WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Anthropophagus: The Beast

Watching exploitation movies, there’s always the risk of an anticipation/actuality disconnect. Sometimes the title sets up the false expectation. ‘Lesbian Vampire Killers’, anyone? I was expecting a movie about lesbians hunting vampires, Buffy gone muffy as it were. Sometimes the cover art suggests a lurid thrill-ride only for the viewer to realise, as the end credits roll, that the artist had given up on the piece of shit movie ten minutes in and painted what they would have conjured on screen if only someone had demonstrated the foresight to hire them as director instead of the talentless fucking hack who actually called the shots on the rancid slab of celluloid in question.

On which note: ladies and gentlemen, please give a big warm Agitation of the Mind raised middle finger to Joe D’Amato’s ‘Anthropophagus: The Beast’.

Approaching the film, I was aware of two things: its presence on the DPP’s “video nasties” list, and the embryo-munching scene that earned its place there. I was aware of its director, his reputation and the catalogue of cinematic excrescence that bears his name. He’s not even a stranger to the Winter of Discontent; back in 2010, I wrapped up a review of the loathsome ‘Emanuelle in America’ – a film whose woman-on-horse masturbation scene is something I would give a lot to unsee – with the heartfelt homily “fuck you and rot in hell, Joe D’Amato”.

So I’m not going to clog up the thousand words of this review with any bemoaning the fact that I didn’t know what I’d let myself in for. I was even aware, courtesy of an entry in Tim Brayton’s 2010 Summer of Blood season on Antagony & Ecstasy, that this was one of the least ineptly made entries in the D’Amato canon even if it’s first half was terminally low on tension, incident and drama.

What I didn’t expect of ‘Anthropo-Fuck-This: The Cheese’ was that it would be so turgidly and dust-gatheringly slow. That the set-pieces would be so tortuously contrived and so utterly leeched of tension. That, at 91 minutes, it would contain more padding than an orthopaedic mattress. That, in short, it would leave me not disgusted, not outraged, not corrupted or depraved, but plainly and simply bored.

The opening scene has a German couple holidaying amongst the Greek islands finding themselves a nice empty beach. He stretches out and works on the tan, a pair of industrial sized headphones clamped over his ears; she plunges into the invigoratingly cold sea and swims out to where a rowing boat, seemingly devoid of rowers, is bobbing on the waves. What she finds in the boat isn’t revealed, but it occasions a piercing shriek, only the boyfriend doesn’t hear because of said personal stereo equipment. A POV shot of something heading from boat to shore suddenly gets very sinister as we see droplets of blood preceding its passage up the beach. The boyfriend looks up just in time to get a cleaver in his head.

It’s a reasonably effective opener. It sets the scene, it plays out in a somewhat unexpected manner and the sharp-instrument-meets-cranium pay off promises video nastiness a-go-go. So how much screen time do you reckon it accounts for? Minute and a half? Two? Three at the most?

Six minutes.

And how about the next sequence where Julie (Tisa Farrow), on her way to the island residence of an English couple to whose visually-challenged teenage daughter Rita (Margaret Mazzatini) she acts as carer, cadges a lift with sojourning twenty-somethings Maggie (Serena Grandi), Arnie (Bob Larsen), Carol (Zora Kerova), Danny (Mark Bodin) and Andy (Saverio Valone), only to find the island deserted and her friends’ house empty apart from a traumatized Rita? Ten or fifteen minutes? Twenty if you really want to probe the interrelationships?

Try forty minutes. Almost half the Christing movie.

And the interrelationships in question? Arnie’s married to Maggie who is heavily pregnant (hands up anyyone who can guess where this is going; congratulations, you’ve just won two tickets to the DPP’s annual ball); Andy and Danny are best buds, but Andy’s not too struck on the fact that Carol, his sister, has a thing for Danny, while Carol herself is gets royally pissed off very quickly over Danny’s immediate attraction to Julie. 

D’Amato establishes all of this so laboriously you’d think a Strindbergian angst-fest was on the cards. But no, Carol’s antagonism towards Julie pays off in a “locked in a cemetery at night” prank which (a) detracts from what could have been a tense “band of survivors hole up against unknown/unseen attacker” sequence, and (b) is curtailed arbitrarily before any atmosphere or tension can be developed. Otherwise, that’s it. The character dynamics are never explored.

