First, another image of one of her perfumes:
Second, there are currently lots of rare Fenech films on Cinemageddon for your downloading and delectation, including things like The Black and Blond Pussycat and The Sins of Madame Bovary.
Saturday, 26 July 2008
Il Profumo della signora in giallo
Or, a couple of Fenech things.
First, another image of one of her perfumes:
Second, there are currently lots of rare Fenech films on Cinemageddon for your downloading and delectation, including things like The Black and Blond Pussycat and The Sins of Madame Bovary.
First, another image of one of her perfumes:
Second, there are currently lots of rare Fenech films on Cinemageddon for your downloading and delectation, including things like The Black and Blond Pussycat and The Sins of Madame Bovary.
Le Tue mani sul mio corpo
A bourgeois family gathers at their home by the sea for the holidays. There is Andrea (Lino Capolicchio), the neurotic student haunted by memories of his dead mother; his father, a publisher (Jose Quaglio); his new trophy and / or gold-digging wife, Mirelle (Erna Schurer), who is far closer to Andrea's age than her husband's; Mirelle's mother and, before long, her friend, Carole (Colette Descombes) and her partner Jean.
Andrea on his motorcycle, fantasising about taking a death trip
Male and female voyeurs
It soon emerges that Andrea is obsessed with and secretly spies upon Carole, whilst Mirelle – who knows of Andrea's obsession – alternatively flirts with and mocks the already confused young man.
Some of the images produced by Andrea
Later, following a party, Andrea introduces a black woman, Nivel, indicating that she is his fiancee in a bid to shock his father and stepmother: “Nivel will be a splendid wife. I want many, many children. Lots of little cannibals that eat you all up”; subsequently Nivel performs an interpretive dance in which she dresses as both a KKK man and his victim.
Playing with identity
The intrigues and games continue, gradually becoming more serious until, eventually – literally the last scene of the film – there is a murder.
Technically accomplished and well constructed, Le Tue mani sul mio corpo – i.e. your hands on my body, although with the 'you' and 'me' references remaining free floating and shifting – is a challenging film that demands more of the viewer's active involvement than is often the case, with director and co-writer Brunello Rondi preferring to make his points elliptically rather than obviously.
At the start there's a considerable degree of uncertainty over the characters' relationships to one another belied by the neat who's who summary above such that, for example, when we first see Mirelle, we're possibly inclined to think that the man she's with is her boyfriend and / or that she's Andrea's sister.
It's a strategy that works well to foreground Andrea's sexual and other confusions and makes his state more intersubjectively shared by the audience, whilst also providing a more perverse cast to the family as a whole.
The fragmentation of space and identity
Much the same can be said of the general lack of attention to time, place and state within the film, cumulatively giving a somewhat dreamlike quality to the proceedings – what is objectively real and what is in Andrea's mind's eye – and again conveying his lack of purpose and direction.
Individual scenes displaying a carefully thought and worked through mise en scène in which the placement of the characters within the frame – alas often compromised by the pan and scan presentation on the copy I watched – and the decoupage tell us as much about what is going on as the well-crafted dialogue and situations.
Pieces of the puzzle – woman as enigma and piece of meat
Thus, for example, Andrea tries to show his sophistication to the slightly older Carole by making her a cocktail, but then finds he cannot remember the recipe and, pouring her a whisky instead, fills her glass more as if it were wine, with extreme close-ups of Carole apparently returning his gaze suggesting a connection, whether real or imagined, between them.
If there's thus a definite method to the film, the question the giallo enthusiast may find himself asking is whether it is really for him, emerging as it does more as a bourgeois melodrama / psychodrama than as a thriller in the conventional sense. While it's certainly true that the likes of Lenzi's psico sexy films of the period – Colette Descombes having actually appeared in Orgasmo the previous year – also have considerable dramatic elements and a similar tendency to focus on outwardly respectable bourgeois types, they counterbalance this with conventional conspiracies motivated by passion or financial gain and a willingness to present obvious set pieces alongside the more mundane narrative. (In this regard Le Tue mani sul mio corpo is perhaps more reminiscent of Death Laid an Egg for the way in which it too fuses narrative and set-piece, albeit in a more restrained, 'tasteful' and bourgeois way than Questi and Arcalli's masterpiece of Marxist satire.)
