LET’S GET PHYSICAL: EMANUELLE AND THE PORNO NIGHTS OF THE WORLD (1978) ** ½

“E-‘MAY’-NUELLE”

FORMAT:  BLU-RAY 

After a one film absence, Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) came back for this second sequel to Porno Nights of the World.  She begins our journey of perversion with a drive down the Las Vegas Strip.  Once she’s back in her home, she tells us about seance where the spirits possess the female participants into disrobing.  We then witness a black magic ritual that ends in an orgy, an adult carnival with midway games that give away blow-up dolls instead of kewpie dolls, a magician who makes audience members’ clothes disappear, and a stripper whose costume is made up entirely of ribbons, and her customers must pay to pull each strand. 

In a scene reminiscent of Emanuelle in America, a stripper named Lady Godiva lets her horse get into the act, if you know what I mean.  Trans exploitation star Ajita Wilson (who starred in Porno Nights of the World No. 2) makes a cameo photographing an orgy.  Next, Ajita takes in a lesbian live sex show.   There’s also a private club where a male bodybuilder causes the clientele (mostly a bunch of old ladies) to writhe back and forth in ecstasy, a behind the scenes look at the making of a porno that ends with filming a scene where an actress plays hide the snake literally (perhaps a callback to the infamous scene in Emanuelle Around the World), an S & M club where a woman escapes her ropes before banging two guys dressed like gangsters from the ‘40s onstage, a club in Montreal that specializes in “bubble bath boxing”, a sci-fi themed nude ballet, a televised striptease competition where the rowdy crowd pelts the losers with rotten vegetables, and a coed nude beauty contest. 

My favorite bit had an unhappy housewife bringing her husband to Tokyo to receive a penis transplant.  This scene contains some really fake looking prosthesis and phony looking gore during the operation.  The stereotyped dubbing on the Japanese doctors is hilariously bad too.  Another highlight is a cabaret act featuring “Snow White” and her four dwarfs.  (Gemser explains the other three “Got jobs as short order cooks”!) 

The most tasteless scene occurs in the New Guinea segment where tribesmen go through great lengths to ensure their bride is a virgin on their wedding night.  Footage of the (obviously faked) wedding night is intercut with real shots of piglets being beaten and butchered, which was totally unnecessary. 

Once again directed by the duo of Bruno Mattei and Joe D’Amato, Emanuelle and the Porno Nights of the World may not be as entertaining overall as its predecessor, but it is a little bit more consistent from segment to segment.  It also benefits from a snappier pace and some humorous commentary by Gemser.  (“What would you do if a flying saucer landed in your cabbage patch?”)  If you go into it knowing what you’re in for, I’d say you probably won’t walk away disappointed.

AKA:  Emanuelle and the Erotic Nights.

ABDUCTED BY THE DALEKS (2005) **

I’ve never been much of a Doctor Who fan, but when I found out about this Skinamax spoof, I knew I had to check it out. 

Four hot babes are on a road trip when they run over an alien.  They then wander around the forest in the dark for what feels like an eternity.  They eventually lose their clothes and wind up being abducted by the Daleks (FINALLY!). 

All the ladies have really thick accents, so it’s hard to make out what they’re saying.  In fact, the robotic voices of the Daleks are easier to understand than the actresses.  Not that it matters much, especially when the actresses are naked so often.  Thankfully, it’s only fifty-five minutes long, but even then, it wears out its welcome way before the end credits even have a chance to roll. 

This doesn’t even feel like a “real” movie.  It’s more like a softcore fan film.  (There are some moments that flirt with hardcore.)   The Daleks themselves are well done though.  It’s possible they were using real props from the show, but then again, what do I know?

Oh, and I’m not one to kink shame, but this didn’t do much for me.  I’m sure that 1% of the population with an S & M Doctor Who fetish is gonna LOOOOVE it.  I guess it starts out well enough for what it is, but it sort of loses whatever steam it’s built up when the girls are menaced by masked killers in the woods instead of the cheesy robots.  Then again, your mileage may vary. 

It's all very cheap and very dumb.  Then again, so is Doctor Who.  But since this has tons of boobs, I’d say it’s a lot better than that BBC shit.  

This will probably be a wet dream for Doctor Who nerds.  It might work as a curio for nudie movie fans.  Everyone else will be understandably perplexed.  

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: PORNO NIGHTS OF THE WORLD (1977) ** ½

“E-‘MAY’-NUELLE”

FORMAT:  BLU-RAY 

Laura Gemser stars in this (fake) Mondo movie in character as Emanuelle.  She’s your hostess for a visual tour of the world’s naughtiest nightclubs where anything can happen.  One club features a stripper who takes it off for a man in a shoddy ape costume before doing it on stage.  Later, another dancer strips for a dog and lets it lick her bush, which gives a whole new meaning to the term “lapdance”.  There’s also a club in Hong Kong that caters to lesbians and a segment on a dancer named “Butterfly” who does performs tricks with golden ping pong balls. 

