Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali / Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals / Emanuelle's Cannibal Adventure / Trap them and Kill Them

Whilst working undercover, posing as a patient in a mental hospital, Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) is understandably shocked by the sight of a nurse running screaming into the corridor, blood gushing from where her right breast used to be.


Yeah, and Marlboro-smoking chimpanees might fly out my butt...

Investigating further, Emanuelle discovers that the nurse, whose habit of making unwanted lesbian advances towards her patients seemingly precludes much in the way of sympathy, was tending to an unidentified and mute patient who had been found in the Amazon rainforest.

Even more intriguing is the distinctive tattoo above the young woman's pubic region – a placement which naturally also allows for the a convenient bit of full-frontal female nudity – identified as the mark of a cannibal tribe believe to be extinct for the past half-century.


This time round Emanuelle conceals her camera in a giallo-style doll


D'Amato regular Dirce Funari appears as the white cannibal girl

Convicing her editor that this could be the scoop of the century, presumably thus trumping her earlier exposes of white slavers and snuff film producers, the ace reporter seeks out the assistance of Professor Mark Lester (Gabriele Tinti), an expert on the subject of cannibalism, to mount an expedition into the Amazon.






A touch of the old mondo snuff footage as two African adulterers are punished for their sexual transgression

Arriving, Mark and Emauelle rendezvous with an old friend of the anthropologists, Wilkes (Geoffrey Coplestone) who knows the area and its tribes well. Though unable to accompany them, his daughter Isabelle (Monica Zanchi) and her tutor Sister Angela (Annamaria Clementi), whose convent lies upriver, join the expedition along with a couple of guides, Felipe and Manolo; that night Isabelle watches Emanuelle and Mark as they make love and masturbates, while later the two women wash each other in the river.

As the party pulls ashore to make camp for the night Emanuelle is attacked by a snake and is saved by the timely intervention of Donald McKenzie (Donal O'Brien), who invites them to join him at his camp inland, along with his wife Maggie (Susan Scott / Nieves Navarro) and their guide Salvatore (Percy Hogan).

Donald explains that he is on a hunting expedition but also proves to be a voyeur, looking in on Sister Angela and Isabelle as they sleep, half-naked. Meanwhile Maggie and Salvatore go off into the undergrowth for a tryst.

All the while none of the group notices none of the group notices that they are being watched from the undergrowth by the waiting cannibals...

The next morning one of the guides goes missing while the party's boats prove to have been cut loose from their moorings. Continuing on foot, they then discover the remains of one of the nuns from the convent...

One things about the cannibal filone which I'd never really thought about until watching Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals again was its unusual production pattern. Though enough films with cannibal themes were certainly made in the ten year period between 1972 and 1981 there doesn't seem to be any obvious rise and fall to their production, with a fairly steady flow of productions from the same few directors – Lenzi, Deodato, D'Amato – instead and only the occasional opportunistic interloper on the territory, most notably Sergio Martino with the at-times not dissimilar Mountain of the Cannibal God.

Seen in retrospect the thing that distinguishes D'Amato's forays into the filone, whether through the character of Emanuelle Nera as here or in his other pornotropic ventures without the character such as Papaya Love Goddess of the Caribbean and Orgasmo Nero, is his emphasis upon sex over violence and gore.


Is it just me or did anyone else half expect to see Captain Hagerty's zombie surfacing behind them here?

Thus, in addition to all the sexploitation material outlined above, the opening New York also sequences present Emanuelle fantasising about making love to Lester and saying farewell to her current boyfriend in her own special way, presumably for anyone in the audience who felt that only one display of Gemser's naked form every five minutes wasn't enough already.

This said, once the cannibals finally make an appearance in the final half-hour the nastiness quotient does increas significantly and, moreover, should not disappoint the horror audience – excepting those who are regrettably sufficiently jaded to need their random animal killings – with D'Amato also handling the shock moments well, using rapid cuts, zooms and stinger sounds to augment their effectiveness whilst also conveying something of the subjective experience of the characters.






Some of the gore

In his analysis of the Black Emanuelle films, Xavier Mendik suggests that they existed primarily to allow Italian audiences to see Emanuelle degraded and objectified on account of her monstrous non-whiteness. While a sophisticated theoretical analysis, it arguably downplays the extent to which the character is displayed as desirable – surely the main reason for the success of the franchise – and the way that the white / non-white boundaries are more complex than a simple attraction / repulsion dynamic would allow for.


Can we honestly say one of these women is presented as desirable and the other as monstrous?

It's hard to square the sheer popularity of the Emanuelle series and character with the idea that Italian audiences went to see these films primarily out of a perverse, sadistic desire to see Gemser and the other non-white characters humiliated, degraded and generally 'put in their place'.

