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Director: Joe D'Amato
Screenplay: Romano Scandariato
and Joe D'Amato
Cast: Laura Gemser (as Emanuelle);
Gabriele Tinti (as Professor Mark Lester); Nieves Navarro (as Maggie Mackenzie);
Donald O'Brien (as Donald McKenzie); Percy Hogan (as Salvadore)
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #27
Returning to the Italian Emanuelle films, this is far more a
horror movie than Emanuelle in America
(1977) was in terms of the packaging, following on in the same world as
Laura Gemser's titular character goes
into the deepest of South American jungle to report on a presumably lost tribe
of cannibals. It's also unfortunate however that this film is clear evidence to
Joe D'Amato's less than impressive
critical evaluation to some viewers. He's capable as a working director of
solid, lurid B-movies but alongside a danger of merely showing empty filth, his
work here is perfunctory to a lazy extreme.
Once the story is set up and
Emanuelle is trekking through the jungle sets with a small band of fodder
around her, it's a lot of utterly bland characters stood around under the tree
canopies. Whilst many Italian genre films can have one dimensional figures, the
best use them as pieces part of an elaborate or gruesome moment which startle
and fascinate the viewer. No such thing happens here, hampered by a snail's
pace and only redeemed by an atmospheric score by Nico Fidenco, a new voice for me as a composer who now stands out
as a potential creator of gems, bringing a greater depth to a pretty tawdry
softcore cannibal film that doesn't deserve the quality. Particularly with the unintelligible
mutterings that appear in the score, signposting cannibalistic natives watching
in the bushes at unsuspecting victims, it's a quality audibly greater in every
way to the drab results visually onscreen.
Drab but also distasteful even
for a schlock film meant to sicken. Emanuelle
in America had troubling content - including real horse wanking (for a lack
of a polite metaphor) thankfully censored from every UK cut and the jarring shift from softcore
sex to a snuff film subplot - but it felt like a fictitional mondo documentary
which intended to provoke viewers. The
Last Cannibals, not surprisingly, was a desperate attempt to rejuvenate the
Black Emunuelle franchise by latching
onto the growing cannibal sub-genre in Italy, becoming merely crass as a
result. Having only seen only a handful, I confess that whilst I'm still
curious about them I will likely view the Italian cannibal films as being very
unappealing. Barring the obvious xenophobic content in their premises, the
other issue with this and Sergio
Martino's The Mountain of the
Cannibal God (1978) is that they're average turn-of-the-century jungle
adventure plots in dire need of better plot twists than more guts being shown
being munched. When seeing the footage shown to characters within this film of
an African tribe punishing adulterers, including a full on rubber prosthetic
castration, it feels like D'Amato
merely showing shocking content without the kitsch transgression of Emanuelle in America or the atmosphere
of Anthropophagus (1980). As a
result the film merely leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, scenes of a nun
merely existing in the cast to be butchered, sexual related mutilation of both
genders, and a ritual gang rape arbitrary, idiotic schlock scenes next to
incredibly dumb characters standing around like prats doing nothing in a forest
for an infinite amount of time.
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That this is also a softcore sex
film mixed with the cannibal subgenre actually comes off as a worse tonal shift
than for Emanuelle in America; the
later at least felt like an unintentional kicking of the titillated viewer in
the groin, especially as it was erotic in the beginning, whilst this is an utter
failure in both camps. The horror is something Eli Roth managed to do better in his tribute to films like this,
regardless of modern day practical effects in The Green Inferno (2013) because of its characterisation, and of
course Cannibal Holocaust (1980),
whilst morally problematic for its killing of real animals, is a cut above that
was both a vomiting of utter nihilism with the likelihood that director Ruggero Deodato lost his mind during the
jungle shoot. As softcore, it's not titillating and, horribly, Gemser is reduced to a cipher with none
of the sex appeal or charisma she had before, the red haired busty vamp that is
Maggie (Nieves Navarro) having far
more sexual chemistry, able to get away with openly sleeping with a native
guide in front of her impotent husband due to their ability to talk about it
and their greater lust for treasure lost in the jungle.
This doesn't mean I'll damn D'Amato. He's capable of good work and
producing Michele Soavi's debut Stage Fright (1987) is automatically
applauded, but there's a clear Jekyll and Hyde scenario at hand. At one side,
I'm gnashing my teeth for the up-coming UK release of Beyond the Darkness (1979) just for the hypnotic Goblin score; hell, even The Blade Master (1984) looks fun even
in spite of its negative reputation. On the other side Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980), mixing porn with zombies,
looks like D'Amato creating empty
grim without even any of the technical competence he's clearly capable of.
Because of this he's going to be both an interesting and painful individual to
shift through the filmography of...
...oh, and I nearly forgot that
you see a chimpanzee smoke a cigarette for real onscreen. Something you
wouldn't be able to get away with now but it spins memories of old PG Tips tea commercials
with monkeys playing human beings into a strange cavity of my mind now.
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