I really felt this flick failed to capitalize on a promising premise. An Italian Joe D'Amato exploitation film, starring Black Emmanuelle (Laura Gemser), combined with a cannibal movie! Leave your expectations elsewhere, which is what I should've done (maybe I would've enjoyed it more).
What you've got is SOME gut-muching, paired with a whole lotta skin. Plus... Epic, never-ending scenes of nothing. Movie starts out with reporter Emmanuelle doing undercover work in a mental hospital. There she discovers a mute cannibal who eats a, uh, sensitive part of a nurse's anatomy. Emmanuelle questions her, and her interrogation technique, well, needs to be seen to be believed (AND it's unsuccessful!).
So she sets out for the Amazon to find this lost tribe, with a number of diverse characters, with primarily one thing on their minds (also... cannibal fodder). This whole trek actually gets pretty dull and uninspired. I see a lot of people appreciated the score. I actually thought it worked AGAINST what was happening onscreen in a number of instances. Seems like no one wants to rescue anyone, but things pick up in the final 10-15 minutes. It includes a totally ludicrous rescue mission, which I actually kind of enjoyed, for the fact that it referred to the opening scenes, and brought the story full circle. Yet, they wait til the absolute last second, Emmanuelle paints her torso (fully nude, of course) to resemble the water goddess introduced in the opening (how this was determined is beyond me). So, E takes a long underwater swim out to approach the cannibals, with no effect to the fresh (assuming) water-based paint. Still, this mission was the most entertaining thing in the whole movie, besides 2-3 nice looking ladies in the buff.
There is some gore, which certainly takes a back seat to much of the other shenanigans. Thankfully, this "cannibal" movie skirts the animal abuse, which is kind of a staple when it comes to that genre. One thing in this movie made me LOL. The cannibals wrap a rope around the diamond hunter, and pull til they slice him in half. Considering how gruesome some other gags were to that point, D'Amato opted for an incredibly cheap optical effect you'd see on, say, an old sitcom. This whole mashup of exploitation, softcore porn, and gory cannibal film was ultimately pretty silly, and that effect was the icing on the cake.
I'm giving this a 5, for the WTF factor.
What you've got is SOME gut-muching, paired with a whole lotta skin. Plus... Epic, never-ending scenes of nothing. Movie starts out with reporter Emmanuelle doing undercover work in a mental hospital. There she discovers a mute cannibal who eats a, uh, sensitive part of a nurse's anatomy. Emmanuelle questions her, and her interrogation technique, well, needs to be seen to be believed (AND it's unsuccessful!).
So she sets out for the Amazon to find this lost tribe, with a number of diverse characters, with primarily one thing on their minds (also... cannibal fodder). This whole trek actually gets pretty dull and uninspired. I see a lot of people appreciated the score. I actually thought it worked AGAINST what was happening onscreen in a number of instances. Seems like no one wants to rescue anyone, but things pick up in the final 10-15 minutes. It includes a totally ludicrous rescue mission, which I actually kind of enjoyed, for the fact that it referred to the opening scenes, and brought the story full circle. Yet, they wait til the absolute last second, Emmanuelle paints her torso (fully nude, of course) to resemble the water goddess introduced in the opening (how this was determined is beyond me). So, E takes a long underwater swim out to approach the cannibals, with no effect to the fresh (assuming) water-based paint. Still, this mission was the most entertaining thing in the whole movie, besides 2-3 nice looking ladies in the buff.
There is some gore, which certainly takes a back seat to much of the other shenanigans. Thankfully, this "cannibal" movie skirts the animal abuse, which is kind of a staple when it comes to that genre. One thing in this movie made me LOL. The cannibals wrap a rope around the diamond hunter, and pull til they slice him in half. Considering how gruesome some other gags were to that point, D'Amato opted for an incredibly cheap optical effect you'd see on, say, an old sitcom. This whole mashup of exploitation, softcore porn, and gory cannibal film was ultimately pretty silly, and that effect was the icing on the cake.
I'm giving this a 5, for the WTF factor.