Sweet Sugar (Michel Levesque, 1972)

It's somewhat ironic that the fleshy limbs dangling from their torsos are sometimes called "stems," because that's precisely what the attractive stems belonging to the ladies of Sweet Sugar (a.k.a. She Devils in Chains) have to put up with on a daily basis. Let me stop you there for a second, "dangling from their torsos"? Who talks like that? Oh, shit. I know what you're doing. You're about to start typing a bunch of words that revolve around legs, aren't you? Please tell me you are, because I love it when you write about those kooky appendages. Every time you go on and on about gams, stems, wheels... whatever (give us a spin, doll), my crotch seems to go from being a dry, brittle place that no-one wants to lick to a profoundly wet one filled with fresh gullies, humid nooks, and the dampest of crannies. Well, fear not my soon-to-be moist friend, that's exactly what I plan on doing. Now, where was I? Oh, yeah, stems. Human females, as almost everyone knows, are born with stems (it's true, human males also have stems, but nobody I know wants to ejaculate anything of note in their general direction). As they mature, these so-called stems not only increase in size, but they acquire shape and definition, which will allow them to carry out a wide array of tasks. You know what else on this planet has stems and grows slowly over time? Plants, or, to be more specific, sugar cane and marijuana. A woman's stems, just like their stems, are highly sought after commodities, ones that have spawned entire industries whose sole existence is centered around exploiting the metaphorical meat swinging seductively off their succulent branches. Sure, they may sprout naturally from your body and the ground respectively, but like all natural resources, there are going to be those who will want to make a substantial profit by selling your stem cells to the highest bidder.

A brunette prostitute named Sugar (Phyllis Davis) working the streets of, oh, let's say, Tijuana, Mexico, all of a sudden finds her sexy, perspiration-stained stems standing in the middle of a sugar cane field in, oh, let's say, Costa Rica, after being framed for marijuana possession (don't ask me why Mexico is sending its drug offenders to Costa Rica, I'm just making this up as I go along). Anyway, did I just blow your mind or what? What are the odds that three of the most important stems in the long and somewhat storied history of stems would wind up in a locked battle with one another? Pretty remote, if you ask me. While the leafy stems of the marijuana plant are the reason Sugar is sentenced to two years hard labour, it's the lanky, course stems of the sugar cane plant that end up causing her stems the most grief. You'd think they would get along since they're both sweet, extremely tough, and go great with your morning coffee. Unfortunately, the criminal justice system and an amateur mad scientist named Dr. John (Angus Duncan) have driven a wedge between Sugar and her botanical allies.

Arriving at a remote plantation in a truck with a bunch of other ladies, whose stems are just well-proportioned as Sugar's (and so they should be, as they're always trying to flee, and, as most personal trainers will tell you, fleeing is great for tightening up those pesky calve muscles), the wily prostitute in the purple mini-dress is handed a machete and told to cut sugar cane all the day for very little money.

Speaking of garments that are miniature in stature, a leggy (which should go without saying in a film as leg-friendly as this one, but I thought hers were extraordinary) woman in a yellow mini-skirt does most of the fleeing during the film's early going. Sadly, the strength of her extraordinary legs let her down, as she is easily caught by one of the guards. After punching her in the face a few times (a gentle slap would have suffice, but this guy was obviously in a punching mood), the guard prepares to collect his free rape. Oh, didn't you know? The plantation guard rule book clearly states that any guard who catches an inmate while attempting to flee shall be rewarded with one free rape. Luckily for the leggy rapee, Simone (Ella Edwards), a fellow prisoner, decides to help out by placating the rapists with her afro-centric charm. "Why mess with that scrawny thing when you can have me," she tells the guards before fornicating with one of them in the bushes. And it's good thing she stepped in when she did, as the guard's partner was just about to remove her iconic yellow mini-skirt (the plantation rule book also states that the guard's free rape may be shared with up to five other guards).

Just as the women are starting to come to terms with the grim reality of their arid surroundings, they meet Burgos (Cliff Osmond), the burly brute who oversees daily operation of the plantation with a hairy-knuckled fist, Max (Albert Cole), a mustache-sporting guard who sees himself as some sort of renaissance man, and Ricky (James Houghton), a horny yet socially awkward guard, who, with the help of Max, hopes to romance one of the new arrivals. Yeah, that's right, I said "romance." It would seem that not all the guards are dirty psychopaths. In fact, Max and Ricky don't seem like they belong there at all, as their carefree attitudes seem more in line with that of camp counselors than prison guards. Anyway, Dr. John, the aforementioned amateur mad scientist, is the actual owner of the plantation and shows up on horseback just as the ladies are getting off the truck.

