bad – it was easy enough to come to that conclusion based solely on their titles. She-Zombie and Dracula’s Flesh weren’t going to be making a ‘Best of’ list any time soon, but – on the back of her fairly successful career as a catalogue model – I started to wonder if she’d just seen acting as a fun distraction. Whatever her reason for doing it, her sidestep into movies came courtesy of a working relationship she’d struck up with a producer called Isaac L. Murray, the brains – if that was the right word – behind a bunch of films with names like Lust of the She-Wolf and B is for Blood. More relevantly, he got Ursula of the SS off the ground in 1976, and offered Korin her first ever lead role. It was on the set of that movie that she met her husband, Robert Hosterlitz, although by then he was a shadow of his former self, penniless and desperate for work, borne out by the fact that he’d agreed to direct Ursula in the first place.
One site described the three Ursula films as ‘cult seventies Nazi exploitation flicks about a sadistic, nymphomaniac female Kommandant who conducts experiments on her male prisoners’. The first made the infamous Video Nasties list during the 1980s, but – according to the same website – in reality, ‘Ursula was banned more for the subjects it tackled (Nazis, sex, human experimentation) than its actual content. The truth is, the movie’s actually trashy nonsense, madememorable by the busty, beautiful Lynda Korin.’ Robert Hosterlitz had directed all three of the Ursula films his wife starred in, and then Korin had gone on to appear in another eleven movies Hosterlitz had made in Spain after that. She’d taken a mix of lead and supporting roles, but the movies were all of the same ilk, with names like Kill! and Die Slowly .
On paper, it was hard to see how any of this mattered, whichever way you approached it. Korin was having a bit of fun as a part-time actress; Robert Hosterlitz was in the dying embers of his career, just trying to make ends meet.
Even so, I spent twenty minutes seeing whether I could get hold of a few of Korin’s films, just to get a sense of her, even from nearly forty years on. I also wanted to see if there might be something connecting back to what I’d found out about her already, or what I’d discovered carved into the tree. Instead, I found that only a couple of her movies were available any more – and the ones that were either had very long order times or were in the hands of specialist collectors.
Finally, I turned to Marc Collinsky’s Cine article.
As Wendy had already told me over Skype, it wasn’t really about Korin at all, but about her husband, and in particular his early career in 1950s America. Korin had simply been used as a way to understand him away from the camera.
The article began with how the Hosterlitz family, seeing the Nazi threat on the horizon, had emigrated from Germany to the US in 1933. Robert was eight at the time. His father, a minor actor himself, was friends with legendary director Fritz Lang and, eventually, that was what allowed Robert to grab a foothold in Hollywood.
‘Robert had a difficult early life,’ Lynda Korin says. ‘His father died when he was thirteen, and Robert was diagnosed with a minor heart condition in 1943, when he tried to enlist. A lot of people didn’t understand the reasons why he couldn’t join up. They just saw this German kid, still with a little bit of an accent, who stayed at home when every other eighteen-year-old went off to war. I think that bred some suspicion, and the Robert I knew … that would have got to him. He would have hated the idea of being disliked. But, eventually, Fritz Lang managed to pull some strings and Robert got work editing scripts for propaganda films at the War Activities Committee. It was some time during that period that he wrote the script for My Evil Heart .’
In 1949, with Lang prominent in the background once again, Monogram was persuaded
One site described the three Ursula films as ‘cult seventies Nazi exploitation flicks about a sadistic, nymphomaniac female Kommandant who conducts experiments on her male prisoners’. The first made the infamous Video Nasties list during the 1980s, but – according to the same website – in reality, ‘Ursula was banned more for the subjects it tackled (Nazis, sex, human experimentation) than its actual content. The truth is, the movie’s actually trashy nonsense, madememorable by the busty, beautiful Lynda Korin.’ Robert Hosterlitz had directed all three of the Ursula films his wife starred in, and then Korin had gone on to appear in another eleven movies Hosterlitz had made in Spain after that. She’d taken a mix of lead and supporting roles, but the movies were all of the same ilk, with names like Kill! and Die Slowly .
On paper, it was hard to see how any of this mattered, whichever way you approached it. Korin was having a bit of fun as a part-time actress; Robert Hosterlitz was in the dying embers of his career, just trying to make ends meet.
Even so, I spent twenty minutes seeing whether I could get hold of a few of Korin’s films, just to get a sense of her, even from nearly forty years on. I also wanted to see if there might be something connecting back to what I’d found out about her already, or what I’d discovered carved into the tree. Instead, I found that only a couple of her movies were available any more – and the ones that were either had very long order times or were in the hands of specialist collectors.
Finally, I turned to Marc Collinsky’s Cine article.
As Wendy had already told me over Skype, it wasn’t really about Korin at all, but about her husband, and in particular his early career in 1950s America. Korin had simply been used as a way to understand him away from the camera.
The article began with how the Hosterlitz family, seeing the Nazi threat on the horizon, had emigrated from Germany to the US in 1933. Robert was eight at the time. His father, a minor actor himself, was friends with legendary director Fritz Lang and, eventually, that was what allowed Robert to grab a foothold in Hollywood.
‘Robert had a difficult early life,’ Lynda Korin says. ‘His father died when he was thirteen, and Robert was diagnosed with a minor heart condition in 1943, when he tried to enlist. A lot of people didn’t understand the reasons why he couldn’t join up. They just saw this German kid, still with a little bit of an accent, who stayed at home when every other eighteen-year-old went off to war. I think that bred some suspicion, and the Robert I knew … that would have got to him. He would have hated the idea of being disliked. But, eventually, Fritz Lang managed to pull some strings and Robert got work editing scripts for propaganda films at the War Activities Committee. It was some time during that period that he wrote the script for My Evil Heart .’
In 1949, with Lang prominent in the background once again, Monogram was persuaded
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