SalonKitty

Salon Kitty (1976)

If you haven’t ever watched a Nazisploitation movie before then for the most part you are very lucky. A few of them like Ilsa She Wolf of the S.S. are twisted by kind of entertaining, but most of them are just unpleasant. A few years ago I went on a very brief “kick” and watched 4 or 5 before I had enough. One of them that had been recommended to me was Salon Kitty. I didn’t get to it before my desire to watch this subgenre had waned. But with the new Blu-Ray from the folks over at Blue Underground coming out I’ve decided to give it a try.

The movie is about a woman named Margherita who is a devout Nazi. An S.S. man named Wallenberg chooses her for a special project. The idea is that loyal good German girls will be used as prostitutes at a high-end brothel to see if they pick up any pillow talk that can be used as leverage. After a very disturbing set of training montages where the girls are weeded out based on far they will go for the mission they are sent to the brothel run by Madame Kitty. Margherita soon falls in love with a pilot that has become fed up with the war and when the information is used against him she figures out that they are doing more then reading her reports since she didn’t tell anyone what he had said. The Madame and Margherita then make it their mission to get back at Wallenberg for what he has done.

This movie starts off with some really disturbing stuff. I have a pretty thick skin, but I was ready to turn off the movie after about 15 minutes. But since I had this for review I finished it and I’m glad that I did. While not a great movie and a little long (2 plus hours) there was more to this one then just the twisted exploitation stuff. Sure you get lots of naked women, twisted sex scenes, random violence, and just a general sleazy feel to many of the characters. This is the sort of thing that I would expect in a Nazisploitation movie and is normally all that they have to offer. Salon Kitty actually has a story that I found myself interested in. I found myself rooting for Margherita to get back at Wallenberg for all the terrible things that he had done. Which makes his ending in the movie all the more satisfying. Though there is an ending with the ladies that I wasn’t quite sure of (did they get bombed?). But in spite of a few minor complaints I have to say that the writing, characters, and story are far superior to what I was expecting.

This is the part of the review where I normally talk about special effects and gore. But this isn’t that kind of movie at all. What I do want to talk about are the sets and budget. These kinds of movies were normally shot on the cheap and recouped their money in the drive-ins and seedy theaters (at least here in the States). That normally means cheap sets, costumes, and production values. Salon Kitty obviously had some money behind it. The sets are incredible and I normally don’t recognize that sort of thing. But it is so obvious that even I couldn’t miss it. The camerawork and lighting are also very stylized and bring something to the production that you don’t normally see. I have to give director Tinto Brass and production designer Ken Adam all the credit. This movie is beautiful.

As I’ve already stated I watched the Blue Underground Blu-Ray for this review. There aren’t a whole lot of extras on the disc. But there are brief interviews with the director Brass and the designer Adam. I watched and enjoyed both of them. It is clear from these interviews that there was a lot of thought and work put into the making of Salon Kitty.

So here is the part where I give the movie a rating. I am going to recommend the movie, with a caveat about the content. These movies can be kind of hard to sit thru. The subject matter and some of the scenes in this on are fairly unpleasant. If that weren’t enough there is also a needless animal killing tossed in to shock the audience. Yeah they butcher a live pig on camera, so be warned.

3 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer