Le notti erotiche dei morti viventi (1980)

... aka: Demonia
... aka: Erotic Nights of the Living Dead
... aka: Gewalt der Zombies, Der
... aka: Island of the Zombies, The
... aka: Nite of the Zombies
... aka: Queen of the Zombies
... aka: Sexy Nights of the Living Dead

Directed by:
Joe D'Amato

Not released in America until many years after it was made (guess there just wasn't much of a market for a zombie porn flick at the time), back in the day this was often confused with D'Amato's PORNO HOLOCAUST (1981), which was shot around the time on some of the same locations and used much of the same cast. It was written by "Tom Salina," an alias for its star - George Eastman (real name: Luigi Montefiori). Eastman was an imposing, 6'6" actor and writer who made many genre appearances over the years in such films as the fumeti (adult comic) adaptation KISS ME, KISS ME (1973) and Mario Bava's exceptional thriller RABID DOGS (1974). He was at his best playing intense psychos, which probably explains why his best-known role was playing a hulking cannibalistic killer in THE GRIM REAPER (1980) and its equally gory follow-up MONSTER HUNTER (1981), both of which were also made by D'Amato. Indonesian-born beauty Laura Gemser (born: Moira Chen), who'd become internationally famous because of her starring role in D'Amato's Black Emanuelle series, was brought on board to give this a name draw. Eastman later stated in interviews that he and Gemser agreed to take part in this sleaze-fest simply because they wanted a free vacation. Though Erotic Nights has a generous helping of nudity, the hardcore sex isn't as pronounced as some might think going in. There is only one graphic sex scene with a man and two women as well as some graphic solo stuff. That's it. And only one of the billed male stars actually participate in any of it. Neither of the two females do.

At a nuthouse, a patient who can't stop scratching his arm follows a female down into the basement and watches her have sex with another patient. That other patient is Larry O'Hara (Eastman) and the film zips back to a time when Larry was a little more sane and shows us exactly what drove him bonkers in the first place. Mustachioed sleazebag businessman John Wilson (played by Mark Shannon; born: Manlio Cersosimo) shows up somewhere in the Caribbean hoping to open a hotel resort there. But first he decides to sample the, uh, hospitality of the country's women. The two prostitutes he does find are willing to overlook the warts (nasty!) on his balls during their shower / bed sex scene but aren't willing to go along with him as he scouts a certain island as a potential location for his hotel. In fact, they are so freaked out by even the mere suggest that they flee the room in horror and don't even take their very hard-earned money with them. That's because the island is rumored to be bad, bad news. And by the way, the above scene is actually the only X-rated man-woman sex scene in this film, but I doubt most viewers will mind that after seeing what the lead actor has to work with.

Sailor Larry and his girlfriend Liz (Lucia Ramirez) exit their boat and catch a maggot-infested zombie coming toward them in the water. Larry bashes it over the head and it's taken to a hospital for an autopsy, where it quickly comes to life and chews a chunk out of the doctor's neck. After going to a nightclub to watch a stripper fuck a wine bottle, Larry is hired by John to take him to the cursed island. Fiona (Dirce Funari), a woman from the hotel John's been shagging, also decides to come along for the ride. There's more (soft) sex on the boat and then they finally arrive. Looking around they run across a graveyard, as well as the island's only two inhabitants: a old black man with a knot on his head and the alluring and mysterious Luna (Gemser). Neither turn out to be very friendly and seem upset by the intruders. John snaps pictures of the two and when he returns to the boat to develop the film, Luna isn't in any of them. She turns up to seduce Fiona, seduce Larry and behaves rather strangely the entire time. A black cat keeps popping up, the old man gives Larry a charm to help ward off evil and some hooded zombies finally make their presence known during the last 20 or so minutes.

