Orinoco: Prigioniere del sesso (1980)

... aka: Blood for Liberty
... aka: Hotel Paradis
... aka: Hotel Paradiso
... aka: I'm Coming Your Way
... aka: Orinoco: Paraiso del sexo
... aka: Orinoco: Prison of Sex

Directed by:
"Tony Moore" (Edoardo Mulargia)

Filmed back-to-back with ESCAPE FROM HELL (1980) by the same director, producers and crew on the same sets and featuring most of the same stars, this women-in-a-jungle-prison sleaze-fest features more of the same only with the accent placed more on sex and action than sadistic torture, though there's no shortage of that here either. This one doesn't waste any time getting right down to business as there's a group shower scene a whole three seconds after the opening credits conclude and then a sex scene a few minutes after that. At this particular South American prison camp, the ladies are all volunteer prisoners who don't know how bad it really is there until it's too late. They're used for slave labor and the people who own it are having the government foot the bill as they force the girls to work from dawn to dusk digging around for emeralds. Warden Jordan (Luciano Rossi), who's not quite right in the head, is stressing out because he's been unable to locate many jewels as of yet and his crop of girls are becoming weak, fatigued and unproductive from how hard they're constantly worked. After blowing off some steam with his female guard Margo ("Agota Gobertina" / Gota Gobert), he sends for a new crop of ladies to be sent in to help out.

Meanwhile, a group of revolutionaries led by Moreno (Attilo Dottesio) are plotting to overthrow Jordan's prison camp to “free our country from all tyrants.” Moreno sends his main man Laredo (Anthony Steffen) and some others in his group on foot through the dangerous jungle. All but five get gunned down by guards during an ambush but they continue on regardless. At the same time, a few other guards and four shady hired guides led by Orinoco (Stelio Candelli) are escorting a handful of new prisoners, including slutty murderess Maria (Cristina Lay), who was arrested for “strangling an old bastard,” level-headed former nurse Lorna (Maristella Greco), shy and innocent Maise (Maite Nicote) and tough girl Frieda (Adelaide Cendra) to the camp. The two groups eventually cross paths and Laredo and his men kill the guards and get the upper hand. Now their numbers have suddenly increased as both the guides and the ladies decide to work for the revolution's cause.

Back at camp, the prisoners (all decked out in super short skirts so they're always exposing something) are shown slogging away in the mud pits looking for stones as guards whip them, berate them, push them, kick or slap them and occasionally rape or kill them. There's a cat fight (“You must have been brought up by the virgins of the Salvation Army, you dyke!” [lol, wtf?!]), one “fatso” keels over dead from heat exhaustion and another attempts to hide emeralds inside her cooch but has them ripped out and is then tied up and left outside overnight. Prisoner Muriel (Ajita Wilson), who's black so she knows all about voodoo, talks to the “good spirits” who haunt her cell and foresees “lots of blood” in their future, but also freedom. Once the revolutionaries arrive, they easily ingratiate themselves into the camp. Maria is put in a cell with Muriel and the two almost immediately start lezzing out. Lorna, with her nursing background, is put to work improving the infirmary. Orinoco, Laredo (now posing as a guard) and the rest of the guys are invited to stick around for awhile to rest up until they're ready to transport a bag of jewels back to the city.

While we're waiting for the good guys to get their shit together and finally do something we're treated to a bunch of sex and torture scenes. Three of the girls attempt to break out on their own, which ends with two of them shot dead and third strung up by her wrists. When Masie and Frieda reject the sexual advances of Jordan and bisexual Margo, one of the girls is held down and raped with an iron bar. They're then forced to spend the night in “the hole” and are taken out, tied to two bamboo poles and viciously whipped. Crazy Jordan even has his main guard Cesare (Franco Daddi) gun down one of his own men after he threatens to quit. Once the breakout finally does occur, we get lots of gunfire, explosions, chicks lurking around with gardening tools and Marie running around topless lighting sticks of dynamite with a cigar and tossing them at guards. Dead bodies are hilariously lying all over the place by the end. This is pretty much the epitome of good, dumb trashy fun.

There are many different cuts of this movie circulating around. Seems like Britain got it worst of all, where it was cut by over 30 minutes (!!) for an early home video release. It also played theaters there as I'm Coming Your Way on a double bill with some Mary Millington “blue” movie. Though I'm not aware of ANY U.S. release for this one aside from the butcher job that was SAVAGE ISLAND (1985), which uses some footage from this, some footage from Escape and then added new footage featuring Linda Blair, the videos issued in most other countries ran between 80 to 85 minutes.

The most complete cut to my knowledge is the 94 minute version (currently distributed by Njutafilms out of Sweden), which is also the XXX version featuring a handful of ugly, dark and pointless hardcore inserts that do nothing for the film as a whole. Unlike many other films that had bits of hardcore added later on by others so they could play as adult features, the scenes here were obviously shot on location by the same director to prepare for such a release. Several scenes clearly use doubles, but there are a few where the original actors apparently agreed to do them. Wilson is involved in both an explicit lesbian scene and an explicit masturbation scene with a joint (?), though that's not so out of character for her. Biggest shocker of all is that the otherwise mainstream Luciano Rossi (a veteran of many spaghetti westerns) is involved in not one but two explicit scenes and it's very clearly him performing in at least one of them as his face is visible while it's going on. The cast includes Zaira Zoccheddu and Serafino Profumo, who were both also in Escape from Hell.

