WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Emanuelle in America

Before I get stuck into this review (or rather semi-review because, for the first time in The Agitation of the Mind’s short history, I’m writing about a film I didn’t finish watching), allow me to outline three contextual factors by way of an excuse:

1. Tim at Antagony & Ecstasy left a comment on my ‘Black Emanuelle’ review, highlighting my intention to move from the Bitto Albertini to the Joe D’Amato franchise entries. He made a simple and – as I discovered the hard way – eminently sensible exhortation: “Stop while you still have the chance!”

2. Unfortunately, at this point, I had already watched ‘Emanuelle in Bangkok’. My wife, reading my in-progress review of the film, asked a very pertinent question: “What happened to the Agitation mission statement? Only reviewing films you’re passionate about?” I hung my head in shame. Even allowing for the guilty pleasure of a Laura Gemser/Ely Galleani love scene, I had to admit that I had strayed a long way from the blog’s remit.

3. In tracking down ‘Emanuelle in America’ online, I had no luck at my usual go-to site for uncut trash movies but found it elsewhere on an allegedly free streaming site. I got thirty minutes into it before the film froze and a message box informed me I had reached my streaming limit; I could either wait an hour and then watch more, or upgrade to a premium account for $9.99.

No way was I paying to continue watching a Joe D’Amato film. In fact, I’m considering writing to whomever was appointed his executor to request that someone pay me. Nor, after what happened in the half hour I did get to see, was I in any way compelled to log back on an hour later.

Here’s how ‘Emanuelle in America’ starts. Emanuelle (Gemser) conducts a fashion shoot, during which she banters with the models. One of them complains that she’s going out with a philosopher who’s only interested in conversation not sex. Emanuelle leaves the studio, gets in her car and drives away. A guy who looks like he missed the casting call for one of the hillbillies in ‘Deliverance’ and got this gig instead rises up from the back seat and puts a gun to her head.


The following exchange ensues:

Emanuelle (handing him a billfold): Just take the money, okay?
Gunman: I don’t want your money.
Emanuelle: Oh, I get it. You want the car. Sure. Just drop me off here, okay?
Gunman: I don’t want the car. I want to strangle you. So pull over.

Emanuelle obligingly pulls over. There’s a bit more dialogue in which our pistol-packing friend basically infers that Emanuelle is a degenerate sex-obsessed hussy (fair enough) responsible for promoting promiscuity (can’t argue with the dude) and contributing to a climate of moral turpitude (harsh, but not without a kernel of truth) as a result of which she deserves to die (okay, pushing it a bit). Turns out this guy is the model’s philosopher boyfriend. This fucking doofus is a philosopher!!!

The scene resolves as Emanuelle talks him round and starts to give him a blowjob, at which point he flees the car in terror. Let me just recap: he’s going out with a model and has no interest in sex with her, then gets scared when a frankly attractive woman goes down on him. God knows what school of thought his philosophical noodlings subscribe to, but it’s the greatest cinematic argument for ignorance pre-‘Forrest Gump’.

Next up, Emanuelle hangs out with her boyfriend, whose swinging bachelor pad is furnished with a coffee table in the shape of a Marlboro cigarette packet:


This is not classy. This makes the décor of your average giallo apartment look Art Deco. A little part of me died when I laid eyes on that table. You know what the worst thing is? The angled bit that flips back on a real cigarette packet – there’s a similar facility on this table that reveals a drinks cabinet. Yes, folks, Emanuelle is having sex with a man who owns a Marlboro coffee table/drinks cabinet combo … and who doesn’t feel the need to drape a tablecloth over it, repaint it or at least have the common decency to fucking apologise for it.

Little did I know, however, that the worst was yet to come. Emanuelle gets a tip from a buddy who runs a boxing academy that some criminally connected rich dude is running a private harem. Sensing the opportunity to get naked a lot a good story, Emanuelle hires on as one of the girls. Rich dude lives at a secluded ranch where men stand around in bad suits looking menacing and women lounge by the pool in g-strings looking like the feminist movement never happened. Each of the girls are given a chunky jewelled bracelet (70s bling: niiiice) with rich dude’s initials on it as a reminder that he owns them. Rich dude also has his initials painted on the door of his Rolls Royce Corniche. Which makes him about as unclassy as Emanuelle’s boyfriend.

First night at the ranch, rich dude puts on a show for a businessman he’s lining up some kind of dubious deal with. They all traipse out to the stables …

… where the above picture should give you some indication of what follows.

