SS Experiment Camp
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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SS Experiment Camp (original release title: Lager SSadis Kastrat Kommandantur) is a 1976 Nazi exploitation film directed by Sergio Garrone. The plot concerns a Nazi officer who has been castrated. It gained infamy in the 1980s for its bad-taste sexual and violent content involving, as the title suggests, Nazi human experimentation. The film was banned in some countries, including the United Kingdom, where the film was subject to prosecution as one of the films known as "video nasties", a title used in the press and by campaigners that came to be used for a list of films that could be found obscene under the Obscene Publications Act.
Bizarre Magazine, in a 2004 overview of the Naziploitation genre, said the following: "Its advertising campaign, an image of a semi-naked woman hanging upside-down from a crucifix, was instrumental in bringing unwanted attention to the Nasties, although, beyond that, its infamy is unwarranted".
A similar view of it was taken by the British Board of Film Classification, who passed it uncut the next year, noting "Despite the questionable taste of basing an exploitation film in a concentration camp, the sexual activity itself was consensual and the level of potentially eroticised violence sufficiently limited". However, in 2008, it was denounced by the Sunday Times and Sunday Express at the time of Holocaust Memorial Day, and cited by MPs Julian Brazier and Keith Vaz as part of their attempts to tighten the film banning system.
