By Jens Hellroute
My unhealthy obsession and fascination with bad girls probably started with two incidents in the mid70's. I was a 10-11 year old cheerful Danish jock in hicksville who lived for soccer (Biggest sport in the world, yanks! Who the hell have heard of baseball?!?). I also watched a lot of TV and when the British cult series, "The Avengers", finally aired at that time Diane Rigg entered my life and kicked my pre-teen butt black'n'blue! To hell with that old geek with the bowler, this foxy dressed beauty knew lethal martial arts (haven't seen a Bruce Lee flick yet, I must add) and was opening a malicious can of whupass on helpless villains. Hot damn!

Besides being a soccer junkie I also was a boy scout (yes, Hellroute 16's singer once had a undefiled soul, sworn to my help my follow man!?!) and our scout house was also the only recycling center for my little town's used newspapers, magazines and stuff. Needless to say not all publications were Christian lady zines. Of course there were generic jerkoff porn mags, a bit too extreme for my taste, but I vividly remember a Danish men's magazine called "Weekly Report". One issue ran an article on several pages on this notorious epic called "Ilsa, Shewolf Of The SS" (1974. Don Edmunds). A instant almost electric shock hit me!

My school teachers and parents had always told me that them Nazis were evil, ugly and sick. But this blonde bigbreasted woman named Dyanne Thorne wasn't ugly; evil and sick, yes. Hmm... brutal photos showed her in (tight) third reich uniforms gleefully torturing helpless men'n'women in many graphic ways. Other photos showed her naked engaging in sex with men, always on top. Pretty intense stuff for kid barely in his teens!

I tried to forget the unsettling yet fascinating images and started concentrating on sports, playing innocent kissin' games with the gals, and listening to bands like Sweet, Thin Lizzy and Suzi Quatro. A few years later the British punkrock explosion shookup my teenage world like a rabid Ebola plague; Sham 69, Buzzcocks, The Damned, UK Subs, Eddie And The Hot Rods and The Pistols corrupted my soul and taught me that tacky loud crudeness was the way. Lots of punk albums had weird sleazy s&m imagery, X-Ray Spex were singin' "Bondage, Up Yours", Suxie was wearing swastika T-shirts, and Debbie Harry was gonna get me "One Way Or Another"

In the early 80's I started trekkin' to Copenhagen with some Motörhead booze pals, mostly goin' to metal/ punk shows and shooting pool. We also cruised the red light district areas and found a seedy grindhouse theatre that usually showed early 70's Danish porn comedies (which starred several highbrow actors from Danish Royal Theatre! Yep, I'm proud of that unique phenomenon) Italian actionfilms, and of course French skinflicks, some with Brigitte Lahaie. YEAH! But one rainy night there was a double feature from hell; "Caligula" (1980. Tinto Brass) and my hidden childhood 'treasure', "Ilsa Shewolf Of The SS"! Needless to say thisfatal reunion threw me into the mad infamous 80's video nasty (as I found out later it was called) wasteland of lowbudget sickies and wonderful bad girl flicks all controlled by my remote control! More on the ILSA phenomenon later. NB! This article mainlyfocus on aggressive strong gals in exploitation cinema, it's a personal selective thing, okay?

NOIR HELLCATS
Early bad girl cinema probably goes further back than dangerous Noir femme fatales, but it's impact and importance is essensial. To me one pistolpackin' gal will always stand out. A raw stylish sex, guns & violence tale called "Gun Crazy" (1950. Joespeh H Lewis) starring blonde named Peggy Cummings. No other noir broad was more fierce and lethal (the a.k.a. title was probably more precise; "DeadlyIs The Female") than this small town vixen who persuades John Dall to a life of crime, 'We go together like guns and ammunition!'. Obviously inspired by real life antics of Bonnie and Clyde. Later director Lewis also made the masterpiece "The Big Combo" (1955). Other notable aggressive noir ladies was Barbara Stanwyck ("Double Indemnity". 1944. Billy Wilder), Lana Turner ("Postman Always Rings Twice". 1946. Tay Garnett), and Jane Greer ("Out Of The Past". 1947. Jacques Tourneur).

