everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Blistering performances.

"Eine Armee Gretchen" (and there are a handful of English-language titles for this one) is a Swiss German-language film from 1973, so this one will soon have its 45th anniversary already. It is one of the more known films by Swiss writer and director Erwin C. Dietrich, who adapted a novel by Karl-Heinz Helms-Liesenhoff for this film here. I cannot imagine he appreciated what Dietrich did with his base material unless it was as trashy and as much garbage as this film here. It runs for approximately 100 minutes and takes place during the days of World War II. The plot is that the German women want to do their best in order to help Hitler win the war and as Diietrich's films almost always have an erotic component, "the best" means in this case that they want to have sex with as many German soldiers as possible and help them in winning the war because if you are dead, you cannot have sex again and you would not want to miss out on these Gretchens after the War, do you? Oh yeah, this story sounds like the perfect component for a trashy guilty pleasure film, but it turns out no such thing.Actually, it is garbage and you could also say it is offensive somehow. It was made less than 30 years and at that point, really many (female) survivors from this terrible time in German history were still alive. They had to live through terrible times and this film mocking them and their (possibly dead) husbands must have been so painful to watch. The argument that the women from back then are not alive any more today is not valid, because they were alive when this film came out. Apart from that, the film also gives leukemia patients a bad name in Dietrich's extremely clumsy attempt to give this film more dramatic relevance. Another major problem with this film is that you are supposed to like the protagonists, especially the female ones, but this gets really difficult to do when you see them approve of and appreciate Hitler from start to finish.All in all, this film is a gigantic failure and really never should have been made. The fact that Dietrich fails in more areas than usual, for example the historic component that is missing entirely in his other many many stinkers that he made in his career, takes this film to a completely new level in terms of screwing-up. This is why I believe when you look for the worst film from his career, this one is definitely in contention. It is never interesting, pretty offensive to all kinds of women, irrelevant from the (historic) story-telling perspective, never funny despite being categorized as a comedy and just a prime example of how many German-language really sucked in the 1970s. Many people do not know Hitler was actually Austrian. Many people also do now know that Dietrich is Swiss. And both of them did huge damage in their respective fields with their works. I highly recommend to stay away from this movie.

With World War II rapidly coming to an end several young women volunteer to join the German army to show their support for their beloved Fuhrer. However, one of the doctors charged with helping them enlist comes into conflict with the Gestapo and as a result he and his two daughters are subsequently drafted and sent to the Russian Front. That said this film essentially tells the story of the ordeals that these three people encounter as the Russian army begins to close in from the east. Now as far as the overall movie is concerned, although it is billed as a comedy I have to say that I didn't find much humor anywhere. What it did have however were a lot of naked women and scenes of simulated sex, which not only lacked both passion and eroticism, but also lacked any tangible story to make any of these scenes interesting or worthwhile. Additionally, the characters lacked depth and the acting was quite second-rate as well. In short, this was a pretty bad film all around and I have rated it accordingly.

This film, Eine Armee Gretchen (1973) by the European trash/sleaze/soft porn _producer_ king Erwin C. Dietrich is among those very few grade Z films that really make feel angry for many reasons. Firstly, the whole sub-genre of exploitation, nazsploitation, is very repellent and something that should not be used as a theme in entertainment, I really think. It is so easy to exploit something that makes beasts curious, why else there would be pictures of real deaths, suicides and so on on the Internet, for example? From nature comes many dangerous instincts that are the more dangerous, the more the animal in question has "intelligence" and ability to calculate. The most notorious, perhaps, of all Nazi atrocity garbage films is Canadian Don Edmond's Ilsa - She Wolf of the SS from 1974 that includes graphic violence, torture and laughable cinema but also spawned many sequels and rip-offs that started to exploit the original exploitation. What makes especially Dietrich's piece of world's most boring 96 minutes of celluloid among the most unspeakably painful experiences in my life is that it doesn't even try to present the nazis as evil and destructive, it presenents them only to have another reason for a new sex scenes which the film is full of (surprisingly, the film is practically goreless unlike the other films of the genre, but that fits well to the career of its director). Naturally the film's status is so low that criticism like this is pretty useless: there's nothing in the film that the most untalented amateur group could not have made. Another thing is that no matter how tolerant I am towards trash and B cinema, this goes way under all the categories in its level of braindead. It has no plot or any dramatic moments to make it at least marginally interesting for a second, the acting is not acting, only reading lines in front of the camera, the scenes are ridiculous (the final battle in green grass with tanks must be seen if you thought your home video was bad) and the editing done in 2 seconds with garden scissors. All these make those 96 minutes feel like an eternal death alive, and since it underestimates the viewer so pathetically, this is among the exploitation (usually revenge themed) turkeys that are without any, absolutely, any merits. Not even a single frame is interesting, visually or dramatically. The Swiss DVD was released for some reason, think twice do you really want to pay many Euros for it (fortunately I got mine in trade for some junk!)

Dietrich has worked with blokes like Jess Franco, so I was expecting a nasty braindead Women-In-Prison shocker, but instead I've got a braindead sex 'comedy'. This bizarre flick is more offensive than most Naziploitationers cuz the happy supersexy young chicks-in-the-third-reich don't really get punished and the Germans ain't portraited as bad guys!?! They just love sex and their Führer!ONE OF THE MOST MINDBOGGLING TRASHFLICKS I EVER SEEN!!