Verdict
Summary
The last of the Ilsa movies (it’s technically part 4, after the third film Ilsa, the Wicked Warden, a.k.a. Greta sort of gave her a new name and a new image), The Tigress of Siberia is tamer than the other movies, but it still has plenty of the eyebrow-raising sex scenes, nudity, and torture stuff to satiate the fans of the original, which was absolutely shocking and over the top. Thorne is every bit as astonishing physically as she ever was, and this film has much more of a plot and character development than the first two movies did.
Plot:
A dominatrix working for Stalin rebrands herself as a brothel madam where she runs into the one man she could never break.
Review:
Ilsa (Dyanne Thorne still looking amazing) is up to her old games of discovering new ways to inflict the maximum amount of pain and damage on men, only this time she’s in Siberia at a concentration gulag camp, working for Stalin. A fresh shipment of dissidents is deposited in her care, and she and her subservient underlings gets to work straightaway in reprogramming the men and humiliating and torturing them, sometimes to death. One dissident – a handsome and steel-willed man named Chikurin (Michel Morin) simply will not break, no matter how hard she and her men try to brainwash him, and she even uses her sexuality to bring him to his knees, but after the ultimate insult, Ilsa realizes that the only way she’ll win against him is to simply kill him. But before she can execute him, Stalin is killed and the war ends, and the gulag camp is destroyed, forcing Ilsa to abandon her post. 20 years pass, and Ilsa has rebranded herself in Canada … as a madam of a high-end brothel. When a hockey team swings by to get some nookie, she finds herself perplexed by the team’s coach, whom she seems to recognize – it’s Chikurin! Seizing her chance to overpower him and finish the work she began 20 years ago, Ilsa captures him and puts him through the wringer again, only this time Chikurin has a will even stronger and more resilient than before! How will Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia break the only man she lost a battle to?
The last of the Ilsa movies (it’s technically part 4, after the third film Ilsa, the Wicked Warden, a.k.a. Greta sort of gave her a new name and a new image), The Tigress of Siberia is tamer than the other movies, but it still has plenty of the eyebrow-raising sex scenes, nudity, and torture stuff to satiate the fans of the original, which was absolutely shocking and over the top. Thorne is every bit as astonishing physically as she ever was, and this film has much more of a plot and character development than the first two movies did. The climax and ending are pretty satisfying, leaving the door open for another entry. What I like about the Ilsa character is that she completely regenerates into a new scenario from film to film, sometimes even after meeting her demise at the end of the previous entry. She’s basically a serialized character like Fu Manchu or Blofeld or someone like that, and she is made anew from film to film. Too bad they didn’t do another one. This one was directed by Jean LaFleur, whose last film as a director this was.
Kino Lorber’s streak of releasing the Ilsa movies onto 4K Ultra HD / Blu-ray continues with this stellar issue of The Tigress of Siberia. The image and sound quality are outstanding with a superior transfer, and the disc comes with an audio commentary by two film historians, plus alternate footage, a conversation with film historian and critic Tim Lucas (Video Watchdog), the trailer, a slipcover, and a reversible sleeve.
