Paradiso Blu

After their plane goes down in bad weather, survivors Karen (Anna Bergman) and Peter (Dan Monahan) manage to make it to an isolated island. Another plane flies overhead, indicating that there is at least the prospect of rescue, but fails to spot them. Accordingly the two build a shelter and attempt to settle in to their new situation.


How did we get here?

Chris Taylor (John Richardson) comes to the island by boat and stays with them a while.

Following his departure a group of natives land on the island to conduct a voodoo ceremony. Peter manages to scare them off and save Inez (Lucia Ramirez) from apparent sacrifice.


Ramirez and Bergman

This is something of an oddity from producer-director-cinematographer Aristide Massaccessi / Joe D'Amato. Given its setting, voodoo references and the presence of Ramirez, it would be of a piece with the likes of Erotic Nights of the Living Dead and Black Sex were it not for the fact that the sex and horror elements that were their stock in trade are downplayed in favour of Blue Lagoon meets Swept Away styled drama.


A grizzled looking Richardson

While the results again demonstrate D'Amato's adaptability and occasional willingness to try his hand at making a 'proper', less exploitative film, they are not the most interesting to watch, with a distinct lack of dramatic, sexual, class or any other sort of tension throughout.

The appearances of Chris and then Inez certainly threaten to alter the dynamics between Karen and Peter, but nothing really happens. (Lost anyone?)

D'Amato's direction is flat with the more self-conscious moments – slow motion as Karen and Peter embrace, some sudden zooms – decidedly awkward.

This is partly because these moments don't built into memorable set-pieces. This is perhaps most evident in the plane crash sequence, as D'Amato unexpectedly cuts from the build up within the plane to the aftermath. Clearly there wasn't the budget or inclination even for some unconvincing model work.

But the avoidance of the supernatural means we don't get anything like the well-executed statue turning into a cat match cut of Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, the avoidance of more explicit nudity and sex means comparable to Ramirez's popping a champagne bottle using her vaginal muscles.

In the end one gets the sense that D'Amato recognised that the film didn't have much going for it when he encouraged Bergman to put her name to it as director in the hope that it might gain something from association with her more famous father, Ingmar.

I suppose this gives us a nice shock answer if ever asked to name a favourite Bergman film ;-)

Hard Sensation

With the school term over, three somewhat over-aged students, played by Annj Goren, Dirce Funari and someone else, go for a fortnight’s fun in the sun on a private island. The extent to which they can get all-over tans they desire and to sexually experiment individually and collectively is however constrained by the presence of their teacher, played by Lucia Ramirez, as chaperone, and of two sailors who know that any games with the girls are more bother than they are worth in terms of their employment and continuing liberty.

Such concerns are not shared by three escaped convicts, played by Mark Shanon, George Eastman and someone else, who are hiding out on the island after their boat ran aground.

While Eastman remains focused on evading the authorities, Shanon and the other guy are more intent on having fun with the girls and, in the case of the other guy, a homosexual, the sailors...

As any serious student of Eurosleaze can probably tell from looking at the main names among the cast, Hard Sensation is another one of Joe D’Amato’s Dominican Republic pornotropic horrors.


Shanon and Ramirez

Whereas Erotic Nights of the Living Dead combined porn and fantasy horror and Orgasmo Nero porn and cannibal primitive melodrama, Hard Sensation is a combination of porn and the Desperate Hours / Last House on the Left hostage / rape-revenge scenario.

As a slice of sick and sleazy exploitation it does the job in that inimitable D’Amato fashion, with the relative brevity of the film and the sex scenes in the version under review – even when regular hardcore performers Shanon, Funari and Ramirez are involved – appearing more indicative of cuts than self-imposed restraint.


The homosexual convict, a J&B bottle and a symbolic rape / real power scenario

In particular, whilst the rape scenes are not really sufficiently developed to shift from no-means-no rape to no-means-yes porno-rape that they are accompanied by traditional porn funk grooves courtesy of Alessandro Alessandroni (albeit perhaps more likely to be via stock library cues than original compositions) is telling.

So too is that we are told about but not shown any male-on-male rape, as an indicator of where the boundaries of what D’Amato was willing to film in order to shock his audience lay.