This said, the persistent emphasis on traditional giallo scenarios of past trauma erupting into the present, of the pleasures and dangers inherent in voyeurism voyeurism, and the persistent foregrounding of blocks of yellow within the mise en scène – if there's a curtain, a towel, a telephone or piece of swimwear it is almost guaranteed to be yellow – clearly indicate that the film is sullo stesso filone, albeit in its own north by northwest manner.
Capolicchio makes us empathise and sympathise with his character even as we necessarily retain a greater degree of distance from him than we would another more typical protagonist, while Jose Quaglio – also excellent as the blind fascist ideologue in The Conformist – plays the bourgeois patriarch as if to the manner born. Erna Schurer turns in one of her better performances as Mirelle, the character demonstrating a self-awareness about what she really represents to her husband and step-son, and the actress that she possessed brains as well as beauty thereby.
Giorgio Gaslini provided the score, an effective mixture of lyrical and jazzy cues, while the cinematography by Alessandro D'Eva, art direction by Oscar Capponi and the editing by future director Michele Massimo Tarantini are uniformly accomplished, never detracting from Rondi's vision.
[Thanks again to the good folks at Cinemageddon for making the film available and doing the English subtitles.]
Andrea on his motorcycle, fantasising about taking a death trip
Male and female voyeurs
It soon emerges that Andrea is obsessed with and secretly spies upon Carole, whilst Mirelle – who knows of Andrea's obsession – alternatively flirts with and mocks the already confused young man.
Some of the images produced by Andrea
Later, following a party, Andrea introduces a black woman, Nivel, indicating that she is his fiancee in a bid to shock his father and stepmother: “Nivel will be a splendid wife. I want many, many children. Lots of little cannibals that eat you all up”; subsequently Nivel performs an interpretive dance in which she dresses as both a KKK man and his victim.
Playing with identity
The intrigues and games continue, gradually becoming more serious until, eventually – literally the last scene of the film – there is a murder.
Technically accomplished and well constructed, Le Tue mani sul mio corpo – i.e. your hands on my body, although with the 'you' and 'me' references remaining free floating and shifting – is a challenging film that demands more of the viewer's active involvement than is often the case, with director and co-writer Brunello Rondi preferring to make his points elliptically rather than obviously.
At the start there's a considerable degree of uncertainty over the characters' relationships to one another belied by the neat who's who summary above such that, for example, when we first see Mirelle, we're possibly inclined to think that the man she's with is her boyfriend and / or that she's Andrea's sister.
It's a strategy that works well to foreground Andrea's sexual and other confusions and makes his state more intersubjectively shared by the audience, whilst also providing a more perverse cast to the family as a whole.
The fragmentation of space and identity
Much the same can be said of the general lack of attention to time, place and state within the film, cumulatively giving a somewhat dreamlike quality to the proceedings – what is objectively real and what is in Andrea's mind's eye – and again conveying his lack of purpose and direction.
Individual scenes displaying a carefully thought and worked through mise en scène in which the placement of the characters within the frame – alas often compromised by the pan and scan presentation on the copy I watched – and the decoupage tell us as much about what is going on as the well-crafted dialogue and situations.
Pieces of the puzzle – woman as enigma and piece of meat
Thus, for example, Andrea tries to show his sophistication to the slightly older Carole by making her a cocktail, but then finds he cannot remember the recipe and, pouring her a whisky instead, fills her glass more as if it were wine, with extreme close-ups of Carole apparently returning his gaze suggesting a connection, whether real or imagined, between them.
If there's thus a definite method to the film, the question the giallo enthusiast may find himself asking is whether it is really for him, emerging as it does more as a bourgeois melodrama / psychodrama than as a thriller in the conventional sense. While it's certainly true that the likes of Lenzi's psico sexy films of the period – Colette Descombes having actually appeared in Orgasmo the previous year – also have considerable dramatic elements and a similar tendency to focus on outwardly respectable bourgeois types, they counterbalance this with conventional conspiracies motivated by passion or financial gain and a willingness to present obvious set pieces alongside the more mundane narrative. (In this regard Le Tue mani sul mio corpo is perhaps more reminiscent of Death Laid an Egg for the way in which it too fuses narrative and set-piece, albeit in a more restrained, 'tasteful' and bourgeois way than Questi and Arcalli's masterpiece of Marxist satire.)
