Let's be realistic.

Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

In an unspecified South American hellhole, various women from different walks in life are aggressively kidnapped to serve as sex slaves for the male members of a guerrilla army. A new bride named Angela (Ada Tauler) becomes the focal point as she finds herself drawn to a dude named Chino (Wal Davis). The "commander" who watches over the gals is Isla (Nanda Van Bergen), and she decapitates prisoners who don't get with the program.Obviously drawing some inspiration from the "Ilsa" series - right down to the name of the Van Bergen character - this variation on the "women in prison" picture from celebrated Eurotrash director Jess Franco is okay, but you sense that he's mostly going through the motions. Fans of his 70s sleaze will still be fairly satisfied, considering the amount of nudity (female *and* male), loving close-ups of crotches, and sex (lesbian and straight) on display. There is also a dose of torture, but these scenes are not very graphic, and again, you feel as if most of the participants involved don't really have their heart in this.The dubbing is poor, the on-screen performances adequate (Van Bergen does seem to be enjoying herself), and the English dialogue is sometimes pretty funny.Die hard Francophiles may find some value in this, although ultimately it's rather mild stuff in terms of all-out nastiness.Six out of 10.

Alongside producer Erwin C Dietrich (who also wrote this), with whom he directed many films from this era, Jess Franco brings us 'Love Camp', or 'Frauen im Liebeslager' as it was originally known. Part of a 'women in prison' series, this involves a group of women from all walks of life, at best only partially clothed, who are kidnapped and taken to an isolated jungle encampment in order to satisfy a group of revolutionaries when they are not otherwise engaged. The chief warder Isla (Nanda Van Bergen) is, as you may imagine, a glamorous and sadistic lesbian, with whose advances the kidnapped girls also have to contend.As often is the case with Dietrich/Franco collaborations, the locations are beautiful (although we are not given any idea where this is supposed to be set) and this appears to be funded with a decent budget. Franco, so fond throughout the 70s of frantic camera movements and intrusive zooms, seems happy to set up a heady mix of torture and/or sex scenes and simply let the lens capture the action. Although the various predicaments are horrific, they are treated in a very casual, somewhat tame manner and accompanied by cheerful, even romantic, jazz music which helps make the very tone of the film disturbing in a way that 'of its time' doesn't really cover. This, and the fact that there is a compliance, even enjoyment, between many of the women and their captors, fits in very well with the perceived popular view at the time that, on film and television, women are often 'mad for it.' Not for me to judge, and who cares what I think anyway? Not me.Of course, you wouldn't expect any background on any of the girls or revolutionaries, and the dubbing - decent though it is - robs us of much in the way of character. People here are really cyphers, boobs and bottoms you might say, paraded and presented in the way that exploitation films do - and it would be pointless and unnecessary of me to offer criticism of that. I wouldn't, after all, criticise a wildlife documentary for containing wildlife.There is a twisted romance story at play here, between Angela (Ada Tauler), guerrilla Chico (Wal Davis) and Alberto, Angela's husband, which proves very interesting. And yet what we have here is not the best example of its kind. It comes across as a kind of bawdy, unconvincingly choreographed 'Confessions' film, and the desperate situation that could be wrung out of this comes across as a rough template for soft-core pornography.

Somewhere in South America women are kidnapped and marched to a concentration camp to serve as sex slaves to Marxist revolutionaries. To keep them in line the leader of the guerrilla forces by the name of "Chino de Guera" (Wal Davis) appoints a subordinate by the name of "Isla" (Nanda Van Bergen) to be the camp warden. Unfortunately for the female prisoners she is much more sadistic than Chino realizes and soon women are being tortured or killed to suit her pleasure. Now rather than reveal any more of this movie and risk spoiling it for those who haven't seen it I will just say that this turned out to a rather pathetic entry into the women-in-prison (WIP) genre. Although it featured plenty of nudity there was very little eroticism and only a couple of the women, most notably Monika Kalin (as "Tona") and the aforementioned Nanda Van Bergen, were all that attractive. Likewise, having been originally filmed in German the movie was then dubbed into English which left much to be desired. Additionally, the acting was also quite bad as well. In short, this was a pretty bad movie experience and I have rated it accordingly.

Jess Franco has made some odd exploitation movies in his long and prolific career, and 'Love Camp' is one of his nuttiest. Never one to shy from jumping on a bandwagon, the title of this seems to deliberately evoke the legendary nazisploitation sleazefest 'Love Camp 7', and the plot in some ways is reminiscent of 'Salo', but with a twist. The twist being, that we aren't talking nazis here but revolutionaries. A group of young and beautiful women are kidnapped, taken into the jungle (what country? who knows) , and forced to be sex slaves for "the revolution". The female warden (who I assume is Nanda Van Bergen) is a sadistic lesbian and generally acts throughout like a poor man's Ilsa, another series of movies this tries to pattern itself on. 'Love Camp' isn't as explicitly violent as most of the aforementioned movies, and Franco seems more interested in showing lots of flesh rather than torture and gore. The girls spend most of their on screen time naked, and there are a few shower scenes and the like, so Franco sleaze buffs will not be disappointed on that score. However this is by no means near his best work, and you feel his heart wasn't really in it. Watchable but ultimately unsatisfying, I can only recommend it to complete Francophiles. Others less familiar with his work best steer clear of this one. He can do so much better than this mediocre effort!