Nevermind that Gemser's character is presented as a model of sexually liberated, desirable womanhood or that D'Amato seems to have regarded the actress with far greater respect than many of white Italian actresses he also worked with for her straightforwardness, professionalism and refusal to do hardcore material.

Indeed, if anything I would argue that a film like the actioner Tough to Kill, in which Percy Hogan's comedy negro Wabu evenually turns the tables on all the whites – nominal pretty boy hero Luc Merenda included – who have regarded him with outright contempt or benign indifference throughout, comes closer to being a joke at the expense of the white racist who has laughed along with them and at Wabu than anything else.

Though there's nothing quite so pronounced here, we do have Mackenzie's critique of African safaris of the sort represented in Africa Addio, as safe, predictable and inauthentic, as he stresses that knowing that there is genuine danger, that the hunter can become the hunted, is fundamental to the real experience.

Another interesting scene is that in which Maggie gazes on Salvatore and his phallic weapon whilst masturbating, before instructing him to come with her into the undergrowth for that one-on-one encounter. Salvatore is presented as being able to fulfil Maggie's needs in a way that her impotent husband cannot, without there being any obvious racist element to their mutual lovemaking scene. Though we might certainly question if Salvatore is really in a position to refuse Maggie's demands, there's no indication that she is out to humiliate him by playing slave mistress Mandingo type games.




Which of these female and male desiring gazes is barred?

Nor is either lover really punished for the act, such that is cannot be understood as any more transgressive than anything else on show for our delectation – with the notable exception of McKenzie's decidedly non-consensual mauling of Isabelle.

Basically, in D'Amato's pre-AIDS world the message seems to be that anything goes – except perhaps male homosexual activity, as the one type that still retained that element of “monstrousness” even in the work of more avowedly progressive directors – just so long as no-one gets hurt.

Likewise the very fact of having a white middle bourgeois woman as the active bearer of the gaze against an objectified black proletarian man here again challenges classical formulations of this theory and exposes some of their own unspoken assumptions and blind-spots. ('Let she who is without sin cast the first stone,' as it were.)

Though D'Amato's depiction of the cannibals themselves can no doubt be criticised from an ethnographic or anthropological perspective – as can the factual error of having an African chimpanzee in a supposedly South American rainforest – to do so omits the film's exploitation nature and that it is first an foremost a fiction intended to entertain.

It also arguably implies that the vast majority of fiction films should be likewise criticised for their factual inaccuracies or liberty taking or else the imposition of a double standard whereby excuses are conveniently found and made for those films whose politics and representations the critic agrees with. (Where are relativism and respect for the ways of the other here; does an “obvious” cinema also suggest that we would be better using obvious empirical material rather than theoretical sophistry to make sense of what it offers its implied audience it in the first instance?)

The acting, with all the members of the cast D'Amato regulars, is acceptable and in some cases – Navarro, O'Brien better than might be expected – the dubbing relatively poor and Nico Fidenco's engagingly trashy music present and correct.

Enough said, really...

L'Occhio selvaggio / The Wild Eye

Before Cannibal Holocaust there was The Wild Eye.

For this 1967 films presents an indictment of the mondo film-makers mentality but, like its later counterpart, uncomfortably sometimes comes perilously close to becoming what it seeks to condemn – albeit with this also having the effect of implicitly asking the audience to question their own motives in viewing such material.

Director Paolo Cavara was certainly well-placed to make the film, having served as assistant to Prosperi and Jacopetti. Having become increasingly dissatisfied with their methods he attempted to put his past behind him, here presenting several scenarios and situations clearly derived from the Mondo Cane films and Africa Addio to illustrate his former colleagues working methods.

The film opens in the savannah, with a scene that could almost have been taken from a behind-the-scenes or making-of type documentary on Africa Addio.

The filmmaking crew, comprising director Paolo (Philippe Leroy) and cameraman Valentino (Gabriele Tinti) relentlessly pursue a gazelle in their jeep with the intention of making its heart burst, much to the distress of Barbara (Delia Boccardo).

Barbara: “I can't stand to see that poor animal suffer.”
Paolo: “Then shut your eyes.”

While Prosperi and Jacopetti's film doesn't feature the exact same image, it is full of hunting and safari sequences where the coincidental presence of the filmmakers as yet another slaughter takes place cumulatively emerges as contrived.

It becomes apparent, however, that Paolo – the match with the director's own forename almost too obvious to be worth mentioning, though his own role in relation to his former colleagues films would seem to have been more like that of Valentino, the hired hand doing what he is told in an only obeying orders way – is focussed less on cruelty to animals than mankind, as he then stages the jeep's running out of petrol to make the safari party endure a dangerous trek through the drylands with inadequate supplies of water to add a bit more drama to the material, filming at opportune moments along the way.

