1977
Director- Joe D'Amato
Cast- Laura Gemser, Gabriele Tinti, Nieves Navarro, Donald
O'Brien, Mónica Zanchi, Annamaria Clementi
The
story opens in an asylum with a nurse getting s chunk bitten out of her breast
by a patient. Emanuelle is an undercover reporter, posing as a patient, doing a
scoop on the asylum. Intrigued by the seemingly cannibalistic patient, she pays
her a visit. After some coaxing that would probably get her in trouble with the
Me Too movement, she discovers a strange tattoo above the girl’s pubic area.
Upon further research she finds this is the mark of a remote cannibal tribe,
long thought extinct.
She
teams up with an anthropologist (after some steamy sex of course) and sets course for South America where they
meet up with beautiful blonde Isabelle (Mónica Zanchi) who is their guide and
Sister Mary (Annamaria Clementi). They later join up with a husband wife that
are supposedly in the jungle for hunting, but are secretly looking for lost
diamonds that were in a plane that went down. The wife is cuckolding her
husband and hooking up with the hired help. He in turn is a perv that tries to
grope Isabelle while she sleeps.
Before
things can get too far out of hand with the group, they run afoul of the
cannibal tribe. The cannibals make short work of Sister Mary, then cut open
wifey and bisect her husband. The cannibals rape Isabelle as a prelude to sacrificing
her to their river god. Before they can do that though, Emanuelle tricks them
into thinking that she is their deity. The
site of her, rising up naked from the water, is a thing to behold so I can’t
fault the natives for being duped.
The film
is quite entertaining. I think this is due to its director and its star. Joe
D'Amato was an incredibly prolific and successful Italian director who
specialized in genre films. He co-directed the eclectic horror film The Devil'sWedding Night, was the cinematographer
for The Arena with Pam Grier and Margaret Markov, directed the sword and
sorcery Ator, the post-apocalyptic 2020 Texas Gladiators, and too many other
films to name. Chances are, if you are a fan of Italian B-movies, you own
several of his films.
The real
main attraction though is Laura Gesmer. She is quite striking to look at, but
also has a real charisma that allowed her to carry a scene. She seems like a
Milo Minara drawing come to life. The whole movie, in fact, comes across very
much like a live action Euro sex comic. While all of the other women in the
movie are presented as rather disposable
(they strip naked, maybe have sex, then something bad happens to them) Gesmer’s
Emanuelle seems to be very much the
protagonist. Events aren’t happening to her, she is driving the story. The
concept of “the final girl” hadn’t come into its own at this point in cinema,
but I suspect that if Laura had been making movies in America instead of Europe,
she would have been a successful Scream Queen. Gesmer worked on and off with D’Amato
through her entire career, so they must have had a good relationship.
The film
would probably be reviled today by a modern audience. Besides its objectification
of, and violence toward, women, it lacks any level of “cultural sensitivity.” But
honestly, if you are watching this movie expecting social commentary, you have
probably made a mistake. Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals is a trifecta of
exploitation. First, it plays on the trend of blaxploiation of the era. This
film was a later entry in the Black Emanuelle series. These were not sequels to
the original Emanuelle but a very successful imitator, playing on their success
and using a more exotic star. Laura Gemser, who is Dutch-Indonesian, wouldn’t
be considered “black” by the American use of the word, but I suppose for
Europe, in the 70s, she fit the bill. Secondly, it was cashing in on the
cannibal craze that would run through the early 80s. Thirdly, it was part of
the tidal wave of erotic movies that swept the western world at that time.
There was a
bigger market for erotic films in the 1970s than there has been before or
since. It would be easy to dismiss the decline in erotic films as their being
superfluous in the era of on-demand porn. But that would be grossly minimizing
how wildly popular they were. The original Emanuelle film played in Paris
theatres for years! Upon its release
it sold almost 9 million tickets in France alone (that’s about 1 in 5 people in
the country at that time). Meanwhile, across the pond in America, The Devil in Miss Jones was one of the highest grossing movies of the year, beating out most
of the big budget Hollywood films.
Maybe it
was the excess of the 70s, maybe it was the residual free love from the 60s,
but for whatever reason, the public had both a hunger for and a tolerance for
sexuality that is absent today. Looking
back at these erotic films like Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, some might be
tempted to view them as purely exploitive, cashing in on the lowest common
denominator. But that would be ignoring that many of these films weaved art and
sex together in a way that most films don’t even try to today.
Emanuelle
and the Last Cannibals is probably racy by today’s standards, but I’d say it’s
tame by the standards of the genres it seeks to emulate. The nudity, while
plentiful, is not particularly explicit and is certainly less graphic than some
of the harder Jess Franco films. The cannibal violence, while graphic, doesn’t
rise to the level of Cannibal Holocaust and the other better known films in the
genre. Emaunelle and the Last Cannibals plays like mixture of genres. It’s not
the sexiest movie out there but its sexier than most. It’s not the most
graphically violent movie you’ll ever see, but it still has a decent dose of
blood and guts. To me it’s a jungle adventure film with lots of eroticism and
elements of horror mixed in for fun.
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