Grindhouse Theater: Love Camp 7 (1969)

Two British WAC officers volunteer to go undercover in a Nazi prison camp in order to gain information from, and possibly rescue, a scientist that's being held there. The camp's female inmates serve as prostitutes for German officers and are subjected to humiliating treatment, torture, and rape. When the two undercover agents learn that their target is being held in solitary confinement, one of them arranges to be punished so that she can make contact.

Love Camp 7 was directed by notable exploitationeer Lee Frost and written by Wes Bishop and Bob Cresse, the latter of whom also portrays a sadistic camp commandant.

This cult classic represents the beginning of the Naziploitation genre and is also considered the vanguard of the modern women-in-prison (WiP) genre that emerged in the early 1970s.

The film was declined a video certificate by the British Board of Film Classification in 2002 and by the New Zealand Office of Film & Literature Classification. It was originally banned in Australia, before passing several times in a modified version with an R18+ rating. It was finally passed uncut in 2005. It is included on the Video Nasties list.

grind

A grindhouse is an American term for a theater that mainly shows exploitation films. It is named after the defunct burlesque theaters located on 42nd Street in New York City, where 'bump n' grind' dancing and striptease were featured.

In the film Lady of Burlesque (1943) one of the characters refers to the burlesque theatre on 42nd Street, where they are performing stripteases and bump and grind dances, as a "grindhouse".

The introduction of television greatly eroded the audience for local and single screen movie theatres, many of which were built during the cinema boom of the 1930s. In combination with urban decay after white flight out of older city areas in the mid to late 1960s, changing economics forced these theatres to either close or offer something that TV could not. In the 1970s these theatres were put to new use as venues for exploitation films, either adult pornography and sleaze, or slasher and dubbed martial arts films from Hong Kong.

Grindhouse films characteristically contain large amounts of sex, violence or bizarre subject matter. One genre of film featured were "roughies" or sexploitation, a mix of sex, violence and sadism. Quality varied, but low budget production values and poor print quality were common. Critical opinions varied regarding typical grindhouse fare, but many films acquired cult following and critical praise. Double, triple, and "all night" bills on a single admission charge often encouraged patrons to spend long periods of time in the theaters. The milieu was largely and faithfully captured at the time by the magazine Sleazoid Express.

By the 1980s, home video and cable movie channels threatened to render the grindhouse obsolete. By the end of the decade, these theaters had vanished from Los Angeles's Broadway and Hollywood Boulevard, New York City's Times Square and San Francisco's Market Street. By the mid 1990s, these particular theaters had all but disappeared from the US. Very few exist today.