FASTER ACTION GIRLS, KILL KILL!
After "Blackboard Jungle" (1955. Richard Brooks) and "Rebel Without A Cause" (1955. Nicholas Ray) countless nasty female B-movie delinquents entered in the ring ready for action, cheap thrills and instant gradification. The Ed Wood Jr. scripted "The Violent Years" (1956. William Morgan) which has been featured in WWC before, deals with a gang of female misfits and vandals who at one point rape a man! Another Wood story "Fugitive Girls" (1973. A.C. Stevens) took this even further with a Women-In-Prison angle. Sande Johnson's "Teenage Gang Debs" (1966) also featured some ferocious delinquent gals in this gritty gang tale of Manhatten's Golden Falcons Vs. Brooklyn Rebels. The wellknown immortal Russ Meyer cult classic "Faster Pussycat Kill Kill!" (1966) is probably the Citizen Kane of Bad Girl Cinema. A trio of busty go go dancers spread havoc in the desert lead by the unforgettable Tura Satana who breaks a man's back early in the flick. "I don't try anything, I just do it, wanna try me?". Later Meyer sirens include Erica Gavin in "Vixen" (1968), Shari Eubank ("Supervixen". 1975) and Raven De La Croix (1976. "Up").

The 60's biker craze also brought feisty hellcats on the highways. The prolific American International Pictures who produced the cycle epic "The Wild Angels" (1966. Roger Corman) also released the enjoyable "Bury Me An Angel" (1971. Barbara Peters), where tall, sexy and asskickin' Dixie Peabody (luv that name!) jumps on her hog and goes after the bikers who killed her brother. AIP also backed"The Mini-Skirt Mob" (1968. Maury Dexter), a less satisfying drive in movie. Ultra lowbudget trash howlers like Herschell Gordon Lewis' "She Devils On Wheels" (1968) and the sleazy "Sisters In Leather" (1969. Zoltan G. Spencer) also provided unique cheap(very cheap) thrills for cycle addicts. The latter featured Pat Barrington who graced us with her charm and killer curves in classicks like "Mantis In Lace" (1968. William Rotsler), "Orgy Of The Dead" (1965. A.C. Stephens. Script by Ed Wood Jr.), "The AcidEaters" (1967. Byron Mabe) and of course Russ Meyer's "Mondo Topless" (1966). Cult director Al Adamson's underrated "Angels' Wild Women" (1973) had his lovely wife Regina Carrol as the leader of some badass renegade biker sisters who beat up men with chains'n'whips as they burn rubber on the highway. The most recent babes-on-wheels is Troma's "Chopper Chicks In Zombie Town" (1989. Dan Hoskins), which is way funnier than most Troma flicks.

OLGA'S HOUSE OF CHEAP S&M THRILLS
'Her name was Olga and her business was slavery – white slavery. And narcotics. This woman possessed a mind so warped that she made sadism a fulltime business!' - tagline for "White Slaves Of Chinatown".John Waters has several times stated that seeing "Olga's House Of Pain" (1964. Joseph P. Mawra) in NYC's 42nd Street grindhouse theaters taught him more about filmmaking in the mid60's than going to filmschool and watching Eisenstein's "Potemkin"! He was later expelled from the filmschool in a reefer scandal. The fascinating darkhaired model Audrey Campbell starred in the first three entries; "White Slaves Of Chinatown" (1964. Mawra), "Olga's House Of Pain", "Olga's Girls" (1964. Mawra) and "Madame Olga's Massage Parlor" (1965. Mawra). All produced by George Weiss who also back Ed Wood Jr.'s "Glen Or Glenda". During the time Campbell also acted in Joe Sarno's "Sins In The Suburbs" with Dyanne Thorne.

The Olga epics are probably the most rough and vicious movies ever made at that time; the tone and graphic scenes of torture, bondage and S&M are so outrageous it boggles the mind. What also sets Olga apart from most cinematic bad girls is that she is in complete control. She's a tough crime boss/business lady who doesn't need any men to tell her what to do. The b&w films are somewhat crude withvery little dialogue, but thankfully they are graced with a narrator who tells us everything from Olga's perspective mixed with a moody Wagner-like soundtrack. "Olga's Dance Hall Girls" (1966. No director credited) took the series to an end and a different approach (without Audrey Campbell) with it's mix of orgies and occultism. There's no doubt that the Olga character were the influence for later ILSA flicks.

