Dyanne Thorne finds herself in Jess Franco Land in ILSA THE MAD BUTCHER.
ILSA THE MAD BUTCHER
Greta—Haus Ohne Manner aka GRETA THE MAD BUTCHER, WANDA THE WICKED WARDEN, ILSA THE WICKED WARDEN 1977, Ascot Elite, 94m 7s, €14.99, BD-0 By Tim Lucas
This Swiss Blu-ray import is an appreciable upgrade of Elite/ Anchor Bay’s previous Official Jess Franco Collection DVD ILSA THE WICKED WARDEN, given a new title conflating two of its earlier monikers and gath- ered with other titles under the more fullsome heading of the Jess Franco Golden Goya Col- lection. As is generally well- known now, this Swiss production was silently co-produced by Cinepix of Canada, who pro- vided Dyanne Thorne to star but declined to have her identified as Ilsa, the Sadean authority fig- ure she had played in ILSA,
10
SHE-WOLF OF THE SS (1975) and two sequels.
The opulently-endowed Thorne, wearing an unflattering red wig, plays the Marquese Greta del Pino, head of a Third World jungle clinic, whose sexual fa- vors to the Governor (Howard Maurer, Thorne’s husband) al- low her sado-masochistic ex- cesses to be invented on various political prisoners left in her care. The film opens with a tortured escapee, Rosa Phillips, finding her way to the home of Dr. Milton Arcos (Franco himself), where she is brutally apprehended, prompt- ing him to report his misgivings about Greta’s clinic. His filed complaint attracts the attention of Rosa’s sister Abigail Phillips (Tanya Bussellier), a journalist who agrees to let Arcos place her in the clinic under cover. However, once she’s in, she must not only contend with the humiliations of alpha inmate Juana (Lina Romay) but more serious tortures, begin- ning with vaginal cauterization,
which cause her to spill Arcos’ name and destroy her last known chance for escape.
Though one of Franco’s best- known, this is not one of his best films, being a tailored-to-order piece that, while accomodating a few of his own signature touches, goes through its paces mechani- cally and fails to adequately eroti- cize its sadism or Thorne’s character, who never becomes more than a two-dimensional S&M comics caricature. Some razor-sharp close shots of the actress are frankly unforgiving of her age (officially mid-30s, she looks in her late 40s) and her big (disappointing) love scene with Maurer is shot mostly out-of-fo- cus rather than in the soft-focus the doctor may have ordered. Otherwise, we have another re- tread of Franco’s heroine-goes- undercover-and-gets-into-trouble premise (initiated with THE AW- FUL DR. ORLOF 15 years earlier, repeated as recently as JACK THE RIPPER, the year before); a
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