Even when ‘Anthropo-Fake-Ass: The Puh-leeze’ creeps past the halfway mark and our merry band of stupid-decision-making protagonists fetch up at a creepy old house which seems to have shared an architect with the domicile in ‘Deep Red’, there’s no sense of D’Amato infusing his narrative with any degree of urgency. Chase scenes ebb to the soporific. Hushed and supposedly urgent dialogue passages are punctuated with more pregnant pauses than a Harold Pinter manuscript. Characters split up, get distracted or go wandering off on their own with such moronic regularity that you very quickly cease fearing for their safety and instead get bored at how fucking long it takes for the inevitable blood-letting.

Which brings us to the gore. It’s incredibly fake. Even by the standards of Italian horror movies. That horribly unconvincing mannequin that tumbles down the mountain at the end of Fulci’s ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’? Documentary freakin’ realism compared to what’s on show here.

So, yeah: the viscera is phoney, the tension is a non-starter, there’s no nudity, and the music is like listening to a rhinoceros trying to emulate the stripped-down synth-heavy score of a John Carpenter classic using some saucepans and a kazoo. Take it from me, the only reason ‘Anthropo-Dickless: The Zzzzzzzs’ got put on the DPP list was to protect audiences of the day against the possibility of RSI from repeatedly ramming their thumbs down on the “fast forward” button.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Emanuelle in America

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WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Emanuelle in Bangkok

I closed last night’s review of ‘Black Emanuelle’ – a film I had unhesitatingly evaluated on a single viewing as a fuck-awful POS – with the phrase “I’m looking to Joe D’Amato for an upgrade in quality”.

Dear readers, if I ever – ever – say anything like that again – EVER – you have my full permission to descend on Chez Agitation en masse and beat me like a piñata for several hours. And then really get stuck in.

What was I thinking when I wrote that? Was I trying to be funny? Looking to Joe D’Amato for an upgrade in quality!?!? Dear God, you don’t say something like that without consequences. And, oh sweet baby Jesus in a charnel house, did I suffer the consequences!

‘Emanuelle in Bangkok’ (a.k.a. ‘Black Emanuelle Goes East’, which makes it sound like a porno sequel to ‘The Ghost Goes West’) opens with a piece of music that makes the ‘Black Emanuelle’ OST at its absolute nadir sound like Handel’s ‘Messiah’. It’s called “Sweet Leaving Thing” and it’s “permorfed” (according to the end credits) …

… by Silky Sound Singer (who I hope with every ounce of moral outrage in my body was sued under the Trades Description Act for that name) and it’s egregious. I’m not talking bad. I’m not talking horrible. I’m not even talking fuck-awful. In fact, I don’t know if I have the linguistic ability to describe just how sanity-weakening, soul-destroying, aurally-offensive, harmonically-repulsive, bile-inducing and sonically cancerous it is … But I’ll try. Imagine listening to an ungodly conflation of the world’s worst country & western outfit and the world’s cheesiest oompah band. Now imagine listening to them while you’re undergoing major root canal work without anaesthetic and to ensure that you don’t pass out and miss even a single minute of the agony one of the dental nurses is hammering a six inch nail through your scrotum while her colleague repeatedly jabs you in the eye with the business end of an arc welder.

That’s what this song sounds like. You can probably find it on YouTube – hell, you can find the whole movie pretty easily online – but I would urge you not to. In fact, I’d beg you. It’s the aural equivalent of ‘2 Girls, 1 Cup’. You can never unhear it.

So, I was three minutes into the movie and the fucking opening credits music was making me want to self-harm. Surely it had to get better. I took a slug of whisky and told myself the worst was over. Christ, I’m a lying bastard.

The first scene has Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) taking a slow boat to Bangkok and dallying with a moody archaeologist named Roberto (Ivan Rassimov). Their first sex scene, in Emanuelle’s cabin, strives for authenticity. It looks like it was actually filmed in a ship’s cabin. And the thing about cabins is, they’re generally small. The scene is framed in a manner that suggests there wasn’t enough room for the camera and the DoP as well as the performers, so the camera was just rammed into the corner of the cabin and left to roll. Accordingly, the viewer is treated to several minutes of awkward manoeuvring, random body parts and generic slurping sounds. To make things worse, D’Amato decides to nick Albertini’s people shagging/piston rod and cylinder box juxtaposition from the original movie. Except that D’Amato ups the ante by cutting away to a roomful of piston rods hammering away as the massive marine engine powers the ship on through the night.

