Psychotic Cinema

Genre: Naziploitation

Also known under the title Love Train for SS, this is a French/Spanish co-production in the sleazy WW2 naziploitation genre that was so popular during the 1970’s.

It’s 1941 and Ingrid Schüler (Monica Swinn) is a nightclub singer who is having affairs with all the top generals in the Third Reich. Excitement breaks out in the nightclub one evening when it’s announced that the German’s have invaded Russia. This prompts Ingrid to sing a celebratory song and strip off for the audience.

Ingrid is informed that she is going to be in charge of a train which is going to act as a moving bordello and the prostitutes who will work on it will all be volunteers from high ranking German families. The plan is for all these girls of finest Aryan stock to supply their services to the German officers on the Russian Front.

Ingrid and her lover Schmitt

Once Ingrid takes up her new role on the love train, her personality changes and she becomes a cruel disciplinarian. There is one girl she particularly likes to bully and with the help of one of her lovers, Schmitt (Erik Muller), who is a chisel-featured SS Captain, they have fun humiliating her. This is a bizarre scene where the girl is on all fours and Schmitt is riding her around the room singing a rhyme and spanking her backside with a riding crop.

The girls soon settle into the work of satisfying the officers’ needs, when they are interrupted by a radio broadcast announcing a failed assassination attempt on the Fuhror. The radio broadcast explains that some conspirators have been captured, but others are still being searched for.

Sandra Mozarowsky as Greta

Then the doors burst in as squad of stormtroopers enter to arrest the officers who are in the company of the girls and charge them as the missing conspirators.

The train heads further into newly occupied territory where it stops to pick up some female prisoners who will also work as prostitutes on the train. One of the prisoners, the beautiful Greta (Sandra Mozarowsky), is an old friend of Ingrid’s.

One on board the train, Ingrid has all the girls line up in their underwear and gives a speech:

Nazi pony riding

“I urge you to maintain your body in the most perfect condition… Your beauty is your weapon in the holy crusade to establish all over the world the rule of the master race.”

As the train continues its journey, it is invaded by a group of sex starved German infantry men who try to rape the girls and then they are followed by a group of sex starved partisans. Because the partisans spend all their efforts on raping the girls, they don’t realize that German reinforcements have arrived outside and they are all gunned down on leaving the train.

There is one really weird scene which involves footage of a ferocious tank battle which has obviously been taken from another movie because even the colour of the film stock is different to the rest of this movie.

The new recruits

In the midst of this tank battle we cut back to the exterior of the train where two girls run out and help save a wounded tank commander. On returning to the train, the train merrily goes on its way.

Viewing this scene, you are left wondering how in the midst of this battle can the train just sit there unharmed and eventually move off. With all the swastikas painted on the side, it must have been a huge target for miles around.

Eventually the train is brought to a stop in a small town where the girls hear another radio broadcast, this time saying the Americans and Russian are surrounding Berlin.

Having a spanking good time

The girls leave the train and are left to fight for their own survival. With the American army (these are the worst stereo-typed American soldiers you would expect to see) in view, the girls have to make some tough decisions.

Considering that other films in the naziploitation genre tend to wallow in sadistic depravity, Helltrain is relatively mild. The only deviance seems to be spanking, and I think this must have been the producer’s own fetish because we have a couple of spanking scenes, plus one member of the partisans rides a girl like a horse similar to the earlier scene with Schmitt.

Ingrid explains to Greta that she is in charge

This is low budget stuff with much of the girls’ hairstyles and underwear being 1970’s and not 1940’s. The acting is terrible, especially when people are shot, but saying that, Erik Muller is good as Schmitt the SS Captain.

Sandra Mozarowsky, who plays Greta, is beautiful, but sadly committed suicide the same year as this film was made at the tender age of 18.

Directed by the prolific French director Alain Payet, the script seems to have more holes in it that my old socks, but it’s still nevertheless an interesting and fairly amusing entry in what is usually bottom of the barrel entertainment.

An American Soldier

Helltrain (1977)