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.
Black Cobra Woman (1976) - It is not often that I get a DVD from Netflix and the quality is really poor but this is the case with this Jack Palance, Laura Gemser movie. Presented in full screen ratio from an old print including scratches and flaws the look and sound are not great. I don't know if writer / director Joe D'Amato was trying to push his sleazy films as travel movies but he often starts his films establishing the location, in this case Hong Kong by showing planes landing at the airport and ferries crossing the harbor in front of the city. Eva (Gemser) has arrived in town to do a show and when she arrives she is talking to Jules (Gabriele Tinti) who is interested in seeing her show. I am going to guess that the show contains cobras hence the name of the film. This film is early in the lovely Gemser's career this being her fifth film. Already a budding exploitation star with three featured characters in the Emmanuelle series of soft core exploitation movies she would go on to do more than a dozen of the films. Fresh faced and young in this one Gemser is just starting that twenty year film career. Her IMDB bio explains her early life as:"The exotic dark-haired beauty moved to Italy in the mid-1970's and made her film debut as Janine in the obscure Amore libero - Free Love (1974). However, it was Laura's small, but memorable role as a masseuse in Emmanuelle II (1975) that really launched her career in racy soft-core exploitation fare. Gemser achieved her greatest enduring international cult popularity with her incredibly erotic and uninhibited portrayals of the titular hedonistic and sexually adventurous globe-trotting photojournalist in the steamy "Black Emanuelle" series that were often directed by the notorious Joe D'Amato and frequently co-starred Gemser's real-life actor husband Gabriele Tinti." Tinti eighteen years her senior in real life and Gemser's husband plays Jules Carmichael a playboy who since he hit it off with her on the plain invites his brother Judas to go see her show. I wonder if that name will fit the character of the man. The DVD sleeve says that Judas falls for Eva and that is just weird in that he is a good thirty years older than she, but I guess the wealthy have the luxury of not paying attention to age norms in dating.
Judas is smitten by watching the topless Eva dancing with a boa constrictor in a room full of men. She is slender and beautiful and it is all to establish desires, Eva touching a female friend under the table in the club establishes her willingness to be open sexually. Judas staring at this with an intense desire wants her. Later Eva is touching herself on a bed while thinking about her snake dancing and female lover. Judas a snake keeper himself takes her to lunch and then hires Eva to care for his reptiles. She having just met the creepy old man is not looking to immediately move into his house to be cared for by him. Such a strange approach the older rich guy offing to keep her and take care of her. This makes her Asian boyfriend jealous, he does not mind her taking woman lovers but the idea of another man in her life makes him angry. His anger is enough for her to allow him one more fuck before she takes the job with Judas.
Things seem to go well when she joins the Carmichael residence but this film churns slowly while Eva is finding and wooing a bleached blonde Gerri (Michele Starck) and Julkes is seducing and then torturing Candy (Ziggy Zanger) with his brother's snakes. It slogs through the two women travelling around Hong Kong talking. There is some animal violence when they watch a snake being killed skinned and cooked at a local merchant stall. There is also a feeding of Judas' snakes that includes a python killing a mouse. Mostly there is a real openness to the films approach to bisexuality and lesbianism but unfortunately it does not empower those ways of life. More it is a male POV where we can see women caressing each other and getting naked, bathing together and often times in these scenes we see Jules peeping in from the other room always reminding us that this is material for the men to enjoy. Jules is a bit of a creeper, more so than his eccentric but seemingly harmless brother. His jealousy of the two women sharing a bed prompts him to put a deadly snake in the room with the two women. Gerri panics and incites the snake to bite her and she dies quickly. Devastated Eva leaves Hong Kong with Jules not knowing that he killed her lover. Or does she?
There is a revenge aspect to this film and we eventually get there after a lot of slow plotting. Jules taking a Black Cobra up the ass because this special breed will eat its way free is an idea to be marveled at. She also has the gall to confess her crimes to Judas looking for him to back to the happier times when they lived together. She wants t show him she is the snake charmer and brings the green mamba out to dance with it. Unfortunately for her she is bitten by it and dies. This is a quick and remarkable dark ending to the film. I am not sure how worth the time this particular film is as it slogs most of the time and there really is not any redeeming qualities. I suppose the moral is don't kill with snakes or you will die by one? On a Gemser scale for nudity this film is like 2 of 5 nudes so if that was why you want to see it you may be disappointed in that also.
