The French singer, songwriter, painter, television presenter, actress and former model first came to the attention of the public via her image on the cover of Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure. Thanks to her songs “Blood and Honey”, “Tomorrow”, “Queen of Chinatown”, “Follow Me”, “Enigma (Give a Bit of Mmh to Me)”, “The Sphinx” and “Fashion Pack,” she became a multi-million selling disco queen. And she modeled, was a television host, a theatrical actress, a gay activist and the muse and closest friend of Salvador Dali for the last 15 years of his life.
She’s also a mystery, even hiding the date of her birth from her husband (anywhere from 1939 to 1950) as well as where she was born, the gender she was assigned at birth, names and nationalities of her parents, and the location of her upbringing.
From the day her career as a singer and model began, rumors of her gender have been around, including the theory that Dali ponsored her sex reassignment surgery and invented her stage name which was untended to be a pun in Catalan: L’Amant de Dalí or Dalí’s lover.
She has always denied that she was born a man, despite songs that flirt with the idea like “Fabulous (Lover, Love Me)” and “I’m a Mistery.” All this despite numerous articles and images of her original passport using the name Alain Maurice Louis René Tap, which also states that she was born on June 18, 1939 in Saigon.
Who cares. Lear is fabulous.
Lear appears in this film — she thought that it was for a musical comedy and had no idea it was a sex film, which led to a lawsuit — to take us to popular night clubs and sex venues from all around the world. She introduces each city with a song and then D’Amato takes us to the sex scenes, including straight and gay sex, sexual magic tricks, erotic dancing, BDSM, group sex and hey, it’s Joe D’Amato, so the moment you get the least bit aroused, he unleashes necrophilia on you.
Also known as Follie di notte (Madness of the Night), Notti pazze della Amanda Lear (Crazy Nights of Amanda Lear), Crazy Nights, Follow Me, Mondo Erotico and the title we listed it as, which means Porn Nights in the World Volume 2, this movie features two of Lear’s songs, “Follow Me” and “Enigma (Give a Bit of Mmh to Me).”
If this side of the mondo world interests you, check out the Bruno Mattei-directed Le Notti porno nel mondoand Emanuelle e le porno notti nel mondo n. 2, which has the dream team of Mattei and D’Amato making a mondo erotic film with Laura Gemser hosting. It’s not as out of control or shocking as this film, but if you’ve made it through other D’Amato stuff like Emanuelle in America, you can handle this.
Man, I was confused. Crazy Nights came out the same year and this movie mines much of the same territory as Emanuelle and the Erotic Nights and Le Notti Porno nel Mondo, so one would hopefully be excused by getting a bit mixed up what with all the Mattei and D’Amato mondo erotic films. I guess the way I’m keeping them as straight as possible is by remembering that Crazy Nights has Amanda Lear as its host and the other three have Laura Gemser.
I mean, even Letterboxd is confused and lists the Amanda Lear tag for this film.
Maybe you’re reading this and an expert on these matters and can put it all in order for me.
Maybe you’re the ghost of Joe D’Amato and I want to meet you.
Anyways…
What doesn’t help, yet again, is that the IMDB entry for this doesn’t have Gemser in it, but does have Ajita Wilson and Marina Hedman, who are in Crazy Nights. And I must confess to watching all of these Mattei and D’Amato docs one on top of the other.
In the grand scheme of things, no one but me cares about this, but man, I do care.
Also — if anyone has the D’Amato movies Instinct and Pugni, Pirati e Karate I need those ones too. My OCD is out of control not having those on this list. And man, looking at Joe’s sheer volume of adult movies makes me feel like a one-handed Sisyphus, staring at a mountain of sheer depravity.
Paul (Richard Harrison) is researching a tribe when his wife (Nieves Navarro!) falls for one of their women named Haini (Lucia Ramirez, Porno Holocaust) and brings her back to civilization. And then, for some reason, Haini picks up a guy at a bar and has a fantasy of killing him with a machete because hey — this is a Joe D’Amato movie.
The main moral of Sex And Black Magic is if you’re a rich white couple and you try and have a three-way romance with someone with connections to the ancient world of the occult, you know, don’t throw her away.
Also known as Voodoo Baby, the real star of the show is the Stelvio Cipriani soundtrack which is way better than it has any right to be.