With some of the party fearing imminent death, Paolo even tries to persuade them to make last confessions to the camera. “If any of you, in this extremely dramatic moment – you must realise the predicament we're in – would care to record a statement of any sort, you can do it now.”



A multiplicity of wild / savage eyes

Already, however, we have also got an indication of where the filmmakers cannot go, insofar as the mise en scène within the chase sequence contained shots taken from multiple points of view to indicate that there was in fact a second jeep and camera crew always present at the scene but unacknowledged, namely that of Cavara and company, recording Paolo.

The film's limit point is thus established: if The Wild Eye proceed to present the diegetic Paolo's Nietzschean “gaze into the abyss,” his extra-diegetic counterpart does not allow us a gaze into the film's own potential mise-en-abyme. Situated at the crossover between popular and critical cinemas, we are not about to get a more thoroughgoing examination of the roles played by editing, post-synchronised sound and the addition of empathetic musical cues in the construction of the film expeience. Dziga-Vertov Group era Godard it is not.

Having gotten this criticism out of the way – and admittedly only a criticism if one takes an ultramontane view of critical cinema, taking a preaching to the converted film like Wind from the East as the ideal over a mass appeal one like A Bullet for the General – it has to be acknowledged that The Wild Eye works well both as expose of Jacopetti and Prosperi's practices and as thought-provoking entertainment, not least for making us think about exactly what the term entertainment means when the mondo film and its offshoots, all the way down to today's 'reality television' are considered.

After the group have been rescued – as Paolo and Valentino always knew they would – the episodic, travelogue nature of the narrative is established, along with a romantic subplot between the Paolo and Barbara, with whom he has become obsessed in an otherwise uncharacteristic display of emotion and lack of professionalism. (One wonders if there's here a roman a clef element to the piece, that Barbara might represent Belinda Lee to Paolo's Jacopetti.)

Paolo pursues Barbara and her husband to Egypt and soon persuades Barbara, who still has not realised that he staged the desert incident, to come with him to Singapore and continue to appear in episodes of his documentary, as “the straight-laced English woman, who is always being shocked at the same time as she is succumbing to the so-called lure of the orient.”


An 'exotic,' 'oriental' image

After a spot of sightseeing in Singapore, Paolo is soon back at work, having Valentino film scenes of mute prostitutes negotiating with their clients using sign before then deciding that no-one would believe the footage – “Reality is boring, lies are entertaining,” as he later summarises – and finding a drugs rehabilitation program that can be more readily sensationalised:

“What means have you to help these opium addicts?”

“With whatever little charity we receive.”

“Look I'm ready to make charity enough to get these gentlemen fat as Buddhas. Of course, I'll have to make some changes when I shoot, if you agree. But you'll be satisfied.”

This cues in a nightmarish scene of the men, lying on the floor, having their cravings whipped out of them as the still-credulous Barbara looks on in horror. (“Take Barbara as a contrast now and then,” instructs Paolo to Valentino, ever-alert to the cinematic possibilities of getting “a good scene.”)

The rest of the film continues in much the same way, as we witness – amongst other scenes – Paolo trying to persuade a Buddhist priest to immolate himself for the camera in what is likely a reference to Mondo Cane 2's reconstruction of the same famous image; negotiating with a group of soldiers to have them execute their prisoners against a wall where the composition is more photogenic, implying the degree to which Jacopetti and Prosperi may have been complicit in a similar scene in Africa Addio; and, as the grand finale, withholding knowledge of a terrorist bombing so that he can have his camera set up beforehand to capture the carnage as it happens.

Within the parameters outlined, the filmmakers scarcely put a foot wrong, the mise en scène convicingly conveying the anti-mondo message. The dialogue, however, is perhaps a touch heavy at times, over-stating what we have already obtained via the camera, editing and scoring. (Interestingly the highly-regarded Italian author and intellectual Alberto Moravia has a credit for contributing to the writing.)

The uniformly solid performances help to get round this didactic element somewhat. Leroy and Tinti could always be relied upon when playing cynical or jaded characters, with the former, much like in Femina Ridens, making his more excessive lines that bit more credible than they would otherwise be by convincing us that they are expressions of his more extreme character. (“I have decided for once and for all where my place in life is – with the bosses. And I'm not ashamed of it like many others.”) Boccarro delivers a remarkly assured, mature performance given her age at the time, 19, giving Barbara an adult understanding of interpersonal relationships and a youthful idealism and naïvete as to how the world as a whole tends to work.

Recommended; hopefully someone will put out a proper DVD version.

Al tropico del cancro / Tropic of Cancer / Death in Haiti

While vacationing in Haiti with his wife Grace (Anita Strindberg), Fred Wright (Gabriel Tinti) decides to make an impromptu visit on an old friend, Williams (Anthony Steffen), a doctor.