This said, the persistent emphasis on traditional giallo scenarios of past trauma erupting into the present, of the pleasures and dangers inherent in voyeurism voyeurism, and the persistent foregrounding of blocks of yellow within the mise en scène – if there's a curtain, a towel, a telephone or piece of swimwear it is almost guaranteed to be yellow – clearly indicate that the film is sullo stesso filone, albeit in its own north by northwest manner.
Capolicchio makes us empathise and sympathise with his character even as we necessarily retain a greater degree of distance from him than we would another more typical protagonist, while Jose Quaglio – also excellent as the blind fascist ideologue in The Conformist – plays the bourgeois patriarch as if to the manner born. Erna Schurer turns in one of her better performances as Mirelle, the character demonstrating a self-awareness about what she really represents to her husband and step-son, and the actress that she possessed brains as well as beauty thereby.
Giorgio Gaslini provided the score, an effective mixture of lyrical and jazzy cues, while the cinematography by Alessandro D'Eva, art direction by Oscar Capponi and the editing by future director Michele Massimo Tarantini are uniformly accomplished, never detracting from Rondi's vision.
[Thanks again to the good folks at Cinemageddon for making the film available and doing the English subtitles.]
Friday, 25 July 2008
Slash Hits Volume Three: Mullet Massacre
This third 48-page glossy colour A5 volume in Midnight Media's ongoing Slash Hits series provides a comprehensive overview of slasher and related forms such as the giallo – represented by the likes of Phenomena, Murderock, A Blade in the Dark and Stagefright – over the four years from 1983 to 1987.
The period comes across as one dominated by the continuation of the Friday the 13th series, the emergence of Nightmare on Elm Street and the gradual decline of major US studio interest in the form beyond these properties, but with no let up in independent productions, good, bad and indifferent.
Each film, from the best known franchise entries to the most obscure shot on video regional ultra-low budget independent production, is given a concise and entertaining write up cum evaluation, typically of a hard but fair sort, along with specific ratings on the key fan criteria of breasts and blood, with ratings of between one and five been given in each case.
Crucially, however, the value of the film in its own right and as a genre product are recognised as different, such that the likes of The Stepfather and Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer can be acknowledged on their own distinctive merits, despite a relative paucity of one or the other formula ingredient.
Providing a good checklist of films and themes such as treatments of the final girl and the gender transgressive killer or scenario, another major area where the publication shines is in foregrounding the increasing postmodernism / self-reflexivity of slasher product over this period, demonstrating that Scream was really nothing new except for having a name director and studio backing behind it.
The period comes across as one dominated by the continuation of the Friday the 13th series, the emergence of Nightmare on Elm Street and the gradual decline of major US studio interest in the form beyond these properties, but with no let up in independent productions, good, bad and indifferent.
Each film, from the best known franchise entries to the most obscure shot on video regional ultra-low budget independent production, is given a concise and entertaining write up cum evaluation, typically of a hard but fair sort, along with specific ratings on the key fan criteria of breasts and blood, with ratings of between one and five been given in each case.
Crucially, however, the value of the film in its own right and as a genre product are recognised as different, such that the likes of The Stepfather and Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer can be acknowledged on their own distinctive merits, despite a relative paucity of one or the other formula ingredient.
Providing a good checklist of films and themes such as treatments of the final girl and the gender transgressive killer or scenario, another major area where the publication shines is in foregrounding the increasing postmodernism / self-reflexivity of slasher product over this period, demonstrating that Scream was really nothing new except for having a name director and studio backing behind it.
La Bambola di Satana
Following the death of her uncle, Elizabeth (Erna Schurer) arrives at the family castle with her fidanzato Jack (Roland Carey), a journalist, for a reading of the will.
Dolls and black gloved killers, what more could one want?
After dinner with the other guests and servants, in which the history of the castle and the family are discussed, Elizabeth and Jack are taken to their rooms – a conservative touch which provides an early indication of the film's at times awkward straddling of 60s and 70s styles, whilst also serving as an important plot point insofar as it allows for the easier terrorisation of Elizabeth at night.
