Kitty Exploitation: Countdown to Halloween (Day 5)

FRAULEIN DEVIL

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FRAULEIN KITTY

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CAPTIVE WOMEN 4

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ELSA: FRAULEIN SS

Fraulein Kitty is the sadistic overseer of a Third Reich "Pleasure Train" loaded with young women to serve Hitler's combat officers. The pitiless Kitty delights in torturing and killing suspected traitors to the Fuhrer. French partisans have vowed to stop this evil train at all costs. Kitty's ex-lover Franz is the train's interpreter. Franz falls in love with Liselotte, one of the train's hostesses who secretly works for the Resistance. The vengeful Kitty looses her fury on the lovers...but the train is about to be attacked by partisans who plan a battle to the death!

This cut of the film—the one Wizard Video purchased and distributed—is an American dubbed French film released in 1977 featuring mostly German speaking characters.  So it’s a strange one to get your head around, especially when you hear the soldiers marching in German while the mouths are moving in French and the regular dialog is English.

I figured I’d start the VHS viewing with this movie because it’s really the least Halloween adjacent.  In fact, as a Nazisploitation film, and I’m not sure it even comes close.

Oh sure, the horrors of war and all that, but this has less to do with war and more to do with the machinery of oppression.  I mean, it really implies more about the hatred the Nazis were pushing than anything else.  Hell, it’s set on a TRAIN.  And we all don’t need to get hit over the head with a hammer to get that implication.

FRAULEIN DEVIL begins with loads of actual footage of Hitler speechifying and WW2 war footage.  Altogether too much of it, but I gotta say it does set the time (near the end of the war) and place (German occupied France).  And what aids that quite a lot is the sets and costumes used in the opening scene featuring a Nazi headquarters and throughout the seemingly endless train scenes.

Unfortunately, the film is pretty bad—even for an exploitation film.  In fact, it’s very weak.  It’s almost as if the makers were going for a kinder, gentler soft core gore flick.  There’s virtually no gore and the soft core leaves one looking for more.  The one highlight is the scene where a German officer who looks like Dr. Evil is tortured…and that’s mildly entertaining because  it would’ve been funny had it actually been Mike Meyer’s villain… but alas, no.

One does get a train full of women forced into white slavery, an evil dominatrix who is quite a Nazi bitch (for which Malisa Longo deserves some praise), about a half dozen scenes of executions and gunplay and a wee bit of the French Resistance—viva la France!

Gotta go low, so low on this score that “B” isn’t even close…

FRAULEIN DEVIL

My Grade:  “F”

May this VHS sit upon the dash of an Oldsmobile ’88 and melt in the hot sun during the peak of the hottest Florida Summer.