On the plus side, the film is better acted than one might expect – again, we must remember that Shanon was an actor who appears to have turned to porn to pay the bills – while the dialogue has a pleasingly authentic air of abusiveness, teaching all manner of useful Italian words and phrases that you don’t get in your average language class.

Those interested in the film should be warned, however, that the video-sourced English subtitled AVI available from Cinemageddon is of rather poor quality, making it for the D’Amato completist rather than the casual viewer.

Sesso Nero / Black Sex

This was the only one of the four films Joe D'Amato made in the Dominican Republic in the late 70s that I had not seen until now, the others being Porno Holocaust, Erotic Nights of the Living Dead and Orgasmo Nero.

Unlike Porno Holocaust and Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, which also featured Mark Shanon and functioned as horror / porn hybrids, Sesso nero is more a drama / porn combination, being structured around Shanon's character, himself named Mark, having a terminal illness and reminiscing about his past life and loves whilst also making the most of the time left him. (Long term Shanon fans will here find the nature of his illness amusing and somewhat appropriate; those who don't know what I'm talking about and are sufficiently intrigued to seek out the film will soon know and see for themselves, in unpleasant close-up.)




A dramatic scene that is seen on the television in Absurd. The sex that follows moments later, however, is not.

In particular, one woman, Mira, played by Annj Goren, keeps appearing and disappearing before Mark like a ghost, in the street, on the beach or in place of the dancer in a nightclub act.

While the last allows for some sharp match-cut editing to further express Mark's confused perceptions, it feels characteristic of the film's lack of aspirations that D'amato doesn't attempt any, instead being content to simply intercut between Goren and the other women.

Similarly the rest of the film featuring many unimaginative shot-reverse shot constructions during the dialogue scenes; functional handheld camera during the sex ones as a means of getting closer to the action in a "frenzy of the visible" sort of way, and a fair degree of economical use of the zoom lens in lieu of a more complex camera movement and set-ups.


Note how Shanon's character being half out of the shot does not appear to be down to panning and scanning.

More positively Shanon is given more scope to demonstrate his abilities as an actor as well as a woodsman. He acquits himself credibly, reminding us in the process that like porn performers of the same era in the USA, he was after all an actor to begin with.

At the same time one of the things which hurts the film as a drama rather than a porno, especially in relation to the otherwise comparable Richard Harrison / Susan Scott entry Orgasmo Nero - where the illness took the form of fertility problems - is that the dynamic of its sex scenes still tends to be dominated by the need to give visible evidence of penetration and ejaculation.

Likewise, while one of the two group sex scene might be justified as one of Mark's fantasies the other lacks his coded presence and thus feels more like a straightforward porn scenario of the type where meaningless sex can and does happen anytime and anyplace between anybody.

Even worse, there are also some moments where dramatic scenes look to have been constructed more around the J&B bottle than the actors, as when Mark collapses after being given fellatio by his friend Jack's wife, played by Lucia Ramirez.




Who or what is the real star of this scene?

Though Ramirez doesn't do any champagne bottle opening tricks this time round her admirers will not otherwise be disappointed by her performance, although it is Goren who really steals the show in the sex film stakes. Again, however, her scenes suggest the basic issue with the film, that it's too dark and unpleasant to work as a conventional porn piece, but too much of a porn film to be able to really take as anything else. Whatever the case, the combination is very much D'Amato.




Gratuitous but hopefully safe-for-work images of Ramirez; you can fill in the rest of the picture outwith the frame for yourselves

This sense of the auteur also comes through the fact that a lot of the footage seems to come from the other films in the series or at least invokes a strong sense of deja vu, as does a blink and you'll miss him cameo from writer George Eastman as the owner of the nightclub and an old friend of Mark's. While obviously explicable in terms of laziness and lack of budget this approach works well within the context of the film as, just like Shanon's character, the D'Amato fan feels that old memories are resurfacing and images of the past coming back to haunt him; call it our D'Amato repetition compulsion, that we cannot help ourselves and need more.

In this regard it's also odd however that Nico Fidenco's music, while effective in its own right, doesn't evoke many associations. Perhaps Marcello Giombini should have been given the nod instead?

Not D'Amato's best by any means, but interesting enough to be worth a look.