Schurer's characteristic expressions
Instinctively heading for the room she used to stay in when she visited the castle as a child many years ago, Elizabeth is shocked to discover the first of the castle's many secrets. An old servant whom she had been informed was dead is in fact very much alive, albeit wheelchair-bound and apparently insane.
Bava they are not
The next day uncle's will is read, naming Elizabeth as the principal beneficiary to no-one else's particular surprise.
Black gloved hands at work
Later the housekeeper takes Elizabeth, Jack and some of the others on a tour of the castle's dungeons, complete with reproduction torture chamber and identified as being like something out of a giallo novel by another guest; meanwhile another young woman, ostensibly a landscape painter vacationing in the vicinity, proves to be searching for something in the castle grounds along with some unidentified confederates with whom she communicates by walkie-talkie...
Note how the candelabra is shedding absolutely no light at all
That night Elizabeth finds her sleep troubled by extraordinarily vivid nightmares involving the castle, its staff and Jack – if, that is, they are in fact nightmares and not a carefully stage-managed reality designed to drive her mad or to her death...
Released at the end of the 1960s, La Bambola di Satana – not to be confused with the later, more explicit and supernatural horror themed La Bimba di Satana – is one of those entries that hedges its bets by throwing in just about gothic horror and giallo motif the filmmakers could think of into a plot that's half Agatha Christie and half Scooby Doo; fans of the latter style of giallo may care to note that the film climaxes with the literal unmasking of the hitherto disguised chief villain.
Besides the aforementioned madwoman (not) in the attic, torture dungeon and sinister servants, we also have plenty of dark corridors illuminated only by the light from a candelabra; a black-gloved figure whose face we never see until late on; wolves howling outside in the dark; storms every night and a beautiful heroine / damsel in distress who spends much of her time in nightwear that leaves little to the imagination.
Obviously also inspired by the wider fumetti culture of the time, with the credits even being presented as a series of posed stills from later in the film – many also in black and white rather than colour – La Bambola di Satana is perhaps better as a collection of static images than as an actual movie.
While director Ferrucio Casapinta – whose sole film credit this seems to be – definitely has an eye for an arresting composition and tries hard, with the nightmare sequences well rendered, the technical aspects of the film are lacking at times elsewhere, with the zoom lens work sometimes stop-start rather than smooth and far too many attempts at atmospheric and / or realistic lighting going awry as the use of a candelabra, the switching of a bedside light, or a flash of lightning fail to produce an appreciable changes in illumination.
This in turn serves to distinguish La Bambola di Satana from other films of its kind, such as The Virgin of Nuremberg and The Bloody Pit of Horror, albeit to its detriment insofar as they each really work as films in their own right; perhaps the most telling aspect here is the way the makers of Bloody Pit of Horror have the confidence to incorporate the making of a fumetti into the film's narrative, poking fun at what they themselves are doing and indicating that it's all in good fun, not to be taken too seriously.
As Elizabeth, Erna Schurer doesn't have too much to do except look pretty, vulnerable and scared along with screaming on cue. She's adequate to each task, with her background as a photomodel in fumetti clearly giving her the kind of expertise in creating one-dimensional characters needed by the film.
Roland Carey's Jack is similarly flat, the kind of traditional hard-headed hero whom one is never really inclined to doubt or consider as having ulterior motives, with this again serving to give the film a distinctly old-fashioned and comforting feel when compared to the likes of The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (with its similar gothic / giallo crossover) or what a George Hilton type might have brought to the role.
Much the same can be said of the rest of the performers, with the absence of an eccentric character actors of the Luciano Rossi or Pigozzi type being felt along with that of more recognisable female glamour presences beyond Schurer herself.
In line with the general 60s / 70s crossover, Franco Potenza's score is a mixture of contemporary rock pieces and jazzy cues – the former playing diegetically in the nearby trattoria – and old fashioned horror mood music.
Dolls and black gloved killers, what more could one want?
After dinner with the other guests and servants, in which the history of the castle and the family are discussed, Elizabeth and Jack are taken to their rooms – a conservative touch which provides an early indication of the film's at times awkward straddling of 60s and 70s styles, whilst also serving as an important plot point insofar as it allows for the easier terrorisation of Elizabeth at night.