John wanders into a shack and a charm surrounded by candles transforms into the black cat and it attacks him. Then zombies (who bleed green or brown) start filing in one at a time. John rips one's face off, spears another and decapitates one with a machete. When he wanders out to the beach, Luna is waiting for him and bites his dick off. What would compel anyone to whip out their dick out for a strange-acting chick immediately after being almost killed by zombies is something the world may never know, but perhaps the mother who decided it was a good idea to breastfeed her zombie "kid" in BURIAL GROUND (1980) can relate. Luna then lets her zombie followers feast on his corpse. She and the old guy pretty much disappear from the finale as Larry and Fiona run around the island trying to avoid zombies rising up out of the ground and water. They eventually make it to the shack and fight off zombies with a rifle, a torch and the charm. The whole experience turns both into sex-crazed loonies.

Known to let down many viewers, this isn't quite the wall-to-wall mixture of hardcore and gore some people seem to want. While there's a little of both, neither are in abundance. It's slow-moving, overlong, the acting is pretty bad, it drags big time in the middle and the makeups are highly uneven, though sometimes fun. Most of the movie takes place during the day and the cinematography (also by D'Amato), picturesque location work in the Dominican Republic and "Pluto Kennedy" / Marcello Giombini's music score elevate it somewhat. The DVD version (which is now long out of print) was through Shriek Show / Media Blasters.

★★

Emanuelle - Perché violenza alle donne? (1977)

... aka: Confessions of Emanuelle
... aka: Degradation of Emanuelle, The
... aka: Emanuelle Around the World
... aka: Emanuelle Versus Violence to Women
... aka: Le vice dans la peau

Directed by:
Joe D'Amato

Emanuelle is up to her old tricks again. Or is that her new tricks? Well, whatever. I guess a trick is a trick. As Emanuelle Around the World opens, our globe-trotting "free-spirited" beauty (Laura Gemser) is busy getting down with American porno actor Paul Thomas in the back of his moving van. She travels light, with just a toothbrush in her cleavage to her name and if you're lucky enough to pick her up and give her a ride, she'll make sure to return the favor in her own special way. The release print under review today will be Severin's "European XXX Version" of this Italian Emanuelle adventure, which as per director Joe D'Amato's usual, has enough sick-o content to land it partially in our beloved genre. This version (titled Le vice dans peau on the actual print) was prepared for the French market and if the French were good at doing one thing to the films that crossed their borders in the 70s, it was adding hardcore sex inserts to them. However, in this particular instance it appears that D'Amato actually filmed the hardcore stuff himself (some scenes feature the original actors in the same shot as the X-rated stuff) so this was clearly prepared in advance for such an alternate release.

Emanuelle has her latest conquest drop her off at the Sheraton Hotel in San Francisco. She keeps telling everyone she's on a quest to find happiness and apparently she isn't getting it at her job (she's a famous photographer and reporter) or by bedding every person who crosses her path. Emanuelle runs into her good friend, feminist writer Cora Norman (Karin Schubert), who does more meaningful and reputable stories than our heroine, at the hotel and the two ladies agree to meet up later for drinks. After almost getting raped by an old pervert because of a room mix up, Emanuelle runs out into the hallway buck naked and bumps into rich and debonair Malcolm Robertson (Ivan Rassimov). Malcolm takes her on a shopping spree and then accompanies her to New York City to take her out to dinner. The two discuss sex and love and the meaning of it all. Malcolm is the old-fashioned romantic type while Emanuelle feels free to have relations with whomever, whenever she wants, yet feels empty and unfulfilled. Before they part, Malcolm (who works for the Third World Aid Committee at the United Nations) gives Emanuelle his itinerary of where he'll be the next three months and what hotels he'll be staying at.

Emanuelle returns to her newspaper and discovers she's going to be sent to India to meet a guru who knows the "secret to the ultimate climax." Upon arrival, she and her guide have trouble locating him, but Emanuelle does luck out meeting an attractive, stranded tourist named Mary (Brigitte Petronio). After their Sapphic encounter, Mary reveals that she had been gang raped by a bunch of men in Rome who are involved with the white slave trade: kidnapping girls to supply Middle Eastern harems. Emanuelle, who's wanting to be taken more seriously as a journalist, decides to add that to her 'to do' list. First she pays a visit to Guru Shanti's (George Eastman) orgy, where she offends the guru by making a guy get off. The two make up, and he takes her to the "School of Kama Sutra" where she watches a class where women learn "the thousand positions of love" using dildos. After exposing the guru as being the high paid fraud he is, she decides to start exploring a nobler cause. Namely sexual violence.