THE BITCH OF BUCHENWALD
As surreal as it may sound the Ilsa character was actually based on real person, Ilsa Koch, a concentration camp leader in The Third Reich, who was so notorious that even Gestapo feared her. So director Don Edmonds had here some real life history that would make a great inspiration for a motion picture. Producer David F. Friedman had already dabbled in Women-In-Prison/Naziploitation with the nasty "Love Camp 7" (1968. Lee Frost), where Friedman even had a role as a General, so it was pretty obvious to go straight for the throat of the audience and make a kill, financially.

Vegas showgirl Dyanne Thorne (born in Greenwich, Connecticut, 1932) had already been in some films, most notable the fun "Erotic Adventures Of Pinocchio" (1971. Corey Allen) and the occult hippie sleazie "Blood Sabbath" (1972. Brianna Murphy) which showed her as a decent actress. Obviously molded after Olga this blonde busty gal took on the role with gutso and chewed up the scenery. Of course the extremely graphic scenes of gore, sex and torture combined with Naziangle was an exploitive attention getter, but the success of "Ilsa, Shewolf Of The SS" and later sequels would never have been so huge without the charismatic presence of Thorne. After Shewolf followed "Ilsa, Harem Keeper Of The Oil Keepers" (1976. Edmunds), a less graphic but an efficient exploitation film on Ilsa's adventures in the Middle East. How she survived and stayed the same age is of course not important in psychotronic filmmaking!

By "Ilsa, Tigress Of Siberia" (1977. Jean LaFleur) the series got the Gulag treatment, this time with more sex scenes. Spanish EuroSleaze King Jess Franco made the final (unofficial) entry the same year, Dyanne Thorne was now "Greta The Mad Butcher" (aka Wanda, The Wicked Warden aka Ilsa, The Ultimate Power), who reigned supreme in a mental hospital in South America. Franco shows his true colors by making this the most nasty and humourless in the series. I'll strongly advice people to get the new uncut Anchor Bay DVDs with audio commentary by Thorne (who has a great sense of humor), Edmunds, Friedman and others.

Last year I held lectures on a Danish university, Syddansk Universitet, on "Feminism In Exploitation Films" (financed by the Danish taxpayers, thanks!), and ILSA was my main example of why 70's exploitation cinema contains stronger female action character than in nowadays useless Blockbuster wasteland. The young freshfaced students were pretty shocked by the filmclips, but after the lectures many came up to me and asked where they could get their academic hands on the films, so there are some hope for new generations after all!

The success of the ILSA films and the same year's more arty "Night Porter" (Liliana Cavani) spawned a depraved avalance of rough Italian ripoffs like the evil "Gestapo's Last Orgy" (1977. Cesare Canevani), the absurd "SS Experiment Love Camp (1976. Sergio Garrone), and the even more insane "Beast In Heat" (1976. Paulo Solvay) which featured a Neanderthal testosterone mutant rapist created by scientists, take note Dr. Mality! (I wondered where that boy had gotten to!--Dr. Mality) Also check out the vicious "Deported Women Of The SS" (Rino Di Silvestro) the art sleazie "Salon Kitty"(1974. Tinto Brass) and Bruno Mattei's deranged "SS Girls". Be more careful with the "Helga" and "Elsa" films; too lame and tame bottom-of-the-barrell Euro toxic waste.

PRISON BOUND VIXENS
Life in women's prisons has been put on film through out the 20th century, early efforts include Cecil B. DeMille's "The Godless Girl" (1929), "Women In Prison" (1938. Lambert Hillyer) and Edgar Ulmer's "Girls In Chains" (1943). Jess Franco's wonderful colorful "99 Women" (1968) and Frost's "Love Camp 7" were probably the the first of the more lurid WIP prototype that established itself as a vital genre in the early 70's.The most important director in the WIP 'revolution' is of course B-movie legend Jack Hill (did an interview with him in WWC a couple of issues back) who cast the only 22 year old black beauty Pam Grier for "The Big Doll House" (1971).

