Cyprus. The rich Senator Benneman and his 20-year old daughter Patricia arrive for a vacation. Patricia is infatuated by the blond Dorian, the preacher of a love sect that predicts the end of the world in the year 1999, and offers salvation for its members. The sect is led by the Goddess, a woman who demands that its members love everyone, because loving only one person is "betrayal to the rest of humanity". However, the Goddess secretly forces women into prostitution as to finance the cult. Dorian is tasked to seduce Patricia to extract money from her, but he truly falls in love with her. When the police wants to arrest everyone, Goddess orders that a bomb blast destroys their community, while her muscle-bound servant Tanga attacks Dorian and Patricia for daring to flee the sect, but Dorian is able to throw him into a pit in a cave.
One of the bizarre curiosities from the German cinema of the 80s, this exploitation film extravaganza by Austrian musician Christian Anders feels like a very clumsy and poorly thought-out execution, though its idea is rather interesting. "Love Camp" tries, in theory, to make a critique of various cults and sects (and religious and other ideologies in general) by depicting a community that presents itself as practicing love, yet in reality it egoistically uses and exploits its members for its leader, a woman called the Goddess (Laura Gemser), who brainwashes adherents. This can be seen as a dark commentary on ideologies taking a monopoly on any information and reality, banning any kind of critical thought or debate, as it was the case with Jonestown or the Heaven's Gate cult (the ending hints at mass suicide delusion). However, everything here is done so laughably bad it is embarasisng to watch at moments. In one weird moment that tries to show the perversion of its leader, a servant holds a goat by its front legs while the Goddess takes a knife and stabs the animal, letting its blood drip into a bowl, and later the Goddess drinks it (it was done with a puppet, so the animal wasn't killed in real life). In another, the Goddess wants to dominate Dorian's life completely, so she submerges his head into the sea, while she has sex with him, sitting herself on top, and when he passes out and almost dies, she is suddenly worried and tries to help him, as if she didn't see what the consequences will be. Conventional filming and tiresome, schematic dialogue plague the movie, as well as the ridiculous finale, while Anders plays the cult preacher Dorian. If there is one saving grace here, then it is the enchanting Simone Brahmann, who would later become a famous voice actress and dub numerous movies into German language. Whenever she is on the screen, it is as if she floats above all this nonsense around her, a walking oasis of beauty in a desert of ugliness and dilettante on the screen.
Grade:+
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