I mean, I’m doing an entire week of D’Amato movies so you know that I love him. One of the reasons why is movies like this that present to you two options at once. Most movies only give you cannibalism and human sacrifice or they are filled with erotic content. Only Joe would decide that you need to need to have both. You might not be ready for that, but you’re going to get it.
A lot of times when watching Italian westerns I wonder, “Did I see this before?”
Sometimes that’s a trick question as this movie remixes Anche per Django le carogne hanno un prezzo(Even for Django, Death Has a Price) and Paid in Blood, which were both directed by Luigi Batzella.
I say directed and probably should have quotes around it because just like The Devil’s Wedding Night there’s a prevailing notion that Joe D’Amato is the one who really directed this.
Jeff Cameron saves a town from bandits as Captain Mike Jackson. Cameron was born Goffredo Scarciofolo and only made two more movies after this; the majority of his films are either westerns or peplum. Krista Nell, who tragically died way too young at the age of 28, is in this, as are Gianfranco Clerici (who went on to write Don’t Torture a Duckling, The Antichrist, Cannibal Holocaust and The New York Ripper), Attilio Dottesio (Death Smiles at a Murderer) and Donald O’Brien, who was in so many of my favorite Italian movies that it’s hard to just pick one (or fifteen) to list.
The western genre was dying, but better things would come for D’Amato.
Patricia (Carla Solaro, Snuff Killer) is a small town girl who makes the big time, getting to be the newest star on a prime time show called The Voice of the Heart and moving to Los Angeles, falling for the man who makes her famous, the callous Mike (Robert Madison, the son of cowboy star Guy Madison).
This is totally a soap opera but a Joe D’Amato one (he directed, wrote and shot this as Fred Slonisko) and what’s off is that somehow Carla Solaro had a body double which seems ridiculous for someone starring in one of Joe’s movies but life is full of magic isn’t it?
I’m looking through other reviews of this movie and people are tearing it apart and I’m thinking, hey, this is a 1997 Joe D’Amato softcore movie and there’s a scene where the evil old guy gets to sleep with the heroine and I’m thinking the old dude is way too buff for his age and good for him. That should tell you the level of storytelling here in that I’m thinking about that.
Also, Mike is a mass media expert and I’ve been in marketing for too long and I’ve never met one of those. I think I’ve been living my life wrong. I mean, I know I am, I just watched sixty Joe D’Amato movies in one week.
But hey, Top Girl is no Top Model. I think we can all admit that.
Rip off the best, because one of the posters for this film — for Titanes del le Guerra, the name it played under in Spain — takes its inspiration from Blazing Combat #1, which was painted by Frank Frazetta.
Of course, Warren would rip themselves off by the end, endless reprinting their old stories and art, so that cover ran again on Creepy #89, an issue that reprinted several of the Blazing Combat stories. It’d get to the point where you had no idea how many original Warren stories you’d get in an issue or if you’d read them all before and you know, that sounds very much like Joe D’Amato.
Anyways, Tough to Kill is all about Martin (Luc Merenda,Puzzle, Pensione Paura), a hitman who joins Haggerty’s (Donald O’Brien, who ends up in nearly every Italian genre movie made from 1978 on, but he’s in a banana hammock in one scene in this) mercenary group to take on the suicide mission of blowing up a dam in enemy territory. But one of the men has a price on his head and Martin intends to collect, which means that he wants to make sure his team survives.
Along the way, the Stelvio Cipriani soundtrack recycles A Bay of Blood, one of the soldier’s pet bunnies gets laced with cyanide and fed to someone, someone says “you were at each other’s throats like wild geese” giving away what movie D’Amato is ripping off, O’Brien’s character testing his men by dropping a grenade between them and seeing what they’ll do when he isn’t making them salute the flag until they drop a log in their pants, an obstacle course that makes Takeshi’s Castle seem downright polite, a nod to Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and somehow, D’Amato making a war movie without much gore and no nudity. Part of me is thinking that a lot was cut out of this movie, but I kind of know that he was coming down off the high that was Emanuelle and the Cannibals, which had to be like injecting heroin directly into his dick.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Endgame isn’t just my favorite Joe D’Amato movie, it’s also my favorite post-apocalyptic movie ever made. It’s absolutely out of control for the entire movie with blind ninjas being led video game-style by psychics, fishmen all over Laura Gemser and George Eastman not being a bad guy for the whole film. It’s as good as it gets. You can get it from Severin.