Earlier that year Grier had a her first real meaty part after Meyer's "Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls" (1970) as a vicious lesbian warden in the underrated "Women In Cages" (Gerardo de Leon). "The Big Doll House" and Hill's more comic sequel "The Big Bird Cage" (1972) sorta created the 'rules' and clichés of the genre.And now some crackpot psychology from Dr. Hellroute (Medical Deviate), halfassed looted from Jung.

A woman's prison symbolizes a patriarchal cage where the female and her desires is held captive by the male. In this cage the female is submitted and exploited by the male and his lesbian wardens. These lesbians have chosen to imitate the male and digress from their natural femininity. The optimistic and positive aspect of WIP cinema is that a handful of females always manage to escape and liberate themselves from the patriarchal cage. That'll be 400 bucks, pay my secretary on the way out!

A more famous director, Academy Award winner Jonathan Demme, made a pretty feminist chicks-behind-bar flick for Roger Corman's New World company, the sophisticated cult classic "Caged Heat" (1974) with Erica Gavin and Euro Horror legend Barbara Steele. Demme also wrote the thoughtful Pam Grier film "Black Mama, White Mama" (1973. Eddie Romero), a WIP take on "The Defiant Ones" (1958. Stanley Kramer). Grier brilliantly portrays a streetsmart prostitute who escapes a prison shackled together with a blonde naive revolutionaire Margaret Markov. The fact that Grier survives while Markov dies shows that realistic women who trust their instincts instead of women who follow masculine political ideals, has a better chance of survival. My wife's fave WIP film!

Pam Grier and Jack Hill continued with two even more successful violent and sexy female action flicks; "Coffy" (1973) and "Foxy Brown" (1974) which belongs among the most superior blaxploitation movies ever made. What sets these two films apart from other strong girl movies is the deeply human character Grier creates by her delicate yet forceful acting. She's no martial art expert like Cleopatra Jones or TNT Jackson, just a working gal who gets her revenge over men (politicians, pimps, pushers)by using her brains and sexappeal. Okay, she also kicks some serious ass when she has to. Hill later made "Switchblade Sisters" (1976), an awesome grossly underrated girlgang movie where violent teen vixens tear their school and the inner city in a surrealistic blood frenzy.

Other notable WIP epics from that period are the sexy and sappy "Sweet Sugar" (1972. Michel Levesque), "Terminal Island" (1973. Stephanie Rothman) which Carpenter's "Escape From New York" coped some ideas from. The 80's unleashed pearls like "Chained Heat" (1983. Paul Nicolas), probably the ultimate WIP movie ever made. The cast is a sublime who's who of exploitation cinema of that period; Linda Blair, Sybil Danning, Tamara Dobson, John Vernon and Henry Silva. Beat that! The producer made a less outrageous but entertaining WIP pic the year before; "The Concrete Jungle" (Tom DeSimone).

The director later spoofed this with "Reform School Girls" (1986) starring Sybil Danning and Lemmy ex-girlfriend and Plasmatics singer Wendy O. Williams.RIP. I'll bet that Dr. Mality had a serious crush on this headbanger chick in 80's! Paul Nicolas returned with the generic "The Naked Cage" in 1985. Linda Blair went to prison again in the fun anti-commie "Red Heat" (1984. Robert Collector) where Sylvia Kristel torments and rapes poor Linda in Berlin. Later that year Blair went back on the streets to kick some male butt in the entertaining "Savage Streets" (Danny Steinmann).

The genre sorta died out in the 90's with a only few important WIP pics like wonderful "Banished Behind Bars" which put a biker plot into the prison babe formular. Tall blonde Danish Gitte Stallone (who cashed in on little Rocky's millions. Way to go, viking gal!) starred as vicious lesbian warden in the okay "Chained Heat 2" (1993. Llyod Simandl) but the wreckless in-your-face spirit of the WIP genre seems to have disappeared. There's a Hustler spinoff called Jail Babes which also has a website (www.jailbabes.com) for men who wanna get in touch with lonely female offenders. Whatstruck me as a bit odd, at least for a Dane, was that nearly all the girls are equally occupied by the Bible and hard bondage!?! Only in America, as Don King says.

