EMANUELLE AND THE LAST CANNIBALS: Film Review

Welcome, Once More.

If Joe D’Amato ever personally invited me to critique one of his films, I might end-up possibly stabbing myself through the testicles, as it would probably be a damn sight less painful, than enduring another one of his wretched so-called horror flicks!

EMANUELLE AND THE LAST CANNIBALS stars Laura Gemser as the official Black Emanuelle. She plays a journalist, who, after completing an expose on a local asylum/institution, discovers that a current patient may be a cannibal from the Amazon.

Cue Gemser and others, to journey into the forbidden jungle of South America, to look for all things meat-eating, and discover that cannibals are nasty, nasty people, who don’t like Americans!

Never have I seen, in all 30-plus years of my watching movies, a film so incredibly offensive on so many levels! Not even THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915, D.W. Griffith) is this offensive! And that film glorified the Ku Klux Klan, and was made over 100 years ago!

Firstly, D’Amato turns every other sequence into a porno scene! It’s Gemser getting it on with her white, male guide. Then it’s the guide, fantasising about getting it on with Izabelle (the daughter of a friend of his). Then we cut back to Gemser getting it on with Izabelle in a bit of lesbian-coupling, and so on, and so on, and so on! I’ve never seen a more boring way of trying to liven-up, what is already a bad film.

Secondly, it’s dubiously racist beyond belief! Okay, I know the film’s old. I know it was an exploitation film, too. And, yes, D’Amato’s not exactly a paragon of virtue, by any standards, but for fuck’s sake - here we have a movie, that shows every person of ethnicity, to be either dumb, savage, or a dumb savage! Whilst, almost every white person, is shown to be a snooty stuck-up git, or a complete whacko! The main black character, is nothing more than a trussed-up slave, and we have the obligatory scene with a white woman who can seemingly only experience pleasure, when she’s fellating him, who seems to be massively well-endowed as well. We also have her husband, getting revenge for her infidelity, by him anally-raping Izabelle! And did I mention that all the naughty, horrible cannibals pay homage to their leader, by gang-raping Izabelle, before eating her innards?! Oh, and just to add insult to injury, the one character who seems to be virtuous and wholesome - a Nun - is burned and has her nipple sliced off! (Someone, kill me now please…!!!)

Putting all of that aside, the film is a complete mess. D’Amato hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing. Is he aiming for this movie to be a horror film, a porn flick, or a dodgy 70’s adventure yarn?! It’s all of these, and yet none of them also! If D’Amato doesn’t have a clue, then how can the viewer? Whichever it was meant to be, it doesn’t work. The sex is lame, and looks like the camera-crew just wanted to see lots of female nudity for their own perverted pleasure. The gore is chronic, with the exception of the nipple-slicing, which was just totally gratuitously sleazy and sexist. And the less said about the adventure side of things, the better. The ending is piss-poor, and even a fetus would probably have been able to direct more capably than D’Amato can!

This movie sucks! There’s not one single redeeming factor about it! The acting’s strictly by-the-numbers, but seeing as all of the cast is dubbed by very dodgy-sounding dub-artists, (who obviously didn’t care that they sound nothing like their characters, or even get anywhere close to lip-synching their lines), doesn’t exactly help things either. Even Gemser herself, doesn’t seem to give a damn about her acting. There are moments in this film, when the on-screen character is screaming their head off, or yelling, and the audio track is silent. Then again, there are scenes when one of the female dub-artists are screaming to high-hell, and we don’t see that replicated on-screen. Bizarre doesn’t even begin to describe the experience you’ll have watching this movie. Laughable, maybe. Tortuous, certainly. But not bizarre!

Considering the titles that 88 Films have released have been really good, I don’t really get why this title has been given such reasonable treatment. Then again, with a film this bad, could anything salvage it or get people paying for this disc, other than because of its over-hyped notoriety. (The nipple-slicing is patently fake, as are all the gore effects, and they’re not even as good as some of the stuff in Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD which was made some 10 years earlier, and probably with significantly less money, but a hell of a lot more love and talent!) Once you take out the few scenes of gore and sex, all you’re left with is a glorified, 90-minute Tarzan movie! But even Tarzan films had Jane, or some other animal to go all gooey over. EMANUELLE... has nothing in it worth staying through all 94 stodgy minutes for!

Ultimately, this disc and this movie, are simply not worth spending any money at all on, unless you absolutely have too! If someone is willing to pay you, to watch this film, I'd still recommend that serious genre fans give it a wide berth. In all honesty, I'm not sure who's being exploited more - the cast, or the viewers! Either way, I've just wasted £13 on this discs. Please don't let yourself be the next victim of this awful, awful film!