★★1/2

Assassinio al cimitero etrusco (1982)

... aka: Crime au cimetière étrusque (Etruscan Cemetery Crime)
... aka: El asesino del cementerio estrusco (The Killer of Etruscan Cemetery)
... aka: Etruscan Mystery, The
... aka: Il mistero degli Etruschi (Mysteries of the Etruscans)
... aka: Murder in an Etruscan Cemetery
... aka: Scorpion
... aka: Scorpion with 2 Tails
... aka: Scorpion with Two Tails, The

Directed by:
"Christian Plummer" (Sergio Martino)

Joan Barnard (Elvire Audray) is haunted by nightmares of a smoky ritual sacrifices, including people getting their heads twisted around backwards. The delusions even start bleeding over into her waking life as she looks at some photos of an ancient tomb and then envisions them swarming with maggots. Meanwhile, Joan's archaeologist husband Arthur (John Saxon) is off in Europe studying ancient crypts and Etruscan culture. He calls her late one night relaying information about the important discovery he'd made: A hidden tomb inside a cave that's been “untouched since Tutankhamun.” Joan describes the crypt to him. It's the same one she's been dreaming about. Arthur insist Joan's rich father Mulligan (Van Johnson), who's been sponsoring his expedition, send him a telex so he can ship out some crates but before the two can continue the conversation any further, someone sneaks in and gives Arthur's head the ole 180. Distraught, Joan insists on going abroad to investigate despite her father plea to not get involved. Her scientist friend Mike Grant (Paolo Malco), who has a major crush on Joan, accompanies her on the trip.

Upon arrival to a small Italian village called Volterra, the duo meet up with a police inspector and then mysterious Maria Volumna (Marilù Tolo), a countess with an interest in Etruscan artifacts who Arthur had been staying with while there. Arthur's American colleague Heather Hull (Wandisa Guida) and her driver / gopher Nick Forte (Jacques Stany) show up as well. No one seems to know anything. Joan skims through Arthur's journal, which has mysterious notes like “There are Twelve!” and the name of a jeweler in town. She goes to visit the jeweler and he shows her one of Arthur's findings; a gold scorpion with two tails. She claims she'd never seen it before but feels like it belongs to her for some reason. Then it's off to an old Etruscan site where Joan has visions of a couple of ancient Romans and maggots, plus another psychic premonition, this time involving Nick facing a similar fate to her father. Naturally, he's soon found dead in that exact way.

Meanwhile, in New York, a bunch of crates full of Arthur's findings arrive. Unfortunately for Joan's father, who seems to owe someone something, there's only eleven crates and the twelfth is the one containing what he was really after, which turns out to be a shipment of heroin. Three hundred pounds and a 700 million street value to be exact. Yup, pops is a drug trafficker. In Italy, Joan leaves her hotel to follow a man playing a flute to the cave tomb she's been having nightmares about. There she finds the twelfth crate. Her father flies in, explains himself and then Joan's forced into revealing the whereabouts of the drugs or else they'll both be killed. This leads to a massacre at the cave, where another faction wanting the drugs shows up and shoots a bunch of people. Joan goes into some kind of trance, spouts some gibberish and causes a bunch of rocks to crush the bad guys. She's shot herself but miraculously manages to be the sole survivor of the ordeal and is rushed to the hospital.

Once Joan recovers, she and Mike decide to continue trying to unravel the mystery of Joan's dreams. They meet archaeologist Paolo Domelli (Claudio Cassinelli) and his colleague Professor Sorenson (Anita Laurenzi), who are in the midst of deciphering some ancient Etruscan text above a painting of an ancient queen who looks exactly like our heroine. They become involved with a photographer named Gianni (Franco Garofalo), who has “the stones of life” in his possession and had helped Arthur on his initial tomb raiding activities. More heads are twisted, more hallucinations are had, more maggots wiggle and more trite dialogue about anti-matter, anti-gravity, being the guardian or so-and-so protecting a treasure and a bunch of other confusing shit is trotted out at the finale.

Written by genre vets Ernesto Gastaldi and Dardano Sacchetti, this is plodding, muddled and dull in the extreme... and at one time it was going to be of epic TV miniseries length! Somewhere along the line that plan was scrapped (maybe after someone saw how fucking boring it was) and the film was edited down to be a feature instead. Good call. An hour and half was about all this viewer could stand. Scorpion tries to be too many things at once and pretty much fails on all counts. It's part of a wave of early 80s horror films about ancient tombs that was likely prompted by the extremely popular The Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibit that toured the U.S. from 1976 until 1979. Afterward, we got The Awakening (1980), The Curse of King Tut's Tomb (1980; TV movie), Sphinx (1981), this one and numerous others. I don't know if a single one of these was really worth a damn!

I noticed a lot of people picking on the lead actress in their reviews, but she's the last person to blame for this project's failure. For starters, she's been horribly dubbed. Second, she's really no worse an actress than others who'd filled these same type of roles the decade prior, who were also almost always poorly dubbed. Third, it's not her fault this film itself is boring beyond belief. I also find it somewhat sexist to pin the blame on her instead of the men behind the camera. I suppose these comments are coming from fans of the director (who hid behind a pseudonym) and / or the writers looking for some kind of scapegoat. Some of the art direction and the fact Audray is at least nice to look at are about the only two thing of any merit here. Fabio Frizzi provides a pretty good score as well but it sounds almost identical to his CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980) score.

The DVD from Mya Communications includes a handful of scenes that were cut, including one with Saxon whose role in the English-language version is reduced to about five minutes. A set of French lobby cards under the title Crime au cimetière étrusque also show stills from other cut scenes, including some nudity not in the English version.

★1/2