Emanuelle meets up with Cora in Rome to get some pointers on a white slavery ring that Cora herself is trying to bust. She then enlists the aid of a couple of Mary's girlfriends and a teenage boy to help her entrap the slavers. The three ladies get dragged back to some villa, are tied up, blindfolded and led into a dark room. Emanuelle almost gets raped (again) by a grotesque, facially-disfigured, one-eyed psycho who opts for another of the ladies before the teen boy calls in the cops to bust the operation. Speaking of rape, poor Cora ends up getting beat and sexually assaulted by some thugs. While that's going on, Emanuelle decides to repay the teenage boy who helped her out by doing him in the closet on his father's yacht while his stepmother has a lesbian tryst on the bed with her maid.

Having had enough of the sexual violence perpetrated on women by men, Cora and Emanuelle team up and go to Hong Kong, Macao, the Middle East and then New York City in order to expose how scummy men can be. The Hong Kong scenes plumb the depths of tastelessness. Emanuelle gets kidnapped, is taken to a gymnasium, tied up and forced to watch a deranged sadist torture two women. One has milk poured on her privates and a snake inserted in her vagina and the other is raped by a German Shepherd! In the Middle East, Emanuelle and Cora prove that the best way to a man's heart - and his conscience - isn't through his stomach as they sandwich a sheik. In the concluding scenes in New York, a bunch of decadent upper crust folks - including a Senator - decide to punish Miss Ohio (American porno actress Juliet Graham under the name "Elisabeta Terribile") by making her strip by some docks. Some greasy bums crash the party, chase off the rich cowards and rape the beauty queen. Emanuelle tries to escape but one of the bums gets her, puts a gun to her head and forces her to give him a blowjob. After her experiences, it's no wonder Em can't wait to get back to the kind and sensitive Malcolm. The moral of the story? Uh, I guess that most men are pigs?

This mildly diverting, very sleazy chapter in the Emanuelle saga at least has a certain philosophy about female empowerment and sex that's semi-interesting. Most of the problems are caused by out-of-control male libido yet our heroines must use sex themselves (albeit consensual sex) to solve these very problems. Perhaps because this was based on a story written by a woman (Maria Pia Fusco, who also co-scripted), the female empowerment angle rings a little truer here than in many similar films. The two central females are established, successful women risking their own asses when they don't have to in order to help out other women. Despite what they go through, neither give up or let men stop or distract them from achieving their goal. Of course some would say this is all at odds with the near-constant depictions of women being degraded and violated, but it would be difficult to effectively comment upon the exploitation of women without being a bit exploitative itself, eh? Of course, no one is really going to tune in to an Emanuelle sex flick looking for a deeper meaning, but some effort to justify the content was actually put into this one. For those very reasons, I actually enjoyed this one a little more than some of the other Black Emanuelle movies I've seen.

Don't get your hopes (or anything else for that matter) up for the hardcore footage as there's actually not very much of it here. None of the more well-known actors participate in any of it and what there is is very brief and not even finished. A cornball pop theme song called "The Picture of Love" (by Nico Fidenco) plays throughout. The cast also includes Marino Masé, Gianni Macchia, Craig Hill and Dirce Funari. The director also appears unbilled.

★★1/2

Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali (1977)

... aka: Bloody Track
... aka: Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals
... aka: Emanuelle's Amazon Adventure
... aka: Trap Them and Kill Them

Directed by:
Joe D'Amato

Going undercover as a patient, New York Evening Post reporter Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) uses a camera hidden inside a doll to document proof of some unprofessional behavior going down in a mental asylum. One of the patients (Cindy Leadbetter), who was found crazed at the edge of a jungle, rips a nurse's breast off and eats it. As it turns out, the nurse is "well known for her homosexual inclinations" and has been sexually molesting patients. While going through pictures, Emanuelle notices a strange tattoo on the boob-eater's belly. The symbol is indicative of an ancient Amazonian cannibal tribe who were long thought to be extinct. Emanuelle's boss thinks this has the makings of a great story, so he sends Emanuelle to meet with famous anthropologist Mark Lester (Gabriele Tinti), who's now working as the curator of the American Natural History Museum. Mark invites Emanuelle out to lunch, then takes her back to his apartment to show her some black-and-white footage of African cannibals busy at work castrating, decapitating and consuming human flesh. Being the "free woman" she is, Emanuelle doesn't let visions of a native gnawing down on a penis deter her from immediately hopping into the sack with Mark.

