Suman Roberson
It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.
lor_
Filmmaker Zygmunt Sulistrowski was a trailblazer -like the Italian pornographer Ugo Liberatore he pioneered the format of shooting low-budget erotica on exotic globe-hopping locations. Neither of them made the big time, as Just Jaeckin's EMMANUELLE and Hubert Frank's VANESSA later became the Gold Standard for this genre, but Africa EROTICA is an unintentionally humorous example.I found Sulistrowski's later THE AWAKENING OF ANNIE to be the ultimate in nonsensical porn of this type, alongside which Africa is merely silly. But they share almost identical plot gimmicks and porn filler content. NOTE that IMDb credits a French co-director, but the print I watched only credits ZS, even giving him an editing nod under the dumb backwards pseudonym "Ikswort Silus".One-shot beauty Carrie Rochelle stars as the hapless heroine Karen who (just like Annie in the later movie) is smooth-talked by a photographer Robert (slimy "hero" Darr Poran) into traveling as his model for a fashion shoot in Uganda and Tanzania. This occasions many idiotic scenes with the native fauna, silliest of which is the stars fighting with a snake intent on squeezing them to death. You don't need the MST3K boys to make fun of this junk.Another common element with ANNIE is ZS's use of unmatched random porn footage, spliced into the film at odd moments. He even features a softcore sex scene (flashback of the heroine having been raped as a young teen) in which Carrie has two radically different shaped body doubles showing their stuff. I've seen many a hardcore insert to spice up a movie years later, but this seemingly integrated softcore punch-up material is jarring and very poorly executed here.Film's most bizarre sequence deals with bestiality: a cute chimp, always present somewhere in these Africa-set escapist movies, fondles Carrie's unconscious body after she falls out of a tree, and the scene is pretty dirty (though strictly soft X).Structure of the movie is all over the place, with it starting all over again midway as Robert boringly relates an earlier photo shoot adventure he had in Hong Kong with a lovely Asian model.Basically, this farrago is merely an excuse to ogle a truly beautiful girl undressed. The creepy Darr Poran, who is described as being in his "early 40s" but looks more like 60-plus, ruins the movie, what there is left to ruin. Brigitte Lahaie has a small role (appearing at the 65-minute mark), styled as a brunette; presumably her footage was added to the film years later for a re-release, rather than shot in 1970 (7 years before her official credits begin). but I didn't spot her.
