theintheredwoods
I was extremely thrilled with Severin's Blu-ray of Emanuelle and the Last Cannibal came through my work. I was familiar with Joe D'Amato, the famed Italian porno exploitation trash-master who helmed films with names like Porno Holocaust, Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, and Super Hard Love, but, I must admit, I had never seen a single one of his almost 200 films. I had, however, seen a Black Emanuelle film, the first one, and was not terribly impressed. It wasn't directed by D'Amato, but rather Bitto Albertini, another Italian exploitation guy, though less prolific or esteemed than our man Joe. I found Black Emanuelle (or Emanuelle in Africa as my VHS is titled) to be fairly standard Sexploitation fare, none of the sex or any of the parts in between were impressive or interesting enough to hold my attention, but when I saw the cannibals on the cover of this film, I had a hope. A hope that this film would be what it looked like: a sexploitation Cannibal Holocaust.Well, it delivered. This is one of the purest films of unbridled irredeemable trash I have ever seen, and I loved it. After the opening credits basically the first thing that happens is a nurse gets her whole titty bit off by a she-cannibal. I was excited to see that D'Amato was going for the extreme gore right off the bat, even before the copious (and I mean copious) amount of fucking. Emanuelle is a photojournalist who, after doing an undercover piece in a New York psychiatric ward, finds evidence of a long-thought-extinct tribe of Amazonian cannibals. With her handy cannibal expert, she flies south to trek through the jungle in search of them. And have sex with basically everyone she meets.Here is just a list of some of the things you will see in this film-A Man gets his dick sliced off, very slowly, and eaten
-A chimpanzee smokes a cigarette and put on sunglasses while he watches two women sexually bathe each other under a waterfall
-A naked lady with her guts ripped out and a live snake stuffed inside her
-A man shoves his fingers up a teenage girl's vagina while she is sleeping. (Honestly it kinda looked like he was booty digging but I can't be 100% either way)
-A Nun getting her nipple sawed off (and eaten)
-People claiming that it is the nighttime when it is very clearly not. Like the sun is out. And they say that it's dark.
-Hysterical women being slapped (stupid women with their emotions).
-"The Annual Feast of Fertility" (A woman gets stabbed in the vagina and then has her uterus cut out and eaten).
-A man is placed between a tug of war with a long string which, of course, cuts his body in half
-Incredibly awkward, quiet, and frightening cannibal gang-rape.Let me extrapolate a bit on that last bullet point, because it really was the strangest rape scene I've ever seen. The cannibals need to impregnate their captive and so they gang rape her. She lays there, silent, as each cannibal climbs on her and humps her about four times, in a ridiculously unrealistic simulation of sex (think Tommy Wiseau's idea of what sex looks like). As this happens the other thirty or so cannibals stand by watching, also silent. The whole scene is silent. Just people standing around awkwardly watching this raping happen. The movie was in fact not a response to Ruggero Deodato's notorious video nasty Cannibal Holocaust, but rather its predecessor, 1977's Ultimo Mondo Cannibale, the film credited with jump-starting the cannibal film trend of the ensuing ten years. I haven't seen Deodato's first Cannibal picture, but in comparing Emanuelle to Cannibal Holocaust, many similarities are obvious, though I will say this: Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals has 40% less rape, 100% more consensual sex, and 100% less actual animal killing than Cannibal Holocaust. I do really like the character of Emanuelle in this film. Early on she warns her anthropologist-guide-slash-fucktoy that she is a fiercely independent woman who won't be tied down to one man. She fucks a guy who gives her a ride, she rubs a couple vaginas (briefly), she globetrots around the world doing crazy dangerous shit, getting attacked by snakes and almost eaten, pretends to be a God, all in the name of getting a good story and set of photos for the newspaper where she works. Although, obviously obscured by about fifty pounds of celluloid filth, Emanuelle represents something of a feministic protagonist: Self-posessed, career driven, sex positive, and adventurous. Not a role-model for children, perhaps, but certainly much better than the blood-bags that women usually place in movies this gory. The gore, though. I was not expecting this amount of gore. I mean, it's a cannibal movie, I get that, but this was like... Wow. Some really intense shit. Also a lot of people rubbing their own or each others vaginas, which I was also not expecting since this doesn't have the hardcore inserts like some versions of some Emanuelle films do. Definitely the least "soft" of any softcore porn I've seen. There's a moment about halfway through the film when they first meet the hunter character in the wild and begin talking about hunting. Emanuelle asks why he doesn't hunt in Africa where its much safer as opposed to here in the harsh jungle of the Amazon. The thrill of the hunt, he says, is the hunt itself, not the act of killing. Setting your mind upon a prey and tracking it down, that is what gives him pleasure. This can obviously be said of Emanuelle as well, and the hunter reminds both us, and her, that humans can also be hunted. Emanuelle lives her whole life like a hunt: hunting for sexual gratification, adventure, and for the great stories that drive the passion for her reporting. Or maybe that's just a bunch of bullshit. Lets be honest, this is a movie about people fucking and eating each other. I doubt that Joe D'Amato meant for it to be anything more than that, and that's fine! It doesn't need to be anything more than that. It's a movie that knows exactly what it is and who it is marketed to and does everything you want it to do almost perfectly.9/10
Nigel P
This is certainly a curio - a fairly average story sprinkled thinly over lots of softcore sex scenes, with very occasional moments of pretty graphic gore. How does this differ from certain Jess Franco films? Difficult to answer really (Nico Fidenco's score – a definite highlight of this and his other Emanuelle films - is both wonderful and inappropriate in some of its usage, echoing Franco's habit of overlaying graphic scenes with the least assuming musical suites that work against the action rather than enhancing it)); superficially they are similar in style. And yet this lacks the fluidly eccentric directorial strokes of Franco. I note this purely as a personal observation; there's no reason to believe Franco or 'Emanuelle' Director Joe D'Amato were in any kind of competition. The dubbing is at times lacking, with such an effort made to match the words with the lips of the actors, sentences often have. Long. Pauses. In the. Middle. Of them.There's a moment where Emanuelle and Professor Mark Lester (Gabriele Tinti) grimly watch stabbings, flesh-eating, dismemberment and rape before leaving their hiding place saying "Let's do something." A little late perhaps! It would be grossly unfair to condemn this film for its treatment of women; it is guilty, yes, of titillation and exploitation, but it is far from alone in that at the time it was made. You could say it balances it out with the fact that Emanuelle, a female, is the heroine and is responsible for using her sexuality (and skin tone) to ultimately save her group.This film isn't as bad as I imagined it might be. It is, however, tonally disjointed with scenes of genuine horror mixed with leisurely sexual antics. There's no denying that Indonesian-Dutch born Laura Gemser is a definite presence on screen.This Emanuelle, or Black Emanuelle, is not to be confused with Emmanuelle, the French soft-core movie character based on the 1959 novel of the same name. This is the Italian variation. By removing one letter from the name, they somehow legally managed to skip through the copyright loophole and produce their own series of films, featuring Gemser.