This blog has taken me on a journey across a wide spectrum of cinema. I’ve held retrospectives on Dirk Bogarde, Alfred Hitchcock, Andrei Tarkovsky, Sam Peckinpah and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. I’ve written about westerns, thrillers, comedies, romances, science fiction, anime, big-budget spectaculars and low-budget indies. I’ve drawn no lines between gialli and seven-hour black-and-white Hungarian arthouse movies. I’ve luxuriated in the good, the entertainingly bad and on some occasions the undeniably ugly. I’ve worked towards an objective evaluation of ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ even though it called for the expenditure of more words than I’ve invested in even the crème de la crème of my Personal Faves list. And more, much more than this, I did it my way out of my lifelong passion for film.

Last night I started watching a film where a naked woman masturbates a horse.

I enjoy trash movies as much as the next man. I have no problem with a bit of good unclean exploitation. I would make a case for the kind of movies my wife despairs of me for watching. I would defend to the death (or at least go on a protest march for) the right of any director yadda yadda yadda freedom of etc etc etc.

But a movie where a naked woman masturbates a horse??? It’s an awful, sickening scene, made worse by the soundtrack. The noises the horse makes are a clear indication of non-consensual involvement. Bottom line: it’s being sexually abused. I had a hard time with the animal deaths in ‘Cannibal Holocaust’, but at least their misery was brief. The woman-on-horse rape detailed here is, for my money, worse than any of Deodato’s dark moments.

So fuck you and rot in hell, Joe D’Amato. I’m wrapping this Black Emanuelle thing up tomorrow with a general overview of the other movies, then Winter of Discontent will continue with the kind of sick, twisted and depraved fare that you can actually enjoy.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Emanuelle in Bangkok

I closed last night’s review of ‘Black Emanuelle’ – a film I had unhesitatingly evaluated on a single viewing as a fuck-awful POS – with the phrase “I’m looking to Joe D’Amato for an upgrade in quality”.

Dear readers, if I ever – ever – say anything like that again – EVER – you have my full permission to descend on Chez Agitation en masse and beat me like a piñata for several hours. And then really get stuck in.

What was I thinking when I wrote that? Was I trying to be funny? Looking to Joe D’Amato for an upgrade in quality!?!? Dear God, you don’t say something like that without consequences. And, oh sweet baby Jesus in a charnel house, did I suffer the consequences!

‘Emanuelle in Bangkok’ (a.k.a. ‘Black Emanuelle Goes East’, which makes it sound like a porno sequel to ‘The Ghost Goes West’) opens with a piece of music that makes the ‘Black Emanuelle’ OST at its absolute nadir sound like Handel’s ‘Messiah’. It’s called “Sweet Leaving Thing” and it’s “permorfed” (according to the end credits) …

… by Silky Sound Singer (who I hope with every ounce of moral outrage in my body was sued under the Trades Description Act for that name) and it’s egregious. I’m not talking bad. I’m not talking horrible. I’m not even talking fuck-awful. In fact, I don’t know if I have the linguistic ability to describe just how sanity-weakening, soul-destroying, aurally-offensive, harmonically-repulsive, bile-inducing and sonically cancerous it is … But I’ll try. Imagine listening to an ungodly conflation of the world’s worst country & western outfit and the world’s cheesiest oompah band. Now imagine listening to them while you’re undergoing major root canal work without anaesthetic and to ensure that you don’t pass out and miss even a single minute of the agony one of the dental nurses is hammering a six inch nail through your scrotum while her colleague repeatedly jabs you in the eye with the business end of an arc welder.

That’s what this song sounds like. You can probably find it on YouTube – hell, you can find the whole movie pretty easily online – but I would urge you not to. In fact, I’d beg you. It’s the aural equivalent of ‘2 Girls, 1 Cup’. You can never unhear it.

So, I was three minutes into the movie and the fucking opening credits music was making me want to self-harm. Surely it had to get better. I took a slug of whisky and told myself the worst was over. Christ, I’m a lying bastard.

The first scene has Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) taking a slow boat to Bangkok and dallying with a moody archaeologist named Roberto (Ivan Rassimov). Their first sex scene, in Emanuelle’s cabin, strives for authenticity. It looks like it was actually filmed in a ship’s cabin. And the thing about cabins is, they’re generally small. The scene is framed in a manner that suggests there wasn’t enough room for the camera and the DoP as well as the performers, so the camera was just rammed into the corner of the cabin and left to roll. Accordingly, the viewer is treated to several minutes of awkward manoeuvring, random body parts and generic slurping sounds. To make things worse, D’Amato decides to nick Albertini’s people shagging/piston rod and cylinder box juxtaposition from the original movie. Except that D’Amato ups the ante by cutting away to a roomful of piston rods hammering away as the massive marine engine powers the ship on through the night.

