64. Love Camp 7 (1968)*
Directed by the legendary Lee Frost (The Thing With Two Heads), Love Camp 7 is the father of Nazisploitation as well as the picture that began the trend for “chicks in chains” movies. You will not find a better synopsis than the one the BBFC provided when they rejected the film:
“Love Camp 7 is an exploitation film set in a Nazi ‘love camp’ during the Second World War. The film contains numerous scenes of women prisoners being abused, tortured and humiliated by their Nazi captors. Indeed the whole purpose of the work is to invite male viewers to relish the spectacle of naked women being humiliated for their titillation.
Love Camp 7 contains both eroticised depictions of sexual violence and repeated association of sex with restraint, pain and humiliation. These sequences were in clear contravention of the Board’s strict policy on sexual violence, which prohibits scenes that eroticise or endorse sexual assault. The possibility of cuts was considered.
However, because the sexual violence runs throughout the work cutting was not considered a viable option.”
All of which builds the movie up as the Citizen Kane of sleaze, but for a subgenre whose entries include Gestapo’s Last Orgy and Ilsa: She Wolf Of The S.S., it’s actually rather tame.
63. The Werewolf And The Yeti (1975)*
Born Jacinto Molina Alvarez, Paul Naschy played every horror villain from Count Dracula to Dr Fu Manchu, but he was best known for playing Waldemar Daninsky(aka The Wolf Man) in a series of cheaply-made Spanish exploitation films.
The Werewolf And The Yeti is the 8th of the 12 Daninsky films, and it’s one of the most ludicrous, with Naschy captured (and used as a sex slave) by a pair of female vampires while searching for the Yeti in the Himalayas. When he attempts to escape, they bite him and transform him into El Hombre Lobo, setting up everything you could want from a Yeti vs werewolf movie.
There’s nudity, flagellation plus several torn out throats, and even though the climactic confrontation takes up about a minute of screen time, it was enough for the BBFC to ban the movie in 1984. The film has never been resubmitted for classification and remains unavailable in the UK.
62. Women Behind Bars (1975)
Of Jess Franco’s three films on the banned list, only Women Behind Bars avoided a successful prosecution for obscenity in the UK, which cynical viewers might attribute to the censor’s inability to stay the course.
This was Franco’s personal favourite among his women in prison movies, but that’s probably because he gets to use so many lingering close ups of real-life girlfriend Lina Romay’s naked body. It certainly wasn’t for the filmmaking because Women Behind Bars is shot in Franco’s usual style with a mostly static camera and the occasional out-of-focus zoom.
The storyline is non-existent, the acting is amateurish and even at 75 minutes the film drags, so Francophiles will be in their element. Others beware.
61. Don’t Go In The House (1980)
Looking down the banned list you’ll find cult films, pseudo-art films, so-bad-they’re-good films and lots and lots of trash, which is where the Don’t cycle belongs. Of interest mainly as the inspiration for Edgar Wright’s fake trailer in Grindhouse (2007), you could live a happy and fulfilled life without seeing any of them.
The worst of the bunch is Don’t Go In The House, a very poor man’s Psycho about a disturbed loner who kidnaps and incinerates women that remind of him of his tyrannical mother. The most interesting thing about the film is that it was an early credit for British-born cinematographer Oliver Wood, who later shot Die Hard 2, Face/Off and The Bourne Ultimatum.
60. S.S. Experiment Camp (1976)*
Few subgenres baited the censors as eagerly as Nazisploitation, and of all the films banned in the UK, few were more deserving than SS Experiment Camp. The video art, which showed a nude woman on a cross being leered over by a Nazi, left no doubt that this was not The Sound Of Music.
Unlike the previous year’s Ilsa: She Wolf Of The SS, however, the film has more on its mind than gratuitous female nudity. Seeking a new pair of testicles, a Commandant castrates one of his guards, which leads to an unintentionally funny moment when the guard says, “You bastard, what have you done with my balls?”
The BBFC were unamused and banned the film, more for its artwork than its content, which they later described as mild and poorly executed. In fact, when the film was resubmitted with different artwork in 2005, it was passed uncut.
59. Cannibal Terror (1980)
“Deep in the jungle the flesh eaters are waiting!” lies the tagline. The “jungle” looks more like rural Spain, with footpaths, modern buildings and traffic visible in the background. Thank goodness director “Allan W Steele” (aka Alain Deruelle) splices in so much stock footage to add authenticity.
Anyway, the plot involves a trio of petty crooks who kidnap a young girl and abscond into the jungle where they encounter a group of pale, overweight “natives” who’ve clearly taken grooming lessons from Adam Ant. Escaping their clutches, the crooks seek refuge with an old man whose young wife doesn’t seem to mind too much when one of them ties her to a tree and rapes her.
Apart from some fake-looking gore, the most shocking thing in the entire picture is the amount of recycled and reused footage (see if you can count how many times Deruelle uses the same close-up of a plastic skull). The BBFC disagreed, and the film was unavailable in its uncut form until 2003.
58. Gestapo’s Last Orgy (1977)*
“The sickest entry in the Nazisploitation genre!” promises the tag line. Actually, Cesare Canevari’s film is equal parts arthouse and grindhouse, aiming for dramatics along the lines of Salon Kitty and The Night Porter whenever a Jewish foetus isn’t being consumed or a naked woman being set on fire.
The BBFC failed to appreciate such artistry and, following a successful prosecution, the film was never re-released in the UK. There is a multi-region DVD available, though, which negates the point of the ban.
57. Prisoner Of The Cannibal God (1978)
Also known as Primitive Desires and Mountain Of The Cannibal God, this jungle movie has a well-regarded director (Sergio Martino, who made Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key) and a cast that includes Ursula Andress and Stacy Keach, but it’s still a pretty tedious effort. Andress and Keach venture into New Guinea in search of her missing husband, and it’s only at the end that his rotting corpse turns up, being worshipped by a cannibal tribe.
The title was enough to bring the film to the attention of the DPP, but aside from some scenes of animal cruelty there’s nothing here to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. The film was re-released with cuts in 2001, but it’s too poorly paced to be worth checking out.