I think it’s best that I watch some movies by myself. Like this one. That’s because the minute George Eastman showed up on screen, I let out an audible cheer of pure bliss. No one needs to hear me screaming like that.
2025. A nuclear war has left New York City in ruins, populated by scavengers and telepathic mutants who are hunted and killed by the elite. To keep the people of this world from revolting, the reality game show Endgame has been created, where hunters and gladiators battle to the death in the place of warfare.
Lilith (Black Emanuelle herself, Laura Gemser, credited as Moira Chen!) is a psychic who wants protection for her band of mutants. She hires the best Endgame player ever — Ron Shannon (Al Cliver from Zombi and The Beyond!) — to help. Shannon has his own problems, as he’s in the middle of Endgame and facing off against professional killers like Kurt Karnak (the much loved Eastman, who also co-wrote this film), who was Shannon’s childhood friend and has now become his greatest rival. The last time Shannon and Karnak battled in an Endgame, time ran out before they could determine which man was the best player.
Lilith helps Shannon defeat Karnak, at which point his sponsor and the cameramen show up and ask him to drink Lifeplus on screen. Lilith reaches out to him and he rushes to save her. That’s when he agrees to help her and the mutants she protects.
Karnak has lost his mind due to losing, shooting targets obsessively. Colonel Morgan and his men try to recruit him to their cause while Shannon tries to recruit his own team, including Ninja (Hal Yamanouchi, who in addition to playing Silver Samurai in 2013’s The Wolverine also appears in Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, 2020 Texas Gladiators and 2019: After the Fall of New York as the Rat Eater King!) and Bull (Gabriele Tinti, who was married to Gemser and appeared in nearly every Black Emanuelle movie).
“You’re too famous to disappear in a city that grows smaller every day,” says Colonel Morgan when he catches up to Shannon, asking him to give up Lilith. This leads to a firefight where he’s saved by Karnak! George Eastman as a good guy? Holy shit, I’m fucking in!
If you haven’t guessed by all the shouting and exclamation points, this movie is the perfect combination of everything I look for in film — it’s a ripoff, it’s post-apocalyptic, it shares Italian genre favorites and it’s in a ridiculous world where everyone either dresses like a viking or Dump Matsumoto (1980’s Japanese women’s wrestling bad girl supreme).
Meanwhile, in the wasteland, our heroes come upon mutants, which Professor Levin (oh yeah, he takes care of the telepaths) explains have combined man’s primordial caveman past with feral instincts. Which means, in layman’s terms, that they look like human fish or apes.
Think that’s crazy? They then come upon holy monks who have blinded themselves so that they can be guided by psychics and kill anyone who offends their conception of God. What follows is a scene of black-robed maniacs fighting with machine guns and grenades and knives and motorcycles and man…a cast of hundreds gets killed until Shannon finds the captured psychic and instead of saving him, tosses an axe at his head. All the monks have no idea where they are, wandering around yelling that they are blind as our heroes make their escape. If you think they aren’t going to drive over the head of one of the monks, well, you haven’t been watching Italian genre cinema!
Meanwhile, Lilith explains to Shannon that she keeps one of the young psychic kids basically autistic, because if he starts to experience emotions, he’s liable to wipe out everyone around him.
Then, the professor gets killed in a trap, but asks Shannon to save all of them. But that means Bull discovers that she’s psychic, which means that the entire team learns that everyone is a mutant. Everyone starts arguing before Karnak shows up to let them know that more enemies are on the way. Monkey-faced enemies! And a fish-faced leader who has two women with roped up bare breasts on his modified golf cart! What is going on with this movie?
Ninja and Kovack get killed and Lilith is captured. Karnak offers to help Shannon save her. Lilith reaches out to Shannon, telling him that Karnak only wants gold and then to kill him. Then, the fishman leader tears off Lilith’s clothes, yelling “Look at me while I rape you, dammit!” Shannon asks if she’s OK because he’s seeing flashes and she’s all like, “Yeah, I’m fine,” while a fish mutant slobbers all over her. Umm…
When the guys get there, Lilith is fully clothed and the mutant is passed out on the bed. So are we to believe that she enjoyed it? Or that she just went with it? I guess if you’re looking for woke feminism, a Joe D’Amato movie is probably the last place one should root around.