Vomitron_G
...are no guarantee that a film will be any good. Seriously. I just saw Joe D'Amato's "Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals" and... meh, I didn't like it. And I should've known this was going to happen. I've never been too keen on sleazoid-maestro D'Amato as a director and I think Laura Gemser's sexiness is severely overrated. She's just not all that gorgeous. It's probably her exotic looks that work wonders with many men.However, if you think Italian cannibal flicks could use more sleazy nudity & sex, then this one's probably all for you. The film starts of with a nurse who has her breast bitten off and then proceeds with a scene where Laura Gemser starts fingering a female patient. Way to go, D'Amato! That's bound to get anybody's interest, even lesbian feminist viewers.But frankly, the rest of the film just annoyed me. We got sex in the city. Then sex in the jungle. Then some more nudity. Then some more sex. Then some gore. Some sex. More gore. And more nudity & gore. Then Laura Gemser reflecting on some profound inner thoughts in a boat and... The End.Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals is absolute smut. Ultra-sleazy exploitation trash filled with uninteresting soft-core sex and cheap gore. Naked females and dirty cannibals in a jungle. And fake blood & guts. And a monkey smoking a cigarette. And bush of The Gemstress. Sounds good to you? Go ahead and watch it. But don't say I recommended it.There. I just felt like sharing how I didn't like this film. But I got what I expected from it. In spades. So, given the movie's title, it does deliver the goods. I guess at least it's honest exploitation trash.
Michael A. Martinez
Much with like Nun or Nazi-sploitation, the Italian cannibal movie cycle of the 1970's is something of a bizarre enigma of a niche genre to the uninitiated. To the average layperson, Italians and cannibal movies must seem terribly outlandish... but then again so would the idea of Herzog shooting so many German-language films in the Amazon. Italy actually made at least 5 serious cannibal/jungle adventures and around 10 lesser ones from 1972-1988. This one lacks the professionalism of Ruggero Deodato's, the style of Umberto Lenzi's, and the austere grandeur and seriousness of Sergio Martino's efforts, but makes up for it with ample sex and lurid cheesiness.Yup, this is the one and only true soft-core porn-themed Italian cannibal movie, complete with plenty of self-pleasury, lesbianry, voyeury, buggery, and plain ol' missionary. One of those films that makes you feel dirty while watching it or later with the mere memory of having seen it.One of the lower-budgeted efforts ranking down there with ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST, EMANUELLE IN THE LAST CANNIBALS must have been shot mostly just outside Rome. Awful gore effects only enhance the fun, but the real stars of the show are the even worse-than-usual dubbing, shamefully bad dialog, and many questionable directorial touches. Right when you're laughing out loud at the film, it often switches gears into 'sex mode' with numerous soft-core scenes which act as plot-padding filler. Thankfully the animal-killing scenes are in short supply for a change.Acting-wise, they could have done a lot worse. Save for Japanese actor Al Yamanouchi's hilarious early-career miscasting as an uncredited Latino guide, the cast is most appropriate with a good cross-section of Italian B-movie characters of the time. Donal O'Brien chews scenery wonderfully as a hard-as-nails guide, Gabriele Tinti gives just as earnest a leading man performance as he did in his earlier art-house days, Laura Gemser & Nieves Navarro look pretty and seems comfortable with the rampant nudity. Also watch for ubiquitous euro-fatman and villain voice-over actor Geoffrey Copleston as a random Amazonian landowner. All that's missing are cameos from George Eastman or Luc Merenda.Fidenco's score gives a certain level of cheesy seriousness to the thing, but also pegs it all as sexually-themed. This film was more-or-less remade much more professionally years later as CANNIBAL FEROX with no sex and much more violence. Among its genre peers, this film (which I'll call TRAP THEM AND KILL THEM this time) ranks among the more enjoyable in that in the unintentional hilarity department it ranks second only to EATEN ALIVE.