AVENGING ANGELS AND KILLER BREASTS
After Charles Bronson's incredible successful vigilante epic "Death Wish" (1974. Michael Winner) AIP released the wellmade "Act Of Vengeance aka Rape Squad" (Bob Kelljan) the same year. A sadistic rapist in a buttugly orange leisure suit is spreading terror among women while forcing them to sing "Jingle Bells" during his assault!?! A handful of victims learn karate and forms a vigilante squad and eventually track him down. The crude but efficient "I Spit On Your Grave" (1978. Meir Zarchi) remains one the of the most controversial films ever made. Banned in England since it's release (the new UK DVD is still cut), this "Last House On The Left" inspired movie upset Silskel & Ebert so much that they warned people on TV about it which of course helped the film's noteriety and success.

Camilla Keaton gets brutallyraped by four men, one of them a retard who kinda gets forced to do the deed by the others. Later she graphicly offs them one by one including the feeble minded violator. The mood of this video nasty is pretty depressing yet. Abel Ferrara's clever urban revenge flick "Ms. 45 aka Angel Of Vengeance" (1981) is definitely one of the most superior of the genre. Zöe Tamerlis, who was only 17 years old, plays a deaf mute girl who gets raped twice in a day in NYC. Her revenge becomes uniquely surreal as she dress up as a nun and starts blastin' people away at a fashion party. A cult classic.

The superbizarre world of Doris Wishman includes nudists on the moon; "Nude On The Moon" (1960), sex/organ operations; "Let Me Die A Woman" (1979) and "The Amazing Transplant" (1969), and dozens of 'erotic thrillers' like "Bad Girls Go To Hell" (1965). Wishman's most successful and most known movies are the boobzilla trash epics "Deadly Weapons" (1974) and "Double Agent 73" (1974). This twisted duo starred the ultra busty (73 mindbogglin' inches!) oddity Chesty Morgan, who use her lethal bosom to kill, drug and suffocate men. During the last couple of years these films have been hailed by feminist scholars as profound avantgarde masterpieces, so don't always knock highbrow film theory!

EASTERN BLOOD KITTENS
While the Western Civilization saw a litlle decline in hellcat gutso our brothers'n'sisters in the wild East packed a lot of psychotronic heat. A personal 70's fave is the stylish Japanese ³Lady Snowblood² (1973. Toshiya Fujita) backed the same folks who were responsable for gory the "Lone Wolf And Bub/Baby Cart" and "Hanzor The Razor" (a righteous rape samurai Dirty Harry dude!?!) series. A young girl vows to avenge her mom (a prostitute) and everybody wronged her, and by using killer umbrellas and swords Miss Snowblood unleashes rivers of blood seldom seen by this viking.

³Sister Streetfighter² (1974. Kazuhiko Yamaguchi), the third in the Sonny Chiba Streetfighter series, also deliver great femalebloodshed. "Zero Woman" (1995. Daisuke Gotoh) is an exciting later urban female Jap extermintator. A fun mutant came from Indonesia in 1988, ³Lady Terminator² (H.Tjut Djalil) about a strange lustful snake witch who infects a female anthropologist in present time, who becomes a indestructable violent sex demon. One of the weirdest films ever made. The martial arts film industry of Hong Kong also produced some unforgettable wild women epic like "Angel aka Iron Angels" (1986. Teresa Woo), the arthouse fave ²Heroic Trio² (1992. Siu-Tung Ching, Johnny To), "Deadly China Dolls" (1990. Godfrey Ho, this hack's best!),

My fave HK wildcat action movie of all time; ³Naked Killer² (1992. Clarence Fok Yiu-Leung). A sexy young gal gets trained by an older bisexual female martial arts hitman to become a professional assassin. This outrageous, wellmade and very un-PC tale is a must for addicts of girly asskickers.Okay, it¹s been a fun trip through decades and exotic settings, so I hope this article has given people a little taste for hellraisin¹ amazons in exploitation cinema.

Jens Hellroute hails from Copenhagen, Denmark and is a member of both the punk/sleaze band Hellroute 16 and the Danish Film Institute ! To contact this writer, send your email to: hellroute@wormwoodchronicles.com.