Surprisingly, SS Hell Camp is not a happy, jolly romp through wartime Germany.  It’s a grisly, if tedious, account of a battle between the occupants of a Nazi camp and the local villagers.

The camp’s leader, Dr. Ellen Kratsch, has – for reasons that we’re never quite told – created a half-man, half-mutant hybrid.  Because this is what Nazis did.  The hybrid, a creature that’s slightly human, but with a low-set brow, extra facial hair, and communicates through grunting.  We’ll call him Tevez.

Tevez is a rape machine.  That’s why they, er, created him.  It doesn’t make sense, and it’s not very pleasant, but it’s going to be the start of an artificial Master Race, so, er, okay.  Tevez’s first victim gets thrown into his cage, where he grunts like he’s chomping down a sandwich.  The reaction shots from the associated SS Officers are straight out of the X Factor – generic “oh, god, I should probably be horrified” style disapproving – rather than trying to get across the horror of what they’re seeing.

Two of the villagers blow up a rail-bridge into the SS Camp, but in a shocking show of the sliding scale of morality, argue over whether or not they should have blown up a train full of soldiers as well.  With the soldiers alive, the Nazis wander into town to find out exactly what the hell is going on.

Now that the Nazis are really mad, they run through a laundry list of unpleasantness.  Atrocities committed because they make for shocking viewing.  Almost all of them involving fannies.  A fanny is electrocuted.  Another is shot.  A third has the hair ripped off and eaten.  None of this is harrowing, just extremely weird.  The tone is wrong, the screaming is hammy, the woman saying “you’re hurting me” is more suited to being squashed on the tube than having a fingernail ripped out with pliers.

The classic stupidity is a moment where a girl has two starved rats placed on her stomach, with the idea that they’ll eat and bury through her body.  Pretty grim, right?  The “rats” are actually two gerbils.  Painted black.

The film is, at best, ham-fisted and inept.  The dubbed English voiceovers sound bored, like they’re from a 1998 episode of Eurotrash.

Despite tens of people dying, nobody has bothered to check out what people actually look like when they get shot (hint: it’s not falling over in slow motion, and popping out a hand to break their fall.)

At several points, they noticeably switch to stock footage of Nazi soldiers (it’s unclear whether it’s real Germans, or from another, older, film), and back to their own shoot.

If you’re a fan of trivialising rape and Nazis, while looking at boobies and old ladies cautiously falling down, then this is definitely the film for you.

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