Shock Corridor- Exploitation in a Madhouse

            Shock Corridor is a low budget film of a journalist going undercover in a mental institution to uncover the facts surrounding a mysterious murder. He achieves this by getting himself committed by his girlfriend, who poses as his sister, claiming that he has been trying to sexual assault her.

            If you think this is a little extreme for a 1960s picture, you are correct. But controversial is a stable diet for director Samuel Fuller’s films. The director started off writing pulp novels before moving onto films. The term “narrative tabloid” was used by critic Grant Tracey to describe the director. He never shied away from topics of prostitution, child molestation, mental illness, incest, racism, police corruption, etc. All somewhat taboo topics at the time. And while his films were not highly praised at their initial release, time has given them a second life. The French New Wave claimed his work as a major influence.

Though there certainly are noir elements

            There has been a discussion for years on whether Shock Corridor should be classified as film noir or exploitation, or both. While it certainly does have that striped down film noir feel, the sexual element- very shocking for the time- is often played here for shock value. Particular a scene where the protagonist accidently stumbles into the ward dedicated to the treatment of nymphomaniacs and is nearly torn apart by a dozen in a violent sexual frenzy. Not only was it ridiculous, but also totally unnecessary to the plot.  It is touches like this, and the reason he’s committed, which tip the balance towards to exploitation.

            Apparently the director wrote the original draft of the screenplay in the 1940s, while working for Fritz Lang, under the inferior title Straitjacket. The filming itself was incredibly cheap. It was shot over ten days. There was only one set and no exterior locations. Which helps to give the film a closed in claustrophobic feel. In fact the sound stage was so small, Fuller hired midgets to walk around in the distant section of the corridor to give the illusions of depth.

            As the film progresses, the protagonist comes into contact with the three witnesses to the murder, each suffering from bizarre delusions. The first is Stuart. Who was captured in the Korean War and was brainwashed into becoming a Communist. Stuart was ordered to indoctrinate a fellow prisoner, but instead the prisoner's unwavering patriotism reformed him. Stuart's captors pronounced him insane and he was returned to the US in a prisoner exchange, after which he received a dishonorable discharge and was publicly reviled as a traitor. The character imagines himself to be Confederate States of America General J.E.B. Stuart.

            The second is Trent was one of the first black students to integrate a segregated Southern university. The constant barrage of bigotry drove him over the edge. He imagines himself a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and stirs up the patients with white nationalist dogma and attacks the other black inmates. Third is Boden, an atomic scientist scarred by the knowledge of the devastating power of intercontinental ballistic missiles. He has regressed to the mentality of a six-year-old child.

Now while the protagonist is trying to get information out of each one, they eventually lapse into sanity and begin talking about the murder. While this is happening, the film shot in black and white, is spliced with hallucinogenic color footage. This is the part that actually makes the film, which causes it to stand one. One little artistic touch. The hallucination sequences include footage shot on location in Japan for House of Bamboo (1955), and footage shot by Fuller in Mato Grosso, Brazil for the unfinished film Tigrero.

After a hospital riot, the protagonist is straitjacketed and subjected to shock treatment. He begins imagining that his girlfriend really is his sister, and experiences many other symptoms of mental breakdown. He learns the identity of the killer and violently extracts a confession from him in front of witnesses. He then sits down and writes his story. Immediately afterwards he lapses into a catatonic state from which it is believed he will not recover.

Shock Corridor is a bizarre film that rises high above its low budget. In fact, the lack of budget is what caused the director to try innovative new techniques to make the film stand out. Which he succeeds at brilliantly.

The entire film is below. Enjoy and Caveat Emptor.

                    For more fun try Across the Wounded Galaxy by Rex Hurst

Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS- Nazisploitation at its Finest

Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS is perhaps the definition of an exploitation film. It is a gory, violently sexual made expressly for the purpose of giving the audience a cheap and shocking thrill, yet still attempting to drape itself in the paper thin masquerade of being a serious expose of the atrocities of the past.

