Ilsa, Wicked Warden (1977)
Starring: Dyanne Thorne, Lina Romay, Howard Maurer
Director: Jess Franco
Synopsis: a fake rip off serenading as an Ilsa due to Dyanne Thorne's presence
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

No point beating around any bushes - this is an atrocious film. Firstly it is serenading as an Ilsa film but as you will discover within ten minutes of watching the movie, it has nothing to do with the previous episodes. Dyanne Thorne returns in a cheap re-run of her legendary Ilsa role but without any of the charm of allure of the wonderful fraulein from the 3rd Reich. Here Thorne is hardly recognizable sporting an accent closer to Count Dracula than to Germany.

In this fake Ilsa clone made by some Italian rip off merchants (Jesse Franco who decided to cash in on the Ilsa thing by presenting his atrocity as an authentic part of the "series") Ilsa, or rather Greta is the sadistic, lesbian warden of a prison where experiments to "cure" sexual deviancy are the order of the day. There is plenty of flesh on display, more than in the Ilsa films, and the raunchy scene involving Thorne shows just how low the poor actress had to stoop in order to get work in the wake of her Ilsa disasters. Thorne became so infamous after Ilsa that people just would not hire her, and thus she had to appear in embarrassing smut like this. There are loads of torture scenes, all horribly close up, but not as gruesome as in the real Ilsa films which says a lot. This time we are treated to inmates being injected with acid so that their genitals cannot feel any sensation……smoke is seen rising from the private parts of an inmate whose sexual appetite has to be curbed by the all powerful warden.

Thorne has a sick scene where she inserts needles all over her lover before pressing down on the masochistic girl with all her force. Perhaps the most disgusting scene is when an inmate is forced to wipe clean an inmate who has just defecated…..with her tongue! Fortunately we aren't shown the horrors of this scene, but the suggestion was bad enough. The film tries very hard to out sicken the two previous Dyanne Thorne Ilsa films and perhaps it does succeed to some extent but it never has the same tongue in check humour that was so pervasive in the Ilsa films. One could hardly help but chuckle along with all the depravity on display in the Ilsa movies. Here the element of camped up comedy is utterly missing and none of the performers appear to be relishing their roles as they did in the real Ilsa films.

This is a sad imitation, merely trying to cash in on the notoriety of the Ilsa films. This kind of sick exercise in filmmaking can work only If there are huge doses of humour, either overt or between the lines, but in this movie we are just offered the atrocities pretty much straight up. The side characters are neither interesting nor funny and one doesn't feel for any of them in their plight against the marauding prison warden. This time Thorne comes undone in the most sickening manner yet….

This film is an uninspired piece of grade A crap. Even for devotees of shlocky, crap movies, this has very little to offer other than the sight of the great Dyanne Thorne sporting yet another fascinating accent. It's truly abysmal and a far cry from the camp insanity of the two true Ilsa films directed by Don Edmonds. This fake Ilsa is best given a miss altogether.