This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

This one was a little bit of a surprise to me. It's another of those delicate and tasteful films that fell under the nazisploitation sub-genre. These films still cause a shudder in many even forty years after they were released. The mixing of the Holocaust with sadistic horror and salacious sexploitation being a combination that continues to trouble today; if nothing else, the nazisploitation sub-genre is one of the few types of genre cinema that remains shocking decades after its heyday. But I digress, as I mentioned earlier this one shocked me. And the reason wasn't the usual one when it comes to this kind of thing, in that it wasn't the salacious content that struck me, it was the fact that when watching it I thought to myself could this possibly be an actual German movie? It seemed incredible that the German nation, so directly associated with the evils of Nazism would ever have the brass neck to produce a film remotely in the ballpark of nazisploitation. The Germans would spend decades trying to shrug off the Nazi association so had they gone insane in 1973 and made a Nazi sex film? Well, as it turned out, no they had not. This movie had been produced by none other than Germany's 'neutral' neighbours, the charming Swiss! But given the shared language, this is the nazisploitation film that feels most 'German'. Which certainly gives it a whole new aspect of wrong-headedness.During the last days of World War II a battalion of female Nazis are sent to the eastern front to service battle weary soldiers fighting the relentless Soviet advance. There's really not very much more plot to it than that and what there is really serves as no more than a framework for a succession of soft-core sex scenes. This one came out very early in this cycle of films and in fact was a year ahead of the movie that is often considered to be the template in this genre, Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS (1974), so its perhaps unsurprising that it seems a bit different. Unlike that film, or all of the subsequent outrageous offerings from the Italians, this one focuses on Nazi women, as opposed to female victims of the Nazis. There is no death camp setting, nor is there any real violence to speak of. Its sex, sex and more sex in this one; although I found it oddly unerotic (thank god). Somewhat unusually, the Nazis are presented as essentially sympathetic and not really the baddies we are used to them being, which is unsurprisingly not something you see very often! It also seems to possess higher production values than these types of movies normally have, with more sets and some battle scenes too. But it ultimately is kind of boring too. It lacks the sheer excess that the later nastier films still radiate. It's really a soft-core sex film with Nazi iconography, which makes it very odd, that much I will admit. Its worth at least checking out if you are interested in the seamier side of 70's exploitation cinema but there are more entertaining nazisploitation movies out there, and yes I know that is a strange thing to say.

"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.

Actually the alternate title of Frauleins out of Uniform is a better one.Young girls join up to help Hitler's army and end up having lots of sex with soldiers and each other while trying to fight for the Nazi way.Swiss made (for a German audience) exploitation soft-core war film that is more interesting for the nonjudgmental attitude toward the Nazis and its lack of any real violence -certainly nothing happens thats too exploitive -then anything then happens on screen. There is some attempt at a story, but it doesn't really go anywhere since the whole excuse for the film is for the women to get naked and to have simulated sex. Actually its not even that its pretend simulated sex (which is an oxymoron, which describes much of this film). Its all so nice that you really are never stimulated or titillated by anything on screen. Its like watching a bland TV show or Hogan's Heroes where people periodically undress. Its so bland as to inoffensive. I have never seen any film so asexual despite its best attempt to be sexual.Words fail me.Its not bad, its dull and so bland that you just don't care. I wish I could express how nonplussing this film is, its amazing.Should you see it? Only if you want to see some cute girls disrobe. Other than that I'd watch something else.Probably one of the weirdest Naziploitation films I've ever seen, which is not to be taken as a recommendation.

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!)