While perusing some of the film's promotional material, I couldn't help but notice that all the women on the poster, including Phyllis Davis, are wearing cut-off jean shorts. After I was finished studying it, I thought to myself: There's no way they actually dress like this in the movie. If my scepticism sounds a little misguided, you have to understand, I've been burned many times in the past by films that openly flaunt their cut-off jean short-related content. Ultimately failing to deliver the denim-deficient goods I so wantonly crave, these jean-short inadequate films are a blight on humanity. Well, you should have seen my reaction the moment Sugar was handed a pair of cut-off jean shorts along with her machete, I was bouncing up and down like a hyperactive little girl with an unfunny form of cerebral palsy.

It turns out, cut-off jean shorts are standard issue for all the female workers at Dr. John's super happy fun time plantation and jean short emporium, thus nullifying any chance that Sweet Sugar might wind up being a real stinker. After all, I got my cut-off jean shorts, and that's all that really matters in the grand scheme of things. Fortunately, the film, directed by Michel Levesque, is sleazy in all the right places, and takes the leggy women in peril genre to new and unsavoury heights.

Okay, I'll admit it, the heights are definitely unsavoury, but they're not all that new (it's pretty basic stuff when looked at from a cockeyed angle). I know, that whole bit I did about stems makes the film seem more like a tangled trip through an intellectual vortex, than a seedy slab of uncouth exploitation. But I'm one of few people who has the skills necessary to decipher what writers R.Z. Samuel (story) and Don Spencer (screenplay) were trying to convey with their cinematic examination of the complex relationship that exists between a woman's legs and the plant world. In other words, you're gonna have to trust me when it comes to the newness that Sweet Sugar brings to the table.

As any sane individual with all their faculties intact, I want to start lavishing praise on the quality of the catfight that takes place in this movie. But then I remembered, I despise the term "catfight." To call the campfire brouhaha that Phyllis Davis's Sugar and Ella Edwards' Simone engage in over Mojo (Timothy Brown), a voodoo priest, a "catfight," is a tad demeaning. Besides, why would you call their dust-up a "catfght" when the film features an actual cat fight?!? You heard correctly, there's a fight and it involves cats.

You see, Dr. John, on top of boasting about the agreeable shape of his well looked after genitals, loves to tinker with science (the guy's a huge fan of ethnopharmacology). And, get this, he's currently working on a serum that will rid women of their frigidity. When he's not devising convoluted ways to force women to appreciate the rectum-challenging girth of his penis, he can be seen bragging about his greatest triumph: a serum that drives docile kitties insane. Itching to try out his new serum, Dr. John, with the help of a couple of guards, throws a bunch of drug-addled cats in the direction of Sugar and her leggy clique. Scratching and clawing at their defenseless thighs with an abrasion-causing glee, the hopped-up felines make mince meat out of their soft, supple flesh.

Keen observers will notice that Dolores (Pamela Collins), a bewildered blonde with a terrible work ethic, is knocked to the ground like a sack of dirt during the cat chucking incident. Unlike Sugar, whose moxie is unshakable, Dolores seems ill-equipped to handle the hardships that come with lengthy sentences at out of the way labour camps. In an act of pure naivety, Dolores tries to ingratiate herself with Dr. John ("Forget it, LaRue. This is Polynesiantown") by playing the underage damsel in distress card. However, instead of receiving preferential treatment, she ends up getting experimented on. What kind of experiments, you ask? Well, let's just say, there the kind of experiments that make you walk funny when all is said and done.

When Dr. John says, "take off your sweater... it's perfectly all right, I'm a doctor," to Dolores, that should have been her cue to jump out the nearest window (don't worry, honey, the sweat that has been accumulating in your socks over the course of the day will cushion your landing, that is, if you're lucky enough to land on your feet). Oh, and just because someone says they're a doctor, doesn't mean they're an actual doctor. In fact, no-one is really a doctor, it's a completely made up vocation, much like, "psychiatrist" or "music critic."

