At The Grindhouse: Women's Camp 119

So last week I was at an electronics chain (which shall not be named, but you know how there are some places where you can get a pretty good buy, and then there are places where you can get a better buy? This place was better than those places, if you know what I mean: Best Buy) and I made what most people would call an "impulse purchase." It was a boxed set of 20 "grindhouse" films, allegedly from the 60s and 70s. So I guess it is what everyone would call an impulse purchase.

Anyway, I have decided that I will watch and review ALL of these movies for this blog, because it will give me something to write about, and more importantly, it will force me to actually watch all of them, and get the most out of my impulsiveness. Then again, I might not finish them-- something else might catch my attention.

GRINDHOUSE #1: WOMEN'S CAMP 119 (1977)


So as a way of introduction, let's look at a few of the IMDb keywords for this movie: experiment, homosexual, death, nazi exploitation, frozen corpse, female frontal nudity, rape, depravity, 1940s, pubic hair, uterus, nipples. That should give you an idea!

Women's Camp 119, also known as Kz9 - Lager di Stermino, also known as SS Campo De Sexo y Violencia (natch), was directed by a man named Bruno Mattei. An IMDb user review calls the film his best, boasting that it contains no stock footage, which is a lie.

I know this because toward the end the allies are shelling the death camp and we keep seeing the same shot of a tank firing a missile AT NOTHING and seeing it explode, on the GROUND, after which we see the interior shot of the camp with the actors going WHOA! and some lights flashing. As in, Mattei was off camera, flicking the light switch on and off.


So yeah, it is very cheaply made, which I guess is the idea. The concept is that bunch of women (lesbians and communists, we are told) are taken to a Nazi camp where a doctor played by Ivano Staccioli is carrying out dastardly experiments to perfect the Aryan race. I know this because he keeps saying things like "we need to continue doing these experiments aimed at perfecting the Aryan race, because then the Aryan race will be perfected because of our experiments!"

Speaking of the talking, apparently the film was originally in Italian. My version is dubbed in English and also subtitled in what is probably German, but could also be some kind of Nordic language. At the beginning it actually has 2 sets of subtitles overlapping on the screen! It's very disorienting!

The transfer is bad, which again, is probably the idea. They didn't rush a print of this thing to the Library of Congress when it first screened, if you know what I mean-- it literally looks the the DVD is taken from a VHS tape. At one point you get that rotating image thing VCRs used to do, and you had to either slap the side or hit the tracking button, remember? You remember.

And this movie is "Nazi exploitation," which is a genre, I guess. At the end of the film there are a couple of slides that talk about some Nazis who managed to duck tribunals and are now leaving peacefully on their farms or something-- and this is right after a woman-- a woman we were maybe supposed to recognize maybe-- (All the naked women look the same, but maybe I just wasn't taking the time to analyze their faces)-- this woman suicide-bombs and kills the main Nazi villain. So I think this movie is like a fatwa against some Nazis who were still alive in 1977.

So there's a philosophical question posed here. If a movie is meant to make you hate Nazis, and the movie is very badly made, so you end up hating the movie, is that like, a point for Nazis? I suppose there was a noble effort going on here-- getting people to be against Nazis is noble, if sort of easy. But using hordes of naked women to achieve your objective? We've gone down the ladder of intolerance pretty far, but we're still on the ladder, you know? Exploiting women to attack Nazis?

Obviously this movie was bad, but it's hard to rate, because you can't compare like, No Country For Old Men Apples to Naked Women and Nazis Oranges. Since this was the first film of the series I will give it a FIVE out of TEN, and the others will be judged against it. Onward! 19 more to go.

Let's Call a Spade a Spade, Okay Brookstone?

I'm calling Brookstone's bluff. I was in one of their stores yesterday, as it happens, because and I was Christmas shopping and sometimes you have to stop Christmas shopping for a minute and go into a store full of things you would never buy in order to rest your brain and regroup and look at a bunch of overpriced stupid shit before you can return to shopping, because that is the kind of thing Brookstone is for.