We also get a glimpse of sexual customs and oddities from around the globe.  In Paris, a hooker works out of a storefront window in the red-light district, and another has her own private nude roller rink.  Elsewhere in India,  ancient fertility rites are still being practiced (“That’s right my friends, this is going on today in the atomic space age”), in Amsterdam we visit a “sex school”, Berlin is the site of a “most beautiful breasts” competition (“Who will win and who will get the booby prize?”), in Bangkok there’s a den of inequity which is a combination of massage parlor and barbershop, and in Brazil, we see a macumba ritual.  There’s also an expose on “Taxi Mothers” who pimp their daughters out to wealthy businessmen, and a funny scene where hundreds of women gather to watch a super stud named Omar bang a bunch of women on stage (one of whom is Uschi Digart). 

Other nightclub acts include a magician who performs a sex change on his assistant (thanks to some editing), intergender mud wresting, and a dancer named “Lollipop” who encourages audience participation.  Later, the magician returns to invite couples on stage for a game of “Guess the Fanny”, and an Arab couple have to pantomime their lovemaking in a club to adhere to strict local policy. 

This is kind of an interesting, if not entirely successful, way to simultaneously ride the wave of both the Mondo movie craze and the Emanuelle franchise.  (It also manages to keep the bestiality theme of the Emanuelle series going.)  Oh, and if the scene of cannibal castration looks familiar, it’s because they were taken from Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals. 

Directed by the one-two combo of Bruno Mattei and Joe D’Amato, Porno Nights of the World is a grab bag of oddball exploitation elements.  Because of its very nature, it’s uneven as all get out.  The upshot is that most sequences are short, which means they don’t stay on one subject for too long.  So, if there’s a segment that you don’t much care for, just be patient.  D’Amato and Mattei will be onto a new silly sequence before too long.  All in all, it’s not nearly as successful or fun as something like D’Amato’s similar Crazy Nights, but it works more often than not. 

AKA:  Sexy Night Report.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: EMANUELLE AND THE LAST CANNIBALS (1977) ***

“E-‘MAY’-NUELLE”

FORMAT:  BLU-RAY 

While Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) is undercover in a women’s mental hospital, she witnesses a patient bite off a nurse’s nipple.  She does some digging and learns the patient was an escapee from a long thought lost tribe of cannibals in the Amazon.  She then takes a trip down river to do a story on the tribe, and naturally gets more than she bargained for. 

The Emmanuelle series had already dabbled in horror and gore with the snuff scenes in Emanuelle in America.  This time around, director Joe D’Amato leans heavy into the gore with this entry meant to capitalize on the cannibal movie craze of the late ‘70s.  While it doesn’t have the hardcore inserts that the past couple of Emanuelle sequels had, the cannibal gore makes up for the lack of sleaze. 

The film benefits from a disciplined plotline as it lacks the hodgepodge travelogue aspect of the previous entries.  Despite this, there are still some sluggish bits in between the highlights.  In fact, it probably works better as a cannibal movie than an Emanuelle skin flick, if only because there’s so many characters in the expedition that Emanuelle winds up getting lost in the shuffle at about the halfway point.  

The expedition scenes feature all the stock footage shots of animals you might expect from a jungle picture.  However, there are some eerie moments along the way like Emanuelle hiding her camera in the head of a creepy doll and every time she presses the shutter, its eyes close.  There’s also a memorable scene where Emanuelle Interrogates the prisoner in a straitjacket by fondling her.  The gore includes castration, eyeball eating, nipple ripping, gut munching, heads on spikes, spearing, disemboweling, and a man is cut in half during what can only be described as a game of cannibal tug of war.  We also get a snake attack, a narrow quicksand escape, and assorted cannibal traps.

Although her role is somewhat diminished in comparison to other films in the series, Gemser still looks great.  She even gets to bang her real-life husband Gabriele Tinti a few times before finally heading down to cannibal land.  Once there, she bathes nude with a hot beauty while a monkey wearing sunglasses looks on.  If that doesn’t scream “must see”, I don’t know what does.

AKA:  Emanuelle’s Amazon Adventure.  AKA:  Bloody Tracks.  AKA:  Trap Them and Kill Them.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: EMANUELLE AROUND THE WORLD (1977) ***

“E-‘MAY’-NUELLE”

FORMAT:  BLU-RAY (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:  

(As posted on September 15th, 2007)

Laura Gemser returns as the beautiful bed hopping, globetrotting reporter Emanuelle in this fourth installment in the “Black Emanuelle” franchise directed by legendary sleaze merchant Joe (Beyond the Darkness) D’Amato. This time she goes from Italy to Hong Kong to The Middle East trying to bust a white slavery operation, while still having the time to hop on over to India to debunk a famous sex guru played by George (The Grim Reaper) Eastman. Oh yeah and she has lots of dirty sex along the way.

