Women-in-Prison Movies
Love Camp 7, 1968
R.L. (Lee) Frost, the try-everything auteur of '60s soft-core cinema, directed horror comedies (House on Bare Mountain), sexy westerns (Hot Spur), fake documentaries (Mondo Freudo) and artsy erotica (Love Is a Four-Letter Word). With Love Camp 7, he and producer Bob Cresse more or less invented the WIP Nazi sexploitation subgenre. Two WAC lieutenants (Maria Lease and Kathy Williams) are parachuted into Germany to infiltrate a women's camp run by Commandant Cresse, where the comely Jewish inmates serve as prostitutes for Nazi officers, or "whores for the Third Reich." Purportedly based on fact, the film is really a vigorous blend of clichés from two grindhouse genres: death row and death camp. From this lurid stew — and from Spain's bad-movie maestro Jess Franco's 99 Women, made the same year — bubbled the next decade of WIP movies.