You can see this right at the beginning of the picture when a message from Herman Traeger, the film’s producer: The film you are about to see is based on documented fact. The atrocities shown were conducted as ‘medical experiments’ in special concentration camps throughout Hitler’s Third Reich. Although these crimes against humanity are historically accurate, the characters depicted are composites of notorious Nazi personalities; and the events portrayed have been reduced into one locality for dramatic purposes. Because of its shocking subject matter, this film is restricted to adult audiences only. We dedicate this film with the hope that these heinous crimes will never occur again. 

Directly after this high minded statement, we move into a sex scene where the incredibly buxom Ilsa is grinding away on a male prisoner whom she then orders to be castrated as punishment for not being able to satiate her nymphomaniac appetite.

Ilsa is the warden of Special Camp 9. Her goal, apart from some other sadistic games, is to prove that women can withstand more pain and suffering than men and therefore should be allowed to fight on the front lines. The movie includes the standard exploitation elements of sadism, degradation, whipping, sexual slavery, graphic torture, and a bloody finale with Ilsa shot dead and the camp set ablaze. I could more into detail on the plot, but I’m sure you get the general idea and by this time you are either interested or you are not.

It was shot in nine days on the set of Hogan's Heroes TV show- a much different take on the Nazi camps. The series had been cancelled, and, on learning that the movie had the camp being burned down at the end, the set was given over to save the cost of demolition. It also included amongst the women prisoners many porn actresses of the early 1970s, whose cleavage they never failed to flaunt.

 The film was a surprise hit on the drive-in theater and grindhouse circuit. Ilsa was resurrected for three profitable sequels that ignored her Nazi origins and her death. As a freelance mistress-for-hire, she became Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976), commander of a 1953 gulag in Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia (1977), and the warden of a corrupt Latin-American prison in Ilsa, the Wicked Warden (1977). The last one was originally not meant to be an Ilsa sequel, but it was changed post production.

Ilse Koch

The character of Ilsa, played by the lovely Dyanne Throne, was loosely based on Ilse Koch "The Bitch of Buchenwald". She was the wife of Karl-Otto Koch, commandant of Buchenwald and later on Majdanek. In 1947, she became one of the first prominent Nazis to be tried by the U.S. military. She was well known for being promiscuous with many of the SS officers at the camp and involved in embezzling confiscated materials from the prisoners. Additionally she was accused of marking prisoners with tattoos for death so she could harvest the skin and make lampshades out of them. She was tried twice and garnered a life sentence, which she ironically protested about to the International Human Rights Commission. She committed suicide in prison in 1967.

Richard Kennedy

Additionally, this film sports Richard Kennedy (whom we covered before in the wonderful film The Love Butcher). Here he plays a Nazi General inspecting the camp and becomes enthralled with Ilsa, whom he sees as the ideal Aryan woman, a Goddess made manifest. And as such, wants her to urinate all over his face for his sexual gratification. He had appeared in episodes of a number of TV show, most notably, Happy Days, Beretta, and Little House on the Prairie, and handful of  other bad films- Henry Kissinger in Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, and a hillbilly in Invasion of the Blood Farmers. His career continued on into the 80s where he died in 1985 at the age of 78.

She Wolf of the SS pioneered the subgenre of Nazisploitation. Usually they were a retread of the women-in-prison formula simply relocated to a concentration camp. The genre eventually died out as none of these films were very successful. Due, I believe, to a lack of campiness that the Ilsa films generated, despite the sex and gore. A few others, for those who are interested, are : The Beast in Heat, SS Hell Camp, Last Orgy of the Third Reich, Helltrain, Germany Year Zero, SS Experiment Love Camp, SS Special Section Women, Red Nights of the Gestapo, Nazi Love Camp 2, Helga, She Wolf of Stilberg, Fraulein Devil, and Nathalie: Escape from Hell- and so on and so on.

And surprisingly the genre has inspired actual critically acclaimed art house films. Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter , Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (which we also have covered here), and Tinto Brass's Salon Kitty all are due in some part to Ilsa trail blazing brutality and demonstrating what can actually be gotten away in film. 

     For an exploitation Ilsa has tremendous staying power. It is campy and profane, sexual and sadistic. For those who like such things, it is a must see.

                      The entire film is below. Enjoy and Caveat Emptor!  