If you have never been I would describe it as the Sore Old Man Who Subscribes to SkyMall's answer to Spencer Gifts.

Also, all of their employees have to wear these weird shoulder-massage devices that sort of look like un-inflated airplane life vests. I assume they have to wear them all day, along with the apron and the red shirt and the khakis. Basically working at Brookstone is like being a fire-fighter, or an actor portraying Batman. It's a lot of wardrobe. One thing I'm sure they are glad they do not have to wear is the head-massager, which basically looks like a prop from a Terry Gilliam movie in the 1980s. This is real:

ANYWAY, you are probably getting the sense that this place has a lot of stuff that massages. It does. It really, truly does. And Brookstone is selling a certain special kind of massager. That's right. I'm talking about "spot massagers." TAKE A LOOK:


REALLY HITS THE SPOT!

Operative words here: "personal," "any part of your body." WE GET IT BROOKSTONE. Stop being coy with all this crap about relieving muscle tension in your knees and shoulders and blah blah blah. We're all adults here. Let's call a spade a spade.

A great thing about this site is there are user comments!


Like, your car, an airplane, work, whatever! 21st Century! Here's another choice:


There are a lot of angles to come at this one from, which is why blog posts have comment sections, too! The good people at Brookstone have some other products we might be interested in!


If you can't read that description, this one is WATER RESISTANT. So, I mean, you can use it anywhere.

Anyway, this was a whole blog post just to say I obviously have Jory's Christmas present picked out.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: A MODEST PROPOSAL

So I wrote this a few months ago, hence the references to David Souter and Arlen Specter. But I never posted it! So here it is.

Okay, so here it is. The Supreme Court has yet to find a district that passes the SUFFICIENTLY EGREGIOUS test, going so far as to reject the concept that a standard can be found as all (Vieth v. Jubelirer) which strikes me as a touch melodramatic—somehow thematically similar to “If I can’t have you, no one can!”—which is coincidentally the way Republicans have been reacting to Arlen Specter and David Souter. But speaking of Souter, it is entirely possible that with a new justice on the court they will reconsider whether or not a sufficiently egregious standard can be found, and I have the perfect plan. New Hampshire has two congressmen—both of whom are presently democrats, but neither have been around for very long. Both seats have changed party hands fairly recently, and this strikes me as unfair, don’t you think?

So under my new redistricting plan, we will have a safe Democratic district and a safe Republican one. How? Wherever a Republican voter is, that is one district. Wherever a Democrat is, that is the other district. You see that it is possible that in any given neighborhood, one could take a stroll and walk through portions of each district several times! This has natural advantages, as the tourism industry in New Hampshire is huge, and people rake in the dough at the Four Corners out West! I should know, I paid like eight dollars for some fried dough from a nice Native American lady there, and then she charged us another eight to take our picture!

Of course, that might not be egregious enough, so here’s the real kicker: the district is mobile. It travels with the voter at all times. Whatever room the voter is in, in his or her house, that is where the district is. If Republican voter X is driving to work, the portions of the highway under his car are a part of the district. If a Democrat and a Republican live in the same house, different rooms will be different districts at different times of the day! If, say, they are watching TV together, each side of the couch will be in a different congressional district!

I know, I know. What about New Hampshire’s many independent voters? Well we all know that most of them are leaning one way or another, so we can devise a series of questions designed to root out their underlying partisan feelings. “Describe Khalid Sheik Mohammed in five words or less.” Republican-leaners will usually string together a series of expletives, while closet Democrats will usually try to both assure us of his guilt and lament the atrocities of the illegal torture program at the same time (No small feat in five words or less, but Gore Vidal did it handily). These tests will have to be administered on a monthly basis, in case their inclinations shift.

How are we going to map this district? Well, I’ve already talked to the Google Earth guys, and they figure when people register to vote at the DMV, we can implant a little GPS chip in their driver’s licenses and track their movements in real time with blue and red dots. This data will prove invaluable to scholars, politicians, stalkers and Nate Silver alike!