Then they find Kovack, who the mutants have left inside a wall. They can’t help him escape and he wants to die, so Karnak breaks his neck. He faces off against an entire room of mutants while Shannon and Lilith escape. She can tell that Karnak is in trouble, but not dead, to which Shannon replies “Fate decides the winner of Endgame, not me.”
Lilith reunites with the children and everyone celebrates that they are only ten kilometers from the rendezvous. Of course, the government is waiting to take everyone out. SS logo adorned stormtroopers show up and just start shooting, but Shannon talks Tommy, one of the mutant children, into creating wind storms and telekinetically using a machine gun and an avalanche to kill all of the soldiers. He even levitates a car that crushes several of them and sets a fire that wipes out even more. Then, he forces Colonel Morgan to kill himself.
Lilith asks Shannon to come with them, but he says “She is the future and he is the past.” She leaves while he stays behind in the wasteland with the gold. As he goes to pick up his gold, Karnak comes back and tells him they haven’t played the final round yet. He throws away his gun as we get an awesome long shot of both men, like something out of a western. They rush at one another with knives and the credits roll.
The poster for this film promises “For An Endgame Champion In The Year 2025, There’s Only One Way To Live. Dangerously.” And this film more than lives up that. If you only know D’Amato from his adult work or gorefests like Beyond the Darkness and Antropophagus, you should totally check this one out. Movies like this are why I went from worrying about the end of the world to wishing that it would happen!
Conan the Barbarian and its success just meant that Italians could go back to making the peplum films they made for more than a decade in the 50s. The locations were there, the props were easy and all it took was the germ of an idea to send tons of Italian filmmakers out and about to make their own sword and sorcery movies, like Franco Prosperi’s Gunan, King of the Barbarians and Throne of Fire, Umberto Lenzi’s Ironmaster and Michele Massimo Tarantini’s Sword of the Barbarians.
For my money, no one made a better barbarian movie on a smaller budget than Joe D’Amato with his Ator films. Made from 1982 to 1990, three of these four films were filmed by D’Amato under his David Hills name. The other one was directed by Alfonso Brescia and D’Amato didn’t like it! As for actors, the first three feature Miles O’Keeffe and the fourth has Eric Allan Kramer as his son.
Instead of just being a big dumb lunk like Conan is in the movies — we can discuss Conan being a thief in the books and comics any time you’d like — Ator is also an alchemist, scholar, swordmaster and even a magician who can materialize objects out of nowhere.
We’ve pulled together our past reviews of Ator’s films, added some content and put them all in one place to introduce you to these astounding movies and hopefully get you watching them.
Ator the Fighting Eagle (1982): Once, Ator was just a baby, born with the birthmark that prophesied that he’d grow up to destroy the Spider Cult, whose leader Dakar (a pro wrestler who appeared in Titanes en el Ring against Martín Karadagian) tries to kill before he even gets out of his chainmail diapers.
Luckily, Ator is saved and grows up big, strong and weirdly in love with his sister, Sunya. It turns out that luckily, he’s adopted, so this is only morally and not biologically upsetting. His father allows them to be married, but the Spider Cult attacks the village and takes her, along with several other women.
Ator trains with Griba, the warrior who saved him as a child (he’s played by Edmund Purdom, the dean from Pieces!). What follows are pure shenanigans — Ator is kidnapped by Amazons, almost sleeps with a witch, undertakes a quest to find a shield and meets up with Roon (Sabrina Siani, Ocron from Fulci’s batshit barbarian opus Conquest), a sexy blonde thief who is in love with him.
Oh yeah! Laura Gemser, Black Emanuelle herself, shows up here too. It is a Joe D’Amato movie after all.
Ator succeeds in defeating Dakkar, only to learn that the only reason that Griba mentored him was to use him to destroy his enemy. That said, Ator defeats him too, leaving him to be eaten by the Lovecraftian-named Ancient One, a monstrous spider. But hey, Ator isn’t done yet. He kills that beast too!
Finally, learning that Roon has died, Ator and Sunya go back to their village, ready to make their incestual union a reality. Or maybe not, as she doesn’t show up in the three sequels.
