The Gestapo's Last Orgy

The most extreme of the Italian 'sadiconazista' films, and the one that framed the whole grubby cycle as a doomed romance, which is its own kind of nerve. A former SS commandant and the woman he held in his camp return years later to the empty barbed wire and remember, in flashback, what passed between them. Cesare Canevari stages the standard atrocities of the genre (the medical experiments, a dinner where the main course is a prisoner, a pit of starving dogs) and then complicates them with the detail that his heroine, alone among the inmates, was not afraid to die, and that this is what fixed the commandant's obsession on her. It is grim, humourless, and about as far down this shelf as the shelf goes.