cinema history class: ilsa, the tigress of siberia

The session: Don't Make Ilsa Angry
Having shown us the original Ilsa movie, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, over ten years ago, Keith decided to show us some follow-up movies 

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 2: Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia (1977)
Directed by Jean LaFleur

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I knew there were a few Ilsa follow-up movies, but I wouldn't have been able to name them for you. 

Plot Synopsis:
A sadistic prison commandant escapes postwar justice by relocating to Siberia, where she discovers that the best way to rehabilitate criminals is apparently through forced labor, torture, sex and elaborate catfights. When a revolutionary hero shows up to challenge her reign of terror, the movie remembers it needs a plot and lurches toward an ending between bouts of exploitation and fur hats.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia gives us a pretty good idea of what we're in for right from the start. That occurs by way of a bullet in the frozen north. The trailer proudly quotes Oui magazine. If your marketing campaign begins with the endorsement of a men's magazine best known for articles that nobody read, subtlety is probably not on the menu.

I went into this one wanting to dislike it. The previous Ilsa films haven't exactly convinced me that the franchise has hidden depths waiting to be discovered. And for the first half of the movie, I felt completely justified.

The Siberian section is, for long stretches, little more than an exercise in increasingly elaborate cruelty. Plot seems almost optional. Instead, the filmmakers appear to have sat around a table brainstorming ways people could be tortured, maimed, or killed in creative fashion. Some of these ideas are admittedly inventive. The arm-wrestling match over running chainsaws certainly leaves an impression. But it's hard to shake the feeling that the movie is less interested in telling a story than in seeing how far it can push the audience's tolerance for gratuitous violence. At times it feels like a proto-Saw film, only with fur hats.

The sex scenes don't help much. One sequence featuring Dyanne Thorne, her real-life husband, and another man manages the impressive feat of being more vulgar than erotic. By this point I was pretty sure I knew exactly what kind of movie I was watching, and I wasn't especially impressed.

Then something unexpected happened.

The movie moved to Montreal.

At first I assumed the Canadian material would be a brief epilogue after the Siberian story wrapped up. Instead, it gradually became clear that Montreal was going to occupy roughly half the running time. And the longer it stayed there, the more interesting the film became.

I didn't notice the transition immediately. It sort of snuck up on me. Scene by scene, the movie started developing an actual plot. Characters had agendas. There were competing factions. People were spying on each other, betraying each other, and occasionally shooting each other. I often found it difficult to keep track of exactly which side was scoring points at any given moment, but that confusion was preferable to the straightforward sadism of the earlier scenes. At least now there was something happening besides torture.

The second half becomes a surprisingly entertaining mix of action film, espionage thriller, and double-cross-heavy adventure story. And interestingly, a number of scenes felt almost like spaghetti westerns transplanted into a Cold War setting. The sequences in Gulag 14 in particular had that familiar atmosphere of armed men facing off in dusty compounds while shifting loyalties determine who survives. Swap out the snow for desert landscapes and some of the scenes wouldn't feel entirely out of place in a Sergio Corbucci film.

By the end, I found myself admitting something I hadn't expected to admit: this was actually much better than I thought it would be. That's not the same thing as saying it's a great film. It's still exploitative, frequently ridiculous, and often unpleasant. But somewhere along the way it transformed from a plotless parade of atrocities into a reasonably entertaining action-and-espionage picture.

As for Joe, he once again found a way to keep us all on our toes. He awarded the film a real-world score of 8.9. He then clarified that, symbolically, it was a 10. I dutifully acknowledged this distinction at the time. Unfortunately, a few weeks later, I can no longer remember what on earth he meant by it.