Ator is played by Miles O’Keefe, who started his Hollywood career in the Bo Derek vehicle Tarzan the Ape Man, a movie that Richard Harris would nearly fist fight people over if they dared to bring it up. He’s in all but the last of these films and while D’Amato praised his physique and attitude, he felt that his fighting and acting skills left something to be desired.
Ator the Fighting Eagle pretty much flies by. It does what it’s supposed to do — present magic, boobs, sorcery and swordfights — albeit in a PG-rated film. It’s anything except boring. And it was written by Michele Soavi (Stagefright, The Church, The Sect, Cemetery Man)!
You can watch it on Tubi in either the original or RiffTrax version.
Ator 2 – L’invincibile Orion (1984): Joe D’Amato wanted to make a prehistoric movie like Quest for Fire called Adamo ed Eva that read a lot like 1983’s Adam and Eve vs. The Cannibals. However, once he called in Miles O’Keefe to be in the movie, the actor said that he couldn’t be in the film due to moral and religious reasons. One wonders why he was able to work with Joe D’Amato, a guy who made some of the scummiest films around.
Akronos has found the Geometric Nucleus and is keeping its secret safe when Zor (Ariel from Jubilee) and his men attack the castle. The old king begs his daughter Mila (Lisa Foster, who starred in the Cinemax classic Fanny Hill and later became a special effects artist and video game developer) to find his student Ator (O’Keefe).
Mila gets shot with an arrow pretty much right away, but Ator knows how to use palm leaves and dry ice to heal any wound, a scene which nearly made me fall of my couch in fits of giggles. Soon, she joins Ator and Thong as they battle their way back to the castle, dealing with cannibals and snake gods.
Somehow, Ator also knows how to make a modern hang glider and bombs, which he uses to destroy Zor’s army. After they battle, Ator even wants Zor to live, because he’s a progressive barbarian hero, but the bad guy tries to kill him. Luckily, Thong takes him out.
After all that, Akronos gives the Geometric Nucleus to Ator, who also pulls that old chestnut out that his life is too dangerous to share with her. He takes the Nucleus to a distant land and sets off a nuke.
Yes, I just wrote that. Because I just watched that.
If you want to see this with riffing, it’s called Cave Dwellers in its Mystery Science Theater 3000 form. But man, a movie like this doesn’t really even need people talking over it. It was shot with no script in order to compete with Conan the Destroyer. How awesome is that?
You can get this from Revok or watch Cave Dwellers on Tubi.
Iron Warrior (1988):
I always worry and think, “What is left? Have I truly exhausted the bounds of cinema? Have I seen all there is that is left to see? Will nothing ever really surprise and delight me ever again?” Then I watched Iron Warrior and holy shit you guys — this movie is mindblowing.
Alfonso Brescia made a bunch of Star Trek-inspired Star Wars ripoffs in the late 70’s, like Cosmos: War Of the Planets, Battle Of the Stars, War Of the Robots and Star Odyssey. Before that, he was known for working in the peplum genre with entries such as The Magnificent Gladiator and The Conquest of Atlantis. And some maniacs out there may know him from his Star Wars clone cover version of Walerian Borowczyk’s The Beast — complete with the same actress, Sirpa Lane — called The Beast in Space.
Today, though, we’re here to discuss Brescia taking over the reins of Ator from Joe D’Amato after Ator the Fighting Eagle and Ator 2: The Blade Master. I expected another muddy cave dwelling movie livened up only by nukes and hang gliders. What I received was a movie where a frustrated artist was struggling to break free.
This movie goes back to the beginning of Ator’s life, where we discover that his twin brother was taken at a young age. Now, our hero travels to Dragor (really the Isle of Malta) to do battle with a sorceress named Phaedra (Elisabeth Kazaand, who was in the aforementioned The Beast) her unstoppable henchman, the silver skulled, red bandana wearing Trogar (Franco Daddi, who was the stunt coordinator for both Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and The Curse), who is the Iron Master of the Sword.
Princess Janna (Savina Gersak, who was in War Bus Commando) and Ator (the returning Miles O’Keefe) join forces and man, Janna’s makeup and hair is insane. She has what I can only describe as a ponytail mohawk and has makeup that wouldn’t be out of place on the Jem and the Holograms cartoon.