The, ahem, “story” involves Emanuelle’s attempts to get an interview with some royal personage. To this end, she dallies with the royal dude’s cousin. Said cousin takes her to a massage parlour where D’Amato happily rips of Gemser’s iconic scene from ‘Emmanuelle 2’. Then Emanuelle, royal cousin dude and an American couple – the wife was played by Ely Galleani, I can tell you that much, but I can’t be bothered hitting up IMDb for character names/cast list – who they randomly bump into all head for a club where a stripper does uses ping-pong balls in her act, after which they boogie on down to an opium den, get high and fornicate in various combinations. Ely Galleani has a too-brief girl-girl scene with the oriental masseuse. Which is nice.

Next thing, the deal with the monarch’s cousin goes south when some mercenaries who are about to stage a coup warn Emanuelle that Bangkok isn’t safe for her and she should leave. They issue this warning by way of a gang rape. If the very concept, content and execution of the scene isn’t offensive enough, it’s suggested that Emanuelle’s sexual confidence has equipped her to transmute an act of violence into a more or less pleasurable experience. That fact that the scene ends with the mercenary who instigated the gang rape seeing Emanuelle on her way and wishing her luck just ramps up the inappropriateness factor to a whole other level.

Emanuelle departs Bangkok, albeit on temporary papers since her passport was taken in a hotel room robbery. At the airport, she bumps into Ely Galleani. What do you know, they’re on the same flight! A Sapphic induction to the mile high club ensues.

Emanuelle travels to Casablanca where she looks up Roberto. He’s shacked up with a fellow archaeologist, Janet. She’s initially hostile towards Emanuelle, but a little three-way action breaks the ice. Meanwhile, Emanuelle petitions the consul to help out as regards her stolen passport and discovers that the wheels of bureaucracy spin a tad smoother when the consul’s daughter takes a fancy to you. Roberto doesn’t take too well to Emanuelle’s relationship with Deborah (she being la fille du consul) and angrily calls them “lezzers” before he storms off. At this point, the appearance of Vicky Pollard delivering a monologue along the lines of “yeah but, no but, what it was right, I sat next to that Emanuelle and she totally copied off me coz I told everyone about her diddling Deborah outside the consulate and Roberto totally busted me for it and oh my God I so can’t believe she did that coz anyway everyone knows she’s a lezzer” would have been the most awesome thing imaginable, an act of cinematic alchemy transforming this celluloid dunghill into something marvellous.

But unfortunately Vicky Pollard has standards and would never work with Joe D’Amato (“yeah but, no but, he’s totally a perv and he’d be shoving a camera up me skirt wouldn’t he?”) and instead of becoming something marvellous, ‘Emanuelle in Bangkok’ goes from bad to worse to pointless. The abrupt shift from Bangkok to Casablanca suggests nothing more than a first cut clocking in at an hour and D’Amato and company desperately shooting anything just to pad it out to feature length. The bits of supposed “local colour” that interspersed the kit-offery are mostly drab. There’s a grim and depressing scene, that seems to go on forever, of Emanuelle taking photographs of a snake-on-mongoose smackdown. It’s completely unfaked and it makes the turtle death in ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ look like an episode of ‘Animal Rescue’.

The whole misbegotten thing ends with Emanuelle reluctantly parting from Deborah, even though our infamously transitory and commitment-shy heroine has admitted to deep and profound feelings for the lass (a spiritual and emotional communion they consummate by taking a bubble bath together), because she has another assignment to go on. Against all the odds, their airport farewell is almost poignant … until that fucking song comes line-dancing onto the soundtrack again, stomping its dirty heels all over your will to live.

O come, o come, Emanuelle

When Just Jaeckin’s profound and sensitive examination of one woman’s sexual liberation soft porn flick ‘Emmanuelle’ garnered critical encomium made a fuckton of money worldwide, a sequel was inevitable. With Francis Giacobetti in the director’s chair this time, ‘Emmanuelle 2’ (or ‘Emmanuelle: the Anti-Virgin’) followed its predecessor’s soft-focus formula to the tee. Nonetheless, it’s the better film for one reason and one reason only: the massage scene.

The set-up is quite simple: Emmanuelle (Sylvia Kristel) and friends visit a Bangkok massage parlour where they are soaped up, rinsed off and and given what you might euphemistically call a full body massage by three incredibly nubile, supple and curvaceous Filipino girls. For about five minutes. (Go here for an excerpt from the scene. Warning: it’s NSFW and then some!)