The, ahem, “story” involves Emanuelle’s attempts to get an interview with some royal personage. To this end, she dallies with the royal dude’s cousin. Said cousin takes her to a massage parlour where D’Amato happily rips of Gemser’s iconic scene from ‘Emmanuelle 2’. Then Emanuelle, royal cousin dude and an American couple – the wife was played by Ely Galleani, I can tell you that much, but I can’t be bothered hitting up IMDb for character names/cast list – who they randomly bump into all head for a club where a stripper does uses ping-pong balls in her act, after which they boogie on down to an opium den, get high and fornicate in various combinations. Ely Galleani has a too-brief girl-girl scene with the oriental masseuse. Which is nice.

Next thing, the deal with the monarch’s cousin goes south when some mercenaries who are about to stage a coup warn Emanuelle that Bangkok isn’t safe for her and she should leave. They issue this warning by way of a gang rape. If the very concept, content and execution of the scene isn’t offensive enough, it’s suggested that Emanuelle’s sexual confidence has equipped her to transmute an act of violence into a more or less pleasurable experience. That fact that the scene ends with the mercenary who instigated the gang rape seeing Emanuelle on her way and wishing her luck just ramps up the inappropriateness factor to a whole other level.

Emanuelle departs Bangkok, albeit on temporary papers since her passport was taken in a hotel room robbery. At the airport, she bumps into Ely Galleani. What do you know, they’re on the same flight! A Sapphic induction to the mile high club ensues.

Emanuelle travels to Casablanca where she looks up Roberto. He’s shacked up with a fellow archaeologist, Janet. She’s initially hostile towards Emanuelle, but a little three-way action breaks the ice. Meanwhile, Emanuelle petitions the consul to help out as regards her stolen passport and discovers that the wheels of bureaucracy spin a tad smoother when the consul’s daughter takes a fancy to you. Roberto doesn’t take too well to Emanuelle’s relationship with Deborah (she being la fille du consul) and angrily calls them “lezzers” before he storms off. At this point, the appearance of Vicky Pollard delivering a monologue along the lines of “yeah but, no but, what it was right, I sat next to that Emanuelle and she totally copied off me coz I told everyone about her diddling Deborah outside the consulate and Roberto totally busted me for it and oh my God I so can’t believe she did that coz anyway everyone knows she’s a lezzer” would have been the most awesome thing imaginable, an act of cinematic alchemy transforming this celluloid dunghill into something marvellous.

But unfortunately Vicky Pollard has standards and would never work with Joe D’Amato (“yeah but, no but, he’s totally a perv and he’d be shoving a camera up me skirt wouldn’t he?”) and instead of becoming something marvellous, ‘Emanuelle in Bangkok’ goes from bad to worse to pointless. The abrupt shift from Bangkok to Casablanca suggests nothing more than a first cut clocking in at an hour and D’Amato and company desperately shooting anything just to pad it out to feature length. The bits of supposed “local colour” that interspersed the kit-offery are mostly drab. There’s a grim and depressing scene, that seems to go on forever, of Emanuelle taking photographs of a snake-on-mongoose smackdown. It’s completely unfaked and it makes the turtle death in ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ look like an episode of ‘Animal Rescue’.

The whole misbegotten thing ends with Emanuelle reluctantly parting from Deborah, even though our infamously transitory and commitment-shy heroine has admitted to deep and profound feelings for the lass (a spiritual and emotional communion they consummate by taking a bubble bath together), because she has another assignment to go on. Against all the odds, their airport farewell is almost poignant … until that fucking song comes line-dancing onto the soundtrack again, stomping its dirty heels all over your will to live.

O come, o come, Emanuelle

When Just Jaeckin’s profound and sensitive examination of one woman’s sexual liberation soft porn flick ‘Emmanuelle’ garnered critical encomium made a fuckton of money worldwide, a sequel was inevitable. With Francis Giacobetti in the director’s chair this time, ‘Emmanuelle 2’ (or ‘Emmanuelle: the Anti-Virgin’) followed its predecessor’s soft-focus formula to the tee. Nonetheless, it’s the better film for one reason and one reason only: the massage scene.

The set-up is quite simple: Emmanuelle (Sylvia Kristel) and friends visit a Bangkok massage parlour where they are soaped up, rinsed off and and given what you might euphemistically call a full body massage by three incredibly nubile, supple and curvaceous Filipino girls. For about five minutes. (Go here for an excerpt from the scene. Warning: it’s NSFW and then some!)