The best part is, when the Supreme Court inevitably strikes this down with a vicious, scorched-earth unanimous decision, we will go down in history as the ultimate gerrymander-ers. Tom Delay will be rolling in his grave, and so will the Founding Fathers! But for different reasons!

MY ANSWER TO THE WRITING PROMPT “IF YOU AND YOUR BROTHER GOT INTO A FIGHT AND YOU KNOCKED HIM DOWN, WOULD YOU URINATE IN HIS MOUTH?”

Recently an English teacher at Kingswood Regional High School came under public and administrative scrutiny for allegedly issuing the above writing prompt. I was not in this class, but being a graduate of this very high school and a casual fan of writing prompts, I couldn’t resist the temptation to try my hand at it. A warning, though: my 5-paragraph essay-writing skills are a little rusty.

No, and Also, What?
by Zachary Little

If I got into a fight with my brother and knocked him down, I would not urinate in his mouth. That is my thesis statement, which I will rephrase at the end of this paragraph probably just by inverting the sentence. My reasons for this are threefold, and I will expand on each reason in subsequent paragraphs. First and foremost, urinating in my brother’s mouth seems like an unreasonably extreme response; I can’t imagine him doing anything that would warrant such action. Secondly, were I to urinate in his mouth, I would have reason to fear an escalation of hostilities that would surely endanger my person and/or be gross. Lastly, urinating in mouths doesn’t seem like an appropriate thing to be discussing—why are we writing this? I would not urinate in my brother’s mouth, were I to knock him down during a fight.

There are any number of things I can imagine doing to my brother after knocking him down: kicking him, spitting on him, saying something mean. It is difficult to categorize these responses; unfortunately to my knowledge no one has written a book yet classifying the types of follow-up actions a person can take after knocking their brother down during an altercation. I don’t think, however, it would be a stretch to say that these responses fall well within the bounds of what most people would call “not very sociopathic.” I cannot say the same for urinating in someone’s mouth. Most people would call such a response “very sociopathic,” and they would be right to think so.

Putting that aside, let’s assume that I went ahead and urinated into his mouth. What comes next? Surely my brother would be motivated to do something even more extreme to me once he got up, probably involving some other bodily fluid, such as blood. I find blood to be very disturbing—just the sight of it makes me feel queasy. What if my brother were to intentionally cut himself and then force me to drink his blood? I think you will agree that if I were to urinate in his mouth, doing such a thing would be not unreasonable or unexpected. That would be a proportional response. A very real fear of escalation would halt me from urinating in my brother’s mouth, even if I exhausted all of the “non-sociopathic” responses. I would probably just let him get up.

Finally, I wish you would have talked to us about this writing prompt before assigning it. Some teachers surely don’t yet grasp the new lay of the land, the way bizarre stories can take off like never before on the internet and cable news. Just about anything can “go viral,” as it were, and I have a strange feeling that something bad is going to come of this writing prompt. Surely a few students will discuss this with their parents over dinner; it is not every day that we receive a writing prompt that is even remotely interesting. Some students might even blog about it—you never know. I’m sure we could have brought that to your attention, were you to have told us that you were thinking about a prompt like this. I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but most teachers just ask us what we want to do after college or something like that. This doesn’t seem like a normal thing to be writing about.

In conclusion, I would not urinate in my brother’s mouth, really under any circumstances, unless perhaps a jellyfish somehow managed to sting his tongue. I think you will agree the odds of that happening are not great. I most certainly would not urinate in his mouth were I to have knocked him down during a fight. It seems too drastic, too disturbing, and I would have real reason to fear for my safety were I to perpetrate such an act. I hope this satisfies whatever curiosity overtook you when you dreamed up this writing prompt, because I think I hear the news vans pulling up all ready. Someone must have tweeted this. I would not, were I to knock my brother down during a fight, urinate in his mouth.