For more fun try Across the Wounded Galaxy by Rex Hurst

Educational Scare Films Part II- More Sid Davis Productions

As I wrote in a previous article, Sid Davis Productions contains the greatest collection of over-the-top, pushy, and obnoxious short films aimed at the educational market. With over 200 titles in its catalogue, Sid Davis focused his films not for math or science, but on the moral upbringing and behavior  of  a student. Like the pathetic “abstinence-only” & “teach men not to rape” brigades today , Davis felt it was up to the state and underpaid civil servants to lead the way on this cause, as most parents were too stupid to be able to do it properly.  And like the infamous "Boys Beware" Davis managed to do it with a heavy handedness that quickly becomes camp once its viewers reach high school age.

      So here is a collection of five more of the most obnoxious educational scare films ever made. Enjoy:

 
The Relaxed Wife (1957): Teaching girls how to be better wives to their husbands. To help him unwind after a long day of man work, and to never NEVER burn the pot roast

The Strange Ones (1969): A helpful policewoman warns children about the dangers of kidnappers and molesters, which is easy as they all look creepy and have mustaches.

Big Man on Campus (1958). The deviancy of being a class clown and how you’re only really cool by following the rules.

Alcohol is Dynamite (1958): Another anti-drinking short where one beer leads down a destructive path to spilled blood and twisted metal.

The Snob (1958): A high school female doesn't want to associate with the other students at school, preferring to spend her time at home,doing homework, etc. The other kids think she's a snob, but a fellow student's mother convinces them that all she really needs is to be pretty and popular.

               For more weirdness try Across the Wounded Galaxy by Rex Hurst

Sid Davis Productions- Exploitative Educational Scare Films

       Sid Davis Productions created perhaps the greatest collection of short films aimed at the educational market which dealt almost exclusively in taboo or social engineering topics. In face some of his methods for dealing with his topics are, by today’s standards, so heavy handed that there is a case for labeling them as exploitation films- since a person can watch them (as I’m sure most people who view them nowadays do) with a sadistic glee as what will befall the protagonist, or to just laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.

      Sid Davis productions got its foundation due to the infamous case of Linda Joyce Glucoft, a 6 year old girl who was raped and murdered in 1949. Davis often stated that the case bothered him so much because his own daughter was 6 at the time. What further concerned him was that, despite his warnings, the girl still did not seem to pay attention watching out for perverts. Davis often worked as a stand-in for John Wayne and was discussing his worries to him when Wayne suggested that Davis make a film about it and offered him $1,000 startup fund (roughly 10,000 in today’s economy).

      With this he produced The Dangerous Stranger- which coined the term “stranger danger” still in use today. It was a tremendous hit in police and educational circles and earned him enough to start his company, which eventually sported a catalogue of between 150-200 titles. The Dangerous Stranger was remade twice, once in 1963 and again in 1972.

     And while nominally many of the subjects of these film are important social matters and he took them seriously, his approach has always been criticized for being over the top, and employing scare tactics and misinformation to attempt to drive his point home emotionally. As can be seen in the a clip from Live and Learn, a short on home safety, where a little girl is making paper dolls with scissors when her father comes home, she leaps up to greet him, trips on the carpet and impales herself on the scissors.

      Now to be fair, Sid Davis was one of the foremost active vocalists against child abuse of his time, something that no one wanted to discuss then, and campaigned for tougher laws for child predators. I have already covered Sid Davis most notorious film "Boys Beware" (which confuses the idea of pederasty and homosexuality), so below I offer several more selections of the more outrageous Sid Davis “social guidance” films. Enjoy.

The Dangerous Stranger (1949)- Teaching kids to be fearful of the world

 Girls Beware (1951)- Teaching girls not to get into compromising situations. Nowadays feminists call this victim blaming.

The Bottle and the Throttle (1961). Film on drinking and driving. Fun fact one beer can cause you to drive out of control.

Marijuana and Heroin- The Terrible Truth (1961). The "gateway drug" myth is older than you think. Slurping on a J, will cause you to shoot up.

Live and Learn (1951). The first in a long line of trying to scare kids into being safe... without much success.

Gossip (1953). Look at the damage you girls can do with your incessant chattering!

    For more fun, try Spiff Blasthandy: Behind the Screen. It's a blast.