Schurer's characteristic expressions
Instinctively heading for the room she used to stay in when she visited the castle as a child many years ago, Elizabeth is shocked to discover the first of the castle's many secrets. An old servant whom she had been informed was dead is in fact very much alive, albeit wheelchair-bound and apparently insane.
Bava they are not
The next day uncle's will is read, naming Elizabeth as the principal beneficiary to no-one else's particular surprise.
Black gloved hands at work
Later the housekeeper takes Elizabeth, Jack and some of the others on a tour of the castle's dungeons, complete with reproduction torture chamber and identified as being like something out of a giallo novel by another guest; meanwhile another young woman, ostensibly a landscape painter vacationing in the vicinity, proves to be searching for something in the castle grounds along with some unidentified confederates with whom she communicates by walkie-talkie...
Note how the candelabra is shedding absolutely no light at all
That night Elizabeth finds her sleep troubled by extraordinarily vivid nightmares involving the castle, its staff and Jack – if, that is, they are in fact nightmares and not a carefully stage-managed reality designed to drive her mad or to her death...
Released at the end of the 1960s, La Bambola di Satana – not to be confused with the later, more explicit and supernatural horror themed La Bimba di Satana – is one of those entries that hedges its bets by throwing in just about gothic horror and giallo motif the filmmakers could think of into a plot that's half Agatha Christie and half Scooby Doo; fans of the latter style of giallo may care to note that the film climaxes with the literal unmasking of the hitherto disguised chief villain.
Besides the aforementioned madwoman (not) in the attic, torture dungeon and sinister servants, we also have plenty of dark corridors illuminated only by the light from a candelabra; a black-gloved figure whose face we never see until late on; wolves howling outside in the dark; storms every night and a beautiful heroine / damsel in distress who spends much of her time in nightwear that leaves little to the imagination.
Obviously also inspired by the wider fumetti culture of the time, with the credits even being presented as a series of posed stills from later in the film – many also in black and white rather than colour – La Bambola di Satana is perhaps better as a collection of static images than as an actual movie.
While director Ferrucio Casapinta – whose sole film credit this seems to be – definitely has an eye for an arresting composition and tries hard, with the nightmare sequences well rendered, the technical aspects of the film are lacking at times elsewhere, with the zoom lens work sometimes stop-start rather than smooth and far too many attempts at atmospheric and / or realistic lighting going awry as the use of a candelabra, the switching of a bedside light, or a flash of lightning fail to produce an appreciable changes in illumination.
This in turn serves to distinguish La Bambola di Satana from other films of its kind, such as The Virgin of Nuremberg and The Bloody Pit of Horror, albeit to its detriment insofar as they each really work as films in their own right; perhaps the most telling aspect here is the way the makers of Bloody Pit of Horror have the confidence to incorporate the making of a fumetti into the film's narrative, poking fun at what they themselves are doing and indicating that it's all in good fun, not to be taken too seriously.
As Elizabeth, Erna Schurer doesn't have too much to do except look pretty, vulnerable and scared along with screaming on cue. She's adequate to each task, with her background as a photomodel in fumetti clearly giving her the kind of expertise in creating one-dimensional characters needed by the film.
Roland Carey's Jack is similarly flat, the kind of traditional hard-headed hero whom one is never really inclined to doubt or consider as having ulterior motives, with this again serving to give the film a distinctly old-fashioned and comforting feel when compared to the likes of The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (with its similar gothic / giallo crossover) or what a George Hilton type might have brought to the role.
Much the same can be said of the rest of the performers, with the absence of an eccentric character actors of the Luciano Rossi or Pigozzi type being felt along with that of more recognisable female glamour presences beyond Schurer herself.
In line with the general 60s / 70s crossover, Franco Potenza's score is a mixture of contemporary rock pieces and jazzy cues – the former playing diegetically in the nearby trattoria – and old fashioned horror mood music.
Thursday, 24 July 2008
Dangerous Pictures Act
Those in the UK with an interest in horror and exploitation films hopefully already know about the Dangerous Pictures Act, whose dangers of misapplication are cogently addressed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oszEa30Ghc
Wednesday, 23 July 2008
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...
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...
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