The 2009 Jess Franco Marathon, Part 5 of 8:

“Love Camp” **

This exploitation quickie opens up with two working girls who must've stolen their boots from the Blue Rita set; they're minding their own beeswax when they're suddenly taken captive. This scene is immediately followed by the kidnapping of another half-naked girl, right out of her own bed, and quickly thereafter a fourth victim, a bride on her wedding night, is stolen right out of her hotel room from in front of her husband! After the re-digitized opening credits we see a team of soldiers towing a line of tied-up gals through the jungle terrain, where one of the women asks, “Where are we going?” and the soldier retorts, “You'll find out soon enough!” I suppose we will...

The female prisoners are led into a room where the “Number 1” soldier is waiting to greet them and to explain the reason behind their abduction, presumably for both the girls' and the audience's benefit. It appears they're there to volunteer their services to the soldiers of the revolutionary army. “Well, we should soon see an improvement in our men's morale!” Number 1 exclaims. And the plot thickens... “They need the the kind of relaxation only a woman can provide!” Well, there's nothing like a straight-forward storyline.

Unfortunately, the voice-over actor handling the dubbing duties on Number 1 sounds like he's reading the pages on the fly. Thankfully, though, this introductory/exposition scene is promptly followed by the obligatory group female shower scene.

Post-shower scene, we have yet another introductory scene, this time it's the lioness blond Directress of the “Camp” spewing a 'Welcome to the Revolution' speech to the new girls. Mid-speech, one of the girls tries to make a break for it, the Directress springs into action and the girl is swiftly decapitated (below the bottom of the frame – I guess the production was unable to spring for a severed head or two). At this point in the film, I think it's fairly safe to assume the new girls now know exactly what they're in for.

As a side-note, the actress who played the Nazi-loving warden in Barbed Wire Dolls is on the other end of the stick in this film, playing one of the prisoners. She actually does quite a good job here as one of the more (loosely) complex sympathetic characters, quite the antithesis to her campy domineering warden character from the first movie. Now that the new girls are all safely locked up in their cell, it's time for Number 1 to make his re-entrance in search of his nightly “entertainment”, swaggering into the prison cell looking like a jungle version of Zap Brannigan and checking out the girl in the bed closest to the cell door: “There's nothing entertaining about that skinning kid! I need a real woman!” ...And believe me, there's way more awesomeness where that came from.

But the trouble really starts when Number 1 and the pep-talking Directress both fall for the same female prisoner. And when the counter-revolutionary doctor tries to smuggle a communique into the camp via the female prisoner's vaginal “examination”, he too becomes the subject of yet another off-screen decapitation!

And just like that, the first sixty-five minutes of Love Camp has flown by in a blur of female nudity and lesbian sex with the occasional disciplinary whipping, with a scant ten minutes left to introduce new plot turns and wrap the whole thing up in a pretty amusing finale. Fun? Yes. Funny? You bet. Worth the seventy-five minutes? If you can appreciate non-stop female nudity, then absolutely! A good movie? Well... I guess that would really be a matter of taste, or turn-ons, or some kind of non-cinematic consideration... A good movie compared to say, The Godfather? No, not really. Compared to Barbed Wire Dolls, or She Killed in Ecstasy? Well, close, but truthfully, no cigar here, either. Love camp was fun for what it was – Camp, plain and simple. I'd still recommend it even if you're mildly curious. Hell, it's a Jess Franco film! As Texan film critic Joe Bob Briggs would say, Check it out!

Till later this week...

-V.


P.S. Yes, the documentary on this DVD was again a repeat of the earlier ones. I'm going to just go ahead and assume that the rest of the DVD documentaries are likewise, and will now cease to comment on them unless something different is otherwise discovered.