Don't ask how (*wink*), but Emanuelle is able to quickly convince Mark to lead the expedition into the Amazonian jungle. The two fly down South, meet up with plantation owner Wilkes (Geoffrey Copleston) and then learn that Wilkes' blonde teenage daughter Isabelle (Mónica Zanchi) and her nun friend Sister Angela (Annamaria Clementi), will be headed into the jungle the following day to drop off supplies at a mission run by Father Morales. All four decide to go ahead and make the trip together. Along with guides Felipe and Manolo, the group load up their supplies, hop on a boat and travel down the river for a 5 to 6 day journey to the mission. On one stop, Emanuelle and Isabelle (who'd already spied on her guests having sex the night before) take their opportunity to scrub each other down in a lake while a chimpanzee goes through their things, smokes one of their cigarettes and tries on their sunglasses.

When evening starts to fall, they dock their boat and come ashore. Emanuelle is attacked by a boa constrictor and is saved by Donald McKenzie (Donald O'Brien), a big game hunter whose camp isn't far from there. He offers to let them stay at his camp but warns that the mission they were heading to has already been attacked by savages who killed everyone there. After meeting Donald's neglected wife Maggie ("Susan Scott" / Nieves Navarro), who's having an affair with their black guide Salvadore (Percy Hogan) because her husband is impotent, Mark decides it would be best if they head back. After all, he doesn't want to put Isabelle and Sister Angela in any danger. Before anyone can go anywhere, one of the Indians is found dead and gutted. Their boat also turns up missing, so there's no way back to civilization other than walking through the jungle, where they encounter snakes, leeches, quicksand and other dangers along the way.

Naturally, the cannibal tribe eventually catches up to them and even set up booby traps throughout the jungle. The other Indian guide is impaled by one. While wandering off into the brush, the nun is abducted. The cannibals strip her naked, cut off her nipple and eat it and then slice open her stomach and eat her guts. Because they're actually in the jungle trying to find a crashed airplane rumored to have been carrying diamonds, Donald and Maggie wander off from the group and end up running across the tribe, who spear him in the shoulder and drag her back to their village. The rest of the gang then must find the village and try to save Maggie before it's too late. They split up into two groups. The group of Donald, Isabelle and Salvadore doesn't do so hot as Salvadore is speared to death and the other two join Maggie at cannibal central. Donald gets pulled in two during a game of tug-o-war with a wire and his wife gets her organs passed around camp after getting slice from her vagina up to her torso. Probably because she's a blonde, Isabelle is drugged and gang raped by the entire tribe, who want to sacrifice her to their water goddess. In a last ditch effort to save her, Emanuelle strips nude, paints the water goddess symbol on her stomach and goes in the village to retrieve her "sacrifice."

Combining an Emanuelle soft-core flick with a jungle / cannibal horror-adventure was actually a great idea since these were both very popular in Europe at the time. This probably did pretty well in theaters, as it delivers precisely what one would expect of this particular combo. There's loads of nudity and sex (mostly confined to the first half) and plenty of bloody violence (mostly confined to the second half). The dubbing and dialogue are both terrible, mismatched stock footage is often used for the jungle and gators and there's an extremely annoying song ("Make Love on the Wing") that plays over and over again, but that's not gonna bother the target audience for this thing in the least.

It was originally released in the U.S. under the title Trap Them and Kill Them since the Emanuelle brand name wasn't much of a sell here in the States. It also used to play late night television as Emanuelle's Amazon Adventure. Both versions were missing some of the more graphic sex and violence. The Blue Underground DVD is uncut.

D'Amato, who also co-wrote and photographed, has a cameo as a psychiatrist in one of the first scenes. The end credits claim it was filmed in Brazil, but it was actually filmed entirely in New York City and Italy.

★★