Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia [1977]
A must-see for the frequently hilarious, OTT seventies' grindhouse sex & gore factor. Something so cynically transgressive and not a little bit cheap & tacky, that Tarantino probably had wet dreams in his youth about making it.
I remember the 'Ilsa-verse' vaguely from my own youth, though I was too young to see them, and they didn't play reputable cinemas anyway. This one follows earlier entries:
Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS ; and
Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks. But I only recently learned these were all Montréal-made films, financed by the local soft-core porn producer Cinepix.
Cinepix is the company that helped launch the career of David Cronenberg (with
Shivers,
Rabid) and featured Ivan Reitman as a producer (under a pseudonym for this film).
This was a period where the federal government offered a 100% tax write-off for film investment, leading to a surge of "exploitation" films, especially slasher and other horror films.
The first half of
Tigress, filmed in the Laurentians, is set in a Soviet Gulag in 1953, with Ilsa [Dyanne Thorne] as the always horny camp commander. The film then transitions abruptly to Montreal in 1977. And it's very much Montreal as Montreal, not disguised as some other place, which offers a unique, albeit grimy, time capsule of the city.
The plot, such as it matters, involves a visting Soviet hockey team, including footage of crowds at the old Forum in '77. Meanwhile, an apparently unaged Ilsa and her underlings are now, inexplicably, running a full-service massage parlor called Aphrodite. Located in what appears to be a seedy area of NDG, a couple of the Soviet hockey players decide to visit it. Events get especially weird when one of them is kidnapped by Ilsa, which prompts Soviet officials back in "Moscow" to send commandos to rescue the guy from Ilsa' in her Westmount (?) mansion.
The "Soviet" characters were probably all local Montreal actors and extras, as their heavy if inconsistent "Russian" appears to be Montrealers doing their best to sound Slavic.
It all sounds pretty campy, nonsensical, and of course it is. Still, it's obvious, there was a high-degree of professionalism involved behind the camera. Cinepix knew what they were doing. And beyond the time-capsule curiosity factor, and unintentional (?) humour, the film remains "enjoyable," and well-paced rather than the sluggish mess you might expect.
