porn quickies, but returning to the horror scene in the mid-eighties with such shoddy entries as The Oracle (1985), Lurkers (1988) and Prime Evil (1988).
 
Dir. Michael Findlay, Roberta Findlay; Prod. Michael Findlay, Jack Frost; Scr. Michael Findlay
 
 
 
 

SS EXPERIMENT CAMP

aka Lager SSadis Kastrat Kommandantur (It.); Sefi Cinematographia, Italy, 1976; 85 min

One of the four original nasties to be banned in the UK as obscene (Cannibal Holocaust (1979), Driller Killer (1979) and I Spit On Your Grave (1980) being the other three), SS Experiment Camp was the second of Sergio Garrone’s contributions to the il sadiconazista cycle of the mid-seventies.
    Joining the third world cannibal films as another sickening and indefensible sub-genre the Italian horror scene has spawned, the mercifully brief Nazi torture-camp cycle produced about a dozen quickies in the 1976/77 film season in Italy.
    The inspiration for the cycle appears to have been Don Edmond’s Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1974) (itself “inspired” — if that is the right word — by Lee Frost’s earlier Love Camp 7 (1968)) and the international success in the mid-seventies of domestic art-house films like Liliana Caviani’s The Night Porter (1974) and Tinto Brass’s Salon Kitty (1976). Garrone is to the Nazi-horrors what Umberto Lenzi is to the cannibal films and SS Experiment Camp has become the cycle’s most notorious entry, but the others all share the same combination of gore, torture, and good-old-fashioned women-in-prison lesbian sexploitation. The emphasis (just as in their progenitors) is firmly on the latter, and there is a sound argument for suggesting that the cycle is a fetishistic pornographic sub-genre rather than a horror one.
    Fortunately, almost all the films of the cycle bombed at the box office so we were spared a prolonged period of cinematic Nazi atrocities. One shudders at the thought of what might have happened if any of these films had proved as successful with Italian audiences as Dawn of the Dead.
    Nevertheless, ten years later American video shelves were graced by a cassette claiming to be SS Experiment Camp 2.

Dir. Sergio Garrone; Prod. Sergio Garrone; Scr. Sergio Garrone, Vinicio Marinucci, Tacla Romanelli
 


 
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