I'm tired of Dolores and her average, cock-teasing ways, let's get back to Sugar and her savage, cock-pleasing ways. Grabbing a guard named Carlos (Darl Severns), she literally plucks him out of the jungle, in order to feed her voracious appetite for coitus, Sugar takes a bath with him in Dr. John's bath! You gotta admire Sugar's audacity. I mean, taking a bath, and, not to mention, having sex in his bed, was a pretty ballsy move, especially when you consider the fact that Sugar had previously rebuffed Dr. John and his soapy schlong while he was standing in the very same bathtub. But that's just way Sugar operates. She doesn't think about the consequences of her actions, she lives in the moment, and that's why she's such an appealing character. I don't think there are any actresses working today who could possibly match the amount of swagger Phyllis Davis oozes as Sugar, whose body, not only allows her to communicate with cougars, but contains all the properties of the known pyschosexual universe.

Watching as the stems of the plantation's sugar cane plants burn, it becomes paramount that Sugar's stems, no doubt still coursing with the chronic residue from the dried marijuana stems she smoked in Tijuana, need to live to strut another day. At least, that's what I gleaned from the film's chaos-filled finale. It's important that her stems survive, and not just for the benefit of future generations, but for all the tragically flaccid men out there waiting for her shapely stems to bring meaning back to their pathetic lives.

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Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (Don Edmonds, 1975)

If you were to attempt to make a gripping drama about the day-to-day struggles that come with living at an SS run concentration camp during the Great Patriotic War, how would you start things off? Some might open on a small patch of flowers flourishing next to an electrified fence–you know, try to capture the dichotomy between the beauty of nature and the scourge that is manufactured oppression. Others might cut to the chase and opt for a closeup shot of a swastika flag gently flapping in the midday sun. Well, the director of the justifiably infamous Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS doesn't care what you think, as he has decided that a side view shot of some mild commandant straddling followed by some not-so mild castration is the best way kick off your concentration camp movie. Right then and there, you know this film isn't going to about illuminating the populace about the ills of Nazism, a discredited movement whose sole appeal was that they had cooler uniforms than their drab enemies. Particularly Karl Diebitsch and Walter Heck's all-black SS uniform, manufactured by Hugo Boss. Utilizing the well-worn: titillate then repulse method of exploitation filmmaking, director Don Edmonds (Tender Loving Care) seems to revel in causing your aroused feelings to quickly turn into one's of revulsion and disgust. Having us cheering on a man's genitals to plunge as far as they can vaginally go one minute, only to have us wincing uncontrollably a mere ten seconds later when those very genitals are unceremoniously removed without even as much as a half-hearted auf Wiedersehen was a tad jarring.

If you enjoy watching men being tortured by female Nazis–and who doesn't?–you better savour the first five minutes, because after that you won't see any men harmed until at least the film's chaotic coda (throats are slit, necks are garrotted). No, this particular camp, Medical Camp #9, is all about performing gruesome experiments on young women. The camp commandant (the mild straddler I alluded to earlier), a stern lass named Ilsa (Dyanne Thorne), wants to help the Third Reich by making its soldiers become more resilient. And if that means employing maggots (mealworms), infectious diseases, pressurized chambers, scalding hot water and electrified dildos, than so be it (you gotta support the Wehrmacht).

A new shipment of ladies arrives at the camp, and you can tell immediately that Ilsa doesn't like Anna (Maria Marx) and Rosette (Jacqueline Giroux). The latter is merely an annoyance, in that she seems to ask way too many questions. It's the former who gets Ilsa's panzer panties all in a twist. You could sense the tension between then when they first meet. The way Anna stood naked before her, proudly displaying her no-nonsense breasts and bulbous pubic region seemed to irk Ilsa (the others sheepishly attempted to shield those particular areas with a balled up clump of their ratty clothes). However, the fact she won't satisfy the shapely commandant's perverted desire to hear her subjects scream whenever she would violently poke and prod them is what really puts Anna's organic structure in danger.

Realizing that their days as relatively attractive women with all their limbs are numbered, Anna and Rosette try to get a revolt going. Only problem being all their bunkmate's are all showing the signs of having resided at a concentration camp where medical experiments and gang rape are not only commonplace, they're in the brochure. (Medical Camp #9: "Come for the syphilis, stay for the sexual humiliation."). In other, less offensive words, they've been there way too long to be any sort of shape to help.

What these spunky gals need is a couple of strapping men. And wouldn't you know it, there are a bunch living in a dorm across the way. Employing prisoners of war and other riffraff to do menial work, the camp has a sizable number of non-Nazi men to choose from. The two Anna and Rosette convince to assist their cause are a dapper American newcomer named Wolfe (Gregory Knoph) and Mario (Tony Mumolo), a wily camp veteran.

