Cultpix Radio

Cultpix Radio Ep.5 - Nazisploitation and celebrating one month

May 10, 2021 Django Nudo & the Smut Peddler Season 1 Episode 5
Cultpix Radio
Cultpix Radio Ep.5 - Nazisploitation and celebrating one month
Show Notes

Cultpix has now been going for one month and we look back on what feel more like six months of intense work to make the world's leading streaming service for classical cult and genre films everything its members expect it to be.

As we also celebrate VE Day and 86 years since the end of WW2, we look at all things Nazi on the big screen (and almost manage to avoid doing silly German accents), for our weekly film theme.

We look at documentaries by and about Nazi's, including Leni Riefenstahl's notorious Triumph of the Will / Triumph des Willens (1935) and why the father of the founder of Synapse Films that we licensed it from, who was himself a Holocaust survivor, deemed it important to release the film, saying, "Jerry, you MUST release the film, lest we forget." To balance it we also stream the Nazi Concentration Camps (1945) documentary shown at the Nurnberg War Crimes Trials and discuss Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder's involvement in concentration camp documentaries.

We then look at US exploitation films made during the war, including Bela Lugosi's Black Dragons (1942), which pre-dates The Manchurian Candidate in its plot; Hitler - Dead or Alive (1942), where a gang of ex-bounty hunters go to Germany to catch Hitler, for one million dollars; and Enemy of Women (1944), which charts the fall and rise of Joseph Goebbels, a weakling harassing women, who went from failed play writer to Propaganda Minister of the Third Reich.

This is followed by the first of the so-called Nazisploitations films that proliferated in the 1970s and 80s. Love Camp 7 (1969), in which two American Lieutenants with photographic memories and big breasts, volunteer to infiltrate Love Camp 7, a women's POW camp in Nazi Germany.  We chart how this led to the rise of the Nazisploitation genre in USA and Italy and films such as Ilsa She Wolf of the SS and its many sequels.

Finally, there is the bastar offspring of the Nazisploitation that take things to a whole new ridiculous level with Black Gestapo (1975), a crazed blaxplo-nazisploitation film that seeks to equate the Black Panther movement with the Nazis. There is also SS Operation Wolfcub (1983), a legendary US porn star (Harry Reams) in an erotic director’s film (Joe Sarno), with no sex! What were they thinking? Slap 'Nazi' or 'SS' on anything to make it instantly appealing as showcasing the ultimate of evils.

To end on a high note we conclude with Schichlegruber - Doing the Lambeth Walk, a 1942 two-minute propaganda film by Charles A. Ridley of the UK Ministry of Information. It remixes Triumph of the Will to a song the Nazis hated and went viral during the war. Watch the "Gestapo Hep-Cats" goose-stepping in the style of Ministry of Silly Walks and Hitler made to look ridiculous. See the full video here:  Lambeth Walk: Nazi Style - by Charles A. Ridley (1941)