While not quite as jaw dropping as Emanuelle in America (hey what could be?), it still features one outrageous scene where the Chinese slaver forces a woman to hump a dog while he puts a snake up another girl’s pussy! It’s not on par with the horse fucking scene from Emanuelle in America, but it will do in a pinch I guess.

Although Gemser is stunning and the sex is plentiful and the film is hardly boring it does make a few missteps here and there. The pacing stops and sputters every time D’Amato frantically whisks Emanuelle off to her next exotic location, often leaving the plot in the dust. (Nearly every scene begins with a voice over conversation to clear up just how the hell Emanuelle got there.) Not that the plot hardly matters in a movie like this, but every time D’Amato introduces a potentially interesting character (like the horribly scarred rapist who looks like Darkman’s inbred uncle) or situation (like when some skuzzy politicians throw a girl to a bunch of homeless dudes who unexpectedly rape her) he ends things so abruptly that we never get a satisfying payoff to these scenes. Like Emanuelle in America, D’Amato tosses in some random ass XXX footage during the sex scenes, but they’re edited in so clumsily that they become devoid of any titillation whatsoever.

Despite these major flaws, Emanuelle Around the World remains highly entertaining and is a must for any Gemser or D’Amato fan. Sadly although we see Emanuelle going around the world we never truly see her go “around the world” if you know what I mean and I think you do.

AKA: Confessions of Emanuelle. AKA: The Degradation of Emanuelle. AKA: Emanuelle Versus Violence to Women.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: EMANUELLE IN AMERICA (1977) ****

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LET’S GET PHYSICAL: EMANUELLE IN BANGKOK (1976) ***

“E-‘MAY’-NUELLE”

FORMAT:  BLU-RAY (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:  

(As posted on September 15th, 2007)

Sometimes writing the plot synopsis of a movie is kinda tricky because you don’t want to give away certain plot points or little surprises. Other times you want to let everyone know about this one great part to get their attention because that one scene is about all the movie has to offer. This synopsis is quite simple: Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) goes to Bangkok and gets naked and has sex. A lot. I mean seriously, that’s what it’s all about. No plot. No motivation. Just Emanuelle. In Bangkok. Having Sex. Why they didn’t just call the movie Emanuelle in Bangkok Having Sex a Lot is beyond me. (Maybe it wouldn’t fit on the marquee.)

But I’m getting off topic here. Where was I? Oh, anyway, so Emanuelle goes to Bangkok and has sex. A lot. First with an anthropologist (played by her husband Gabriele Tinti), then with a host of others, all the while randomly getting naked every chance she gets. Then she gets a sexy massage from an Asian chick who gives her a bath in a very imaginative way: she jumps in the bubble bath and then rubs herself against Emanuelle’s naked body. Genius. Then she gets naked for her bellhop (who gives her a massage) before going off to watch a stripper pour candle wax all over herself. Next, she participates in a pot fueled orgy before getting ANOTHER massage, this time from studly Ivan Rassimov (who would later go on to star in Emanuelle Around the World and Emanuelle in the Country). And so on, and so on, and so on. At one point she gets gang raped, but her promiscuous level is so high that I’m sure all they had to do was ask.

All this plays against positively one of the goofiest musical scores in the history of cinema. Seriously it sounds like the banjo player from Deliverance teamed up with The New Christy Minstrels and tried to reach that New Age Enya market or something.

Director Joe D’Amato does a credible job with his first entry in the series and gives the fans exactly what they want to see, namely Emanuelle getting naked and having sex a lot. (Sample of a typical scene: Emanuelle walks into a room and disrobes. She notices someone in the next room all hot and heavy. She bones them. Repeat.) He would go on to direct FIVE sequels (some unofficial, but if it features Emanuelle naked it counts in my book), the most infamous being Emanuelle in America, which is still the best. Emanuelle in Bangkok may lack the later sequels’ sleaze factor and general WTF quotient (although we do get to see a snake fight a mongoose), but it can’t be beat for the sheer amount of gratuitous nudity. I mean you can’t help but like a movie where the leading lady can’t keep her clothes on for more than 48 seconds at a time. (It gets an automatic four-star rating if you have a masseuse and/or bathing fetish.)

The dubbing is of course atrocious but adds to the flick’s charm. The dialogue is just as bad, especially when Emanuelle cries out, “I feel naked without my camera!” I mean Jesus Christ lady; you’re naked for 70% of the movie, what’s one more second? But it’s Rassimov gets the best line when he tells Emanuelle, “You’re not like them; you’re different. You understand how to control your ecstasy.”