SNUFF, the genre's most controversial
con-trick
SS EXPERIMENT CAMP, Nazi
sex 'n' violence nasty
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before being hastily withdrawn.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
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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