If Mario has the demeanor of a man who has no testicles, well, that's because he doesn't have any testicles. His sole reason for helping the girls is based on his lack of testicles. In fact, almost every facet of his existence revolves around his missing testicles and exacting revenge on the person who removed them from their scrotal perch.

You see, while Ilsa loves to torture people for the sake of national security, she also loves cock. You could say it's her one true weakness, that, and an inability to say no to creepy Obergruppenführers when they inevitably ask her to expel urine on them. Her insatiable need to have an erect penis immersed inside the pure, reasonably unsullied confines of Aryan vag on a semi-regular basis is actually what leads to her downfall. She acquirers her daily allocation of cock from the ranks of the camp workers, and if their cock doesn't meet with her high standards (i.e. hump heartily until she achieves orgasm), she will instruct her black clad minions to haul you down to the lab, where she will personally take away your junk.

When Wolfe is eventually summed to stick his prick in Ilsa's shock-haired tissue box, Mario shoots him a "dude, your balls are so going to be in a jar by sunup" look. What Mario doesn't know is that Wolfe has a trick up his sleeve–his sleeve being his penis. As Ilsa points out, it's not exactly the largest rake in the tool shed–his rake being his penis. But as she soon finds out, its thrusting prowess is second to none. Craving its long lasting power like were an overly buttered piece of toast, Ilsa has become so captivated by Wolfe's unflappable shaft, that her dedication to sadism seems to waver over the course of the film. Actually, the opposite happens, as her desire to make Anna scream hits a fever pitch. Nevertheless, it's her obsession with Wolfe's steady member and Anna's plucky determination that cause the rebellion's plans to move forward at an accelerated pace.

I know what you're thinking. You mean to tell me, the fate of democracy depends on one man's ability to not shoot his goo inside a curvy blonde Nazi doctor in an expedient manner? Ridiculous as it sounds, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS is all about postponing the ejection of seminal fluid. Simple as that. Anybody who tries to tell you otherwise has obviously chosen to approach the film from a perspective that is different than mine, and I respect that. But deep down they know I'm sort of right.

The off and on nature of Dyanne Thorne's German accent was, I wanna say, "adorable," but that doesn't feel right. Okay, how 'bout this: The manner in which Dyanne Thorne's German accent seemed to fluctuate from scene to scene was oddly endearing. Yeah, that'll work. To be fair, the only instance where I recall this actually happening occurred whenever she would say the word "Reich," as in the "Third Reich." At first, I noticed that she pronounced in the Anglo-American way. But then she started saying it the German way. It's as if her accent gradually got better as the film progressed.

As far as lady Nazi's go, Dyanne Thorne (Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks) isn't really my type. On top of being cruel, I like my lady Nazis to be card carrying members of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee (a.k.a.Winzig Brüstchen Ausschuss). Also, Ilsa's ample protrusions repeatedly hampered the symmetry of her fabulous SS uniform. Although, I thought the wide-eyed pride of Greenwich, Connecticut looked amazing whilst standing in front of a blood-spattered wall.

Is it possible for one to grow tired of female pubic hair? I didn't think it was humanly possible, but there were a few moments during this film where I actually thought to myself: "Someone get that poor woman a pair of pants. Her clit's gonna get hypothermia." But then again, it's pretty hard to electrocute a person's genitals if they're wearing pants.

The mayhem of the finale was an unbelievable mishmash of outdoor stabbings, stealthy strangulation, topless knife-wielding, pulsating arterial spray (thanks to makeup artist Joe Blasco), and bullet-ridden corpses. Some of the deaths, especially the one's performed by the guys who take their orders from an ex-poultry farmer/wannabe Mongolian, were wonderfully staged. It's the shame Ilsa and her female subordinates didn't wear skirts throughout the film, because that would have made things perfect. Yeah, that's right, perfect. Sure, the torture scenes are a bit much at times, there's no mention of Alfred Naujocks, and the camp seemed to lack guard dogs, but there's no denying that this film is a well-made piece of exploitative trash.

Oh, and just for the record, the skirts I would have chosen for the female Nazis would have been black with a smallish slit in the back. As far as length goes, I would say, oh, about ten centimetres above the knee. I think that would allow you to commit unspeakable atrocities and still look chic at the same time.

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