A classic giallo opening as the plane touches down

Fred's motives are not entirely pure, however, with it soon emerging that he is one of various parties interested in a new wonder drug that Williams has developed, some of whom will stop at nothing - including murder - to secure it for themselves. (Genre fans may be reminded of the plot of Bava's Five Dolls for an August Moon in this regard, with the brightly coloured visuals and Piero Umiliani's not dissimilar lounge score reinforcing this intertextual connection.)


The touristic gaze at the exoticised other? Tinti and Strindberg on vacation

The first complication is that the idealistic Williams appears to have no interest in selling the drug, regardless of the price...

The second complication is that the drug, the sample of which has gone missing, may in any case also have potentially fatal side effects for those who take it, with one of Williams's native assistants turning up dead soon afterwards, his blood being almost like water in its appearance and chemical composition...




A zombie?


A representative of corrupt officialdom?


A western capitalist neo-imperialist?


The man in the white suit? Umberto Raho has a small but pivotal role

Although showcasing a number of characteristic giallo themes, being bookended by the arrival and departure of a Pan Am jet and featuring the obligatory unidentified black gloved killer (or killers) working their way through a swathe of victims, the gloves admittedly somewhat incongruous in the tropical setting, Death in Haiti AKA Tropic of Cancer offsets such routine elements thanks to its atypical setting (rum rather than J&B being the drink of choice) and the inclusion of some documentary style footage of cockfighting, a slaughterhouse and voodoo rituals.


Williams: Before I met you, I heard you had a reputation for deep sea fishing. Are you still handy with a rod?
Wright: I thought you were the one handy with a rod - or at least that's what I've heard.
Williams: I wouldn't enter the competition with you Fred
Wright: I thought you already had

A credit at the end identifies this footage as having been taken from reality, with one having no reason to doubt this; if the voodoo footage is deployed as “exotic” backdrop for a thriller, this still accords with that Griersonian definition of documentary as “creative treatment of actuality”.






A shocking discovery in the abbatoir

These elements also transcend the mondo label that they might unthinkingly evoke.

Yes, we can no doubt impute that they express the “civilised” white man's fear of the “primitive” black Other, with that inevitable racist emphasis on the “threat” black male sexuality poses towards the white woman, as the exclusive property of the white man, but the truth is more complex and the film's representational strategies and politics more subtle and intelligent.

In the slaughterhouse sequence the imaginary boundary between white / black, and civilised / primitive is dissolved by the rational, scientific and “humane” organisation of the plant, which Williams is required to inspect as part of his duties, the logic of its operations really no different from those of the Parisian slaughterhouse of Franju's Blood of the Beasts; it should also be noted that the sequence is not completely gratuitous in terms of plot either, insofar as the body of one of a henchman who had earlier beaten up Williams is found hanging from a meathook.

Likewise, whilst one of the voodoo sequences climaxes with the ritual sacrifice and slaugher of an cow, its throat being slit on camera, that the filmmakers also include a voodoo cum Christian wedding ceremony, an unfamiliar rite of passage becoming a familiar one as we transition from the naked bride and groom lying on mats on the ground to entering the church in black suit and white dress with veil, along with some quite extensive discussions from Williams of the origins and nature of voodoo practice, indicating a genuine anthropological interest as much as the wild eye of the stereotypical mondo filmmaker.

We can also note here a well-mounted voodoo-inspired hallucination sequence in which Grace unconsciously attempts to work through / out her contradictory feelings towards her husband, Williams and her present environment. Visually reminiscent of both Polanski's Repulsion and Fulci's Lizard in a Woman's Skin - the latter also coincidentally featuring Strindberg - the dynamic of attraction / repulsion that emerges is one that speaks of both hopes and fears, of repressed desires that return precisely because they can never be entirely eliminated.


























In dreams I can rule your life

If it is probably fair to say that the attempt to combine documentary and giallo aesthetics and approaches does not always succeed, the filmmakers certainly deserve credit for trying to do something different. The combination of talent is interesting to note in this regard: Gian Paolo Lomi and Eduardo Mulargia co-directed, while Mulargia and Steffen co-wrote, perhaps suggestive of being both one of the Brazilian lead's more committed projects (generally just an actor, he also co-authored and produced Django the Bastard) and of a distinct division of labour amongst the directors. For while Mulargia can easily be characterised as a run of the mill filone filmmaker - albeit with films like Death in Haiti as a salutory reminder that there is frequently more to the formula film than simply following the formula - Lomi is something of a mystery man, with the IMDB listing only one other credit for him.




Death in Haiti

One of the film's most memorable presences, Alfio Nicolosi, who plays an admittedly rather stereotypically gay figure, would also appear to have only ever appeared in this film, something of a suprise seeing as his corpulent, cherub gone to seed form would seem to have made him a natural for playing decadent figures for Fellini or in the Decamerotics of the time.