Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980) Zombie Porn

Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980) - Also entitled "Sexy Nights of the Living Dead", and in Italian "Le notti erotiche dei morti viventi" this is as much of a pornographic film as will make it onto this blog. Sometimes when you try to touch the edges of genre film you cross over and end up in a place you are so not ready for. Now granted the title of the film and the director Joe D'Amato should have given me an idea that the film would be a skin flick. I have seen some of D'Amato's more soft stuff but remarkably not seen the more hardcore films. This one really pushes the line of soft core with several penetration shots mixed in with a story of zombies. It is the strangest combination, a story where a businessman wants to build a resort on an island. He hires a boat and with his girlfriend heads to the place to check it out. Finding two inhabitants an old partially blind man and a beautiful native girl Luna (Laura Gemser) who seem a bit strange and distant. Pretty much the zombie story is without clear explanation, Luna is also a cat or a ghost or something and they use the dead of the island to protect it from dishonest people. So eventually we will have the boat captain, Larry O"Hara (George Eastman), businessman John Wilson (Mark Shannon) and girlfriend Fiona (Dirce Funari) are bound to be in peril.
Before we get into the multiple sexual acts portrayed on this film lets start with the remarkable bookends to the film. The film starts with an island insane asylum and a few characters crazy as my uncle Joe wandering around, who just happen to be our three main character. There is a late night rendezvous between a nurse and workman with stand up sex. The man is strong because I would have thrown my back out  holding that woman up like that.Followed by another patient who stands behind them masturbating while watching the two have sex. At this point we go back in time to see how these characters got to be in the mental hospital. We will later pop back to this for the closing bookend. There does not seem to be a need for the bookends but at least they break up what is a really boring story.
  So since there is a crappy bookends and a close to nonexistent zombie plot it only leave the porn to be the "meat" of the story. John Wilson starts with a couple of prostitutes who he strips down for ample shots of his prolific tongue performing cunnilingus and them taking turns performing fellatio on him. Then of course the couple money shots with John fucking one of the girls in such closeup.Then the cum shot as the second girl blows him. Like all porn movies they are really way to much in time duration but I suppose there is a ideal time for these scenes that have little to do with the actors and more to do with the audience.
  After the girls leave and John meets up with girlfriend Fiona there is more sex with her. Then there is some establishing sex for out boat captain Larry and so on. When I say so on I mean it, Larry gets with a young lady on his boat and later in one of the stranger scenes I have ever seen he is at a strip club where the dancer strips and also removes the cork from a bottle of champagne in the most unique way. At the island Larry gets to have sex with Luna in the shallow water of the bay. So really this film is a collection of sex encounters with some slow zombie scariness thrown in. The primary conflict is between the Old man and Luna, with John who they do not see as honest and don't want to build on their island. This is resolved in the film with zombies slow chasing and the such. The secondary conflict is "Will Fiona and Larry survive?" and although they run around a good deal they are in the end saved by a statue the old man gave to Larry.
  Now I watched what is called the "explicit uncut version" and really should have tried to stay away from that and instead went with the cut up version. So in the end this film was just too boring lacking any real conflict, zombies without real reason or menace. A porn movie yes, but with limited explicit material which is far from sexy. A horror movie yes but with poor horror villains and not enough story so in the end this film can not be recommended by this viewer. If you want to watch porn you can do better and if it is horror you are looking for this film is far from horror.