What gives the scene that added zing is that one of the masseuses is played by Laura Gemser. In the same year that ‘Emmanuelle 2’ was made – 1975 – Gemser appeared in the title role in Bitto Albertini’s ‘Black Emanuelle’ (note the ever-so-slight but lawsuit-avoiding difference in spelling). In a life imitating art soft porn imitating soft porn scenario, ‘Black Emanuelle’ did enough box office that Albertini went ahead with ‘Black Emanuelle 2’. Gemser was unavailable, so he cast Sharon Lesley.

And there the story might have ended. But for the supreme and indefatigable cinematic talent that was Joe D’Amato. (That was me being sarcastic, by the way.) Born Aristide Massaccesi, he made quite a name for himself as a cinematographer before launching a directorial career. It kind of sets the pattern that his first half dozen or so movies were either uncredited or directed under pseudonyms. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, he made only two features under his own name, the first of which was the flawed but watchable giallo ‘Death Smiled at a Murderer’.

The rest of his filmography – clocking in at over 200 titles! – was pseudonymous. Covering just about every genre from sword and sandal to spaghetti western to (at the fag end of his career) hard core pornography, he utilized at least 40 pseudonyms. I say “at least”: it’s a popular theory amongst D’Amato aficionados that there remain any number of unattributed D’Amato films simply because his entire oeuvre of pseudonyms has not been fully catalogued.

Still, it was as Joe D’Amato he was best known, and under that name he gave the world that staple of the video nasties list ‘Anthropophagus: The Beast’, that tender and delicate drama of human relationships and sexual identity ‘11 Days, 11 Nights’ and that marvel of genre deconstruction and cross-pollination ‘Porno Holocaust’.

Yes, Joe D’Amato made a film called ‘Porno Holocaust’. Holding up the one bloody and tattered piece of integrity I still possess, waving it undefeated above the fetid swamp of the last four weeks on this blog, I can say with pride that I have never seen ‘Porno Holocaust’. I have, however, read a couple of reviews online. That’s the wonderful thing about the internet: there are people out there who will blog definitive reviews on the films of Albert Pyun, argue Tommy Wiseau as a misunderstood, ahead-of-his-time genius, and expend a couple of thousand words on the post-modern, anti-audience imperative of ‘Two Girls, One Cup’. I’m proud to be a part of the movement. Ahem. I digress. Point is, while I value what is left of my soul enough to continue being content not to have seen ‘Porno Holocaust’, I understand from what I’ve read that it’s a hybrid desert island/radioactive mutant/slasher/sexploitation flick. Starring George Eastman.

There is a little part of my mind that turns into an exploding catherine wheel festooning the inside of my skull with gold, crimson and silver contrails purely at the thought that this film even exists. There is a slightly larger part of me, located roughly between the lower intestine and the sphincter muscle, that lurches sickly at the same thought.

So: Joe D’Amato. The man who took up the reins of the Black Emanuelle franchise. A man with no conscience, no remorse; a man who was to cinema what Jack the Ripper was to escort agencies. What excise men were to illegal stills hidden in the highlands of Scotland. What Guy N. Smith is to the Booker Prize. What Aqua’s ‘Barbie Doll’ is to grand Italian opera. What Lindsay Lohan is to a “just say no” campaign. What Tony Blair and George W. Bush are to the truth.

Anyway, you get the picture. Joe D’Amato = cheap exploitation.

Joe D’Amato made the next five Black Emanuelle films, even going so far as to bequeath unto future film historians the penultimate of the cycle – ‘Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals’ – under his birth name. It was just plain old Joe D’Amato on the others, and it was as Joe D’Amato that he steered Black Emanuelle into the realms of sexual violence, contentious content and hardcore inserts that Ms Gemser was quick to point out she never knew about or participated in.

In addition, a further eight ‘Emanuelle’ titles, starring Laura Gemser, were made between 1976 and 1983, by such masters of world cinema as Mario Bianchi and Bruno Mattei. (If I mention that Bianchi was responsible for ‘Satan’s Baby Doll’ and Mattei for ‘Zombie Creeping Flesh’, that should tell you all you need to know.)

This gives us a total of 15 Black Emanuelle movies. But since I doubt my sanity or my wife’s patience would survive a fortnight-long trawl through the whole lot, I’ll be giving over the next week to a representative sampling of seven of them. Join me from tomorrow on The Agitation of the Libido.