Giochi erotici di una famiglia per bene (1975)

... aka: Erotic Games of a Respectable Family
... aka: Juegos eroticos amorales (Amoral Erotic Games)
... aka: Juegos eróticos de una familia bien (Erotic Games of a Good Family)
... aka: Thrilling Story

Directed by:
“Francesco Degli Espinosa” (Enzo Matassi)

Known around town as the paragon of morals, values and social ethics, professor / city councilman Ricardo Rossi (Donald O'Brien) tells a few of his colleagues that “Everyone has the marriage they deserve” when the subject of divorce comes up. He's actually quite right. In the civilized world, no one can really force someone to marry someone else, nor does anyone absolutely have to stay in a terrible marriage. There are always other options. Ricardo's not immune from his own philosophy. Constantly busy with work, meetings and conventions (plus kind of an asshole to begin with), his younger trophy wife Elisa (Malisa Longo) isn't exactly happy. Suffering from stress, neck pain and nervous exhaustion, Ricardo skips a meeting and returns home early one evening only to find his wife upstairs in their bedroom entertaining company. Elisa's lover manages to conceal their identity and escape out of the window before Ricardo can shoot them. Elisa should have followed. Instead, her jilted hubby has special plans in store for her.

After slapping her a few times and calling her a “whore” and a “bitch in heat,” Ricardo asks his wife to pack her bags because she's leaving. She suggests they get a divorce and move on with their lives. Unfortunately, he's too paranoid about what that will do to his precious reputation and is publicly such a stickler on the indissolubility of marriage concept that he'll never allow that to happen. Ricardo then drives Elisa out into the country. He explains he's going to drop her off at a secluded mountain village where she'll live under a fake name and constantly be watched and monitored. Little does Elisa know, but he has other plans in store for her. He's already slipped sleeping pills into a drink she had before they left. When she passes out, he stuffs her in a sack, throws in a huge rock and rolls her body down a hill toward a lake.

Upon returning home, Ricardo sees the figure of a body lying under blankets on his bed. Just as he breathes a sigh of relief discovering they're just pillows, his wife's ghost appears in the doorway giving him the veiled threat that they'll soon be reunited for all eternity. But just as soon as she appeared, she disappears in the blink of an eye. Running through the entire trial in his head, Ricardo starts hitting the bottle and goes to a seedy area of the city to sulk.  As he's drowning his sorrows, he's approached by a hooker named Eva (Erika Blanc). She's not like the other girls. She's educated, intelligent, free-spirited, is a hooker because she wants to be a hooker and knows exactly what he, and perhaps any other man who'd seek the services of a girl like her, wants to hear. Sensing he's not like the usual tricks and has some class, she tells him she'd love to come stay with him for a little while and help him forget his female troubles. And what does he have to lose at this point?

Eva accompanies Ricardo home and then things start getting even weirder. The two head upstairs to make love while an until-now unseen grinning woman watches from the couch smoking a cigarette and the camera alternates between zooming in and out on the characters and zooming in an out on a spinning Frank Sinatra album; a simple yet quite hypnotic effect in a pretty clever erotic sequence. Afterward, Elisa's ghost makes her presence known yet again. The following morning, Ricardo receives a phone call from a woman who says “Murderer!” and then hangs up. A different kind of distraction soon appears on Ricardo's doorstep in the form of his wife's beautiful 18-year-old niece Barbara (Maria D'Incoronato), aka the girl who may or may not have been sitting on the couch watching him and Eva go at it. Ricardo soon finds himself courting the girl and to his surprise she's rather receptive.

Still, Ricardo finds himself wanting Eva back and is willing to pay top dollar for her to temporarily move in with him; handing out a 600 thousand lira advance on her services. There are more appearances by the ghost wife (who continues to threaten his life), more creepy phone calls and, to complicate matters further, a strange bearded man who was at the scene the same night Ricardo murdered his wife appears to be stalking him. Now that she's living with him, Eva cannot see Elisa's ghost like Ricardo can even when she's standing right next to her. Is he so racked with guilt he's hallucinating things and going insane? Is Elisa's ghost really back from beyond to settle the score? Did Elisa actually not end up dead in the lake after being pushed down the hill? And what part, if any, do Eva, Barbara and the mysterious bearded many have in any of this?

Essentially your standard issue “Is he or isn't he insane?” / “Is she or isn't she dead?” giallo mystery, this is livened up somewhat by amusing dialogue, welcome elements of black comedy sprinkled throughout, a decent cast and a heaping helping of flesh. Though the visual presentation often lacks punch (and style), the mystery itself is no worse than most other films of this type and it gleefully chucks out a bunch of twists toward the end that are as entertaining as they are silly. The script (which contains surprisingly decent dialogue) is from Renato Polselli, who'd previously directed such sleazy genre films as Delirium (1972), The Reincarnation of Isabel (1973) and Mania (1974), as well as some porn. He also wrote a number of 60s Gothic horror films. The director is a relative unknown whose only other directorial credit was the (reputedly terrible) spaghetti western comedy Once Upon a Time in the Wild, Wild West (1973).

Never released here in the U.S., this played theatrically in both Italy and Spain. The version I watched was taken from a Spanish language VHS released by Grupo Video in 1985. After this, I'm going to start keeping track of the amount of times Ms. Blanc actually wore that marvelous black bikini / bell bottom / catsuit hybrid in her various films. The outfit is so awesome she'd already worn it in both The Devil's Nightmare and The Red-Headed Corpse and it looks no worse for wear in this one four years later. It's obvious she had this outfit among her personal wardrobe, which makes me love her even more than I already do.

★★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.

★★