What gives the scene that added zing is that one of the masseuses is played by Laura Gemser. In the same year that ‘Emmanuelle 2’ was made – 1975 – Gemser appeared in the title role in Bitto Albertini’s ‘Black Emanuelle’ (note the ever-so-slight but lawsuit-avoiding difference in spelling). In a life imitating art soft porn imitating soft porn scenario, ‘Black Emanuelle’ did enough box office that Albertini went ahead with ‘Black Emanuelle 2’. Gemser was unavailable, so he cast Sharon Lesley.

And there the story might have ended. But for the supreme and indefatigable cinematic talent that was Joe D’Amato. (That was me being sarcastic, by the way.) Born Aristide Massaccesi, he made quite a name for himself as a cinematographer before launching a directorial career. It kind of sets the pattern that his first half dozen or so movies were either uncredited or directed under pseudonyms. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, he made only two features under his own name, the first of which was the flawed but watchable giallo ‘Death Smiled at a Murderer’.

The rest of his filmography – clocking in at over 200 titles! – was pseudonymous. Covering just about every genre from sword and sandal to spaghetti western to (at the fag end of his career) hard core pornography, he utilized at least 40 pseudonyms. I say “at least”: it’s a popular theory amongst D’Amato aficionados that there remain any number of unattributed D’Amato films simply because his entire oeuvre of pseudonyms has not been fully catalogued.

Still, it was as Joe D’Amato he was best known, and under that name he gave the world that staple of the video nasties list ‘Anthropophagus: The Beast’, that tender and delicate drama of human relationships and sexual identity ‘11 Days, 11 Nights’ and that marvel of genre deconstruction and cross-pollination ‘Porno Holocaust’.

Yes, Joe D’Amato made a film called ‘Porno Holocaust’. Holding up the one bloody and tattered piece of integrity I still possess, waving it undefeated above the fetid swamp of the last four weeks on this blog, I can say with pride that I have never seen ‘Porno Holocaust’. I have, however, read a couple of reviews online. That’s the wonderful thing about the internet: there are people out there who will blog definitive reviews on the films of Albert Pyun, argue Tommy Wiseau as a misunderstood, ahead-of-his-time genius, and expend a couple of thousand words on the post-modern, anti-audience imperative of ‘Two Girls, One Cup’. I’m proud to be a part of the movement. Ahem. I digress. Point is, while I value what is left of my soul enough to continue being content not to have seen ‘Porno Holocaust’, I understand from what I’ve read that it’s a hybrid desert island/radioactive mutant/slasher/sexploitation flick. Starring George Eastman.

There is a little part of my mind that turns into an exploding catherine wheel festooning the inside of my skull with gold, crimson and silver contrails purely at the thought that this film even exists. There is a slightly larger part of me, located roughly between the lower intestine and the sphincter muscle, that lurches sickly at the same thought.

So: Joe D’Amato. The man who took up the reins of the Black Emanuelle franchise. A man with no conscience, no remorse; a man who was to cinema what Jack the Ripper was to escort agencies. What excise men were to illegal stills hidden in the highlands of Scotland. What Guy N. Smith is to the Booker Prize. What Aqua’s ‘Barbie Doll’ is to grand Italian opera. What Lindsay Lohan is to a “just say no” campaign. What Tony Blair and George W. Bush are to the truth.

Anyway, you get the picture. Joe D’Amato = cheap exploitation.

Joe D’Amato made the next five Black Emanuelle films, even going so far as to bequeath unto future film historians the penultimate of the cycle – ‘Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals’ – under his birth name. It was just plain old Joe D’Amato on the others, and it was as Joe D’Amato that he steered Black Emanuelle into the realms of sexual violence, contentious content and hardcore inserts that Ms Gemser was quick to point out she never knew about or participated in.

In addition, a further eight ‘Emanuelle’ titles, starring Laura Gemser, were made between 1976 and 1983, by such masters of world cinema as Mario Bianchi and Bruno Mattei. (If I mention that Bianchi was responsible for ‘Satan’s Baby Doll’ and Mattei for ‘Zombie Creeping Flesh’, that should tell you all you need to know.)

This gives us a total of 15 Black Emanuelle movies. But since I doubt my sanity or my wife’s patience would survive a fortnight-long trawl through the whole lot, I’ll be giving over the next week to a representative sampling of seven of them. Join me from tomorrow on The Agitation of the Libido.