Imagine, if you will, a low budget sword and sorcery film that has MTV style editing, as well as gusts of wind, constant dolly shots and nausea-inducing zooms. It’s less a narrative film as it is a collection of images, sword fights and just plain weirdness. Like Deeva (Iris Peynado, who you may remember as Vinya, the girl who hooks up with Fred Williamson in Warriors of the Wasteland) saying that she created both Ator and Trogar to be tools of justice? This movie completely ignores the two that came before — and the one that follows it — and I am completely alright with all of it!
Supposedly, D’Amato hated this movie. Lots of people hate on it online, too. Well, guess what? They’re wrong. This is everything that I love about movies and proved to me that there is still some cinematic magic left in the world to find.
How about this for strange trivia? When they made the Conan the Adventurer series in 1997, Ator’s sword was repainted and used as the Sword of Atlantis!
Quest for the Mighty Sword (1990): If there’s a 12 step group for people who watch too many Joe D’Amato movies, well I should be the counselor, helping talk people off the ledge after they think they need to watch Erotic Nights of the Living Deador Eleven Days, Eleven Nights or…hell, I can’t do it. For all people heap scorn on the movies of the man born Aristide Massaccesi, I find myself falling in love more and more with each movie.
D’Amato hated what Brescia did with his creation, so he starts this one off by killing Ator and introducing us to his son. Obviously, Miles O’Keefe isn’t back.
This one has nearly as many titles as Aristide had names: Ator III: The Hobgoblin, Hobgoblin, Quest for the Mighty Sword and Troll 3.
That’s because the costumes from Troll 2 — created by Laura Gemser, who is in this as an evil princess — got recycled and reused in this movie. D’Amato proves that he’s a genius by having whoever is inside those costumes speak.
Let me see if I can summarize this thing. Ator gets killed by the gods because he doesn’t want to give up his magic sword, which he uses to challenge criminals to battles to the death. The only goddess who speaks for him, Dehamira (Margaret Lenzey), is imprisoned inside a ring of fire until a man can save her.
That takes eighteen years, because Ator the son’s mother gave the sorcerer Grindl (the dude wearing the troll costume) her son to raise and the sword to hide. She then asked him for a suicide drink, but he gave her some Spanish Fly and got to gnome her Biblically in the back of his cave before releasing her to be a prostitute and get abused until her son eventually comes and saves her because this is a Joe D’Amato movie and women are there to be rescued, destroy men and be destroyed by men.
This movie is filled with crowd-pleasing moments and seeing as how I watched it by myself, I loved it. Ator (Eric Allan Kramer, Thor in the TV movie The Incredible Hulk Returns and Little John in Robin Hood: Men In Tights) looks like Giant Jeff Daniels and his fighting skills are, at best, clumsy. But he battles a siamese twin robot that shoots sparks, a goopy fire breathing lizard man who he slices to pieces and oh yeah, totally murks that troll/gnome who turned out his mom.
This is the kind of movie where Donald O’Brien and Laura Gemser play brother and sister and nobody says, “How?” You’ll be too busy saying, “Is that Marisa Mell?” and “I can’t believe D’Amato stole the cantina scene!” and “What the hell is going on with this synth soundtrack?”
Here’s even more confusion: D’Amato’s The Crawlers was also released as Troll 3. Then again, it was also called Creepers (it has nothing to Phenomena) and Contamination .7, yet has no connection with Contamination.
Only Joe D’Amato could make two sequels to a movie that has nothing to do with the movie that inspired it and raise the stakes by having nothing to do with the original film or the sequel times two. You can watch this on YouTube.
While there have never been any official Ator toys, check out the amazing custom figures that Underworld Muscle has made:
Thanks for being part of all things Ator. Which of the movies is your favorite?
Italian movie logic: Emanuelle in Bangkok is the sequel to Black Emanuelle and Black Emanuelle 2 is not.
Photojournalist Emanuelle (as always Laura Gemser) and her archaeologist friend Roberto (Gemser’s husband Gabriele Tinti) are on a series of journeys, whether it’s to meet a Thai king or explode caves in Casablanca or meet a special masseuse or being too close to Prince Sanit (Ivan Rassimov) or Roberto forcing her to choose between him and a female lover Debra (Debra Berger, who was in the Tobe Hooper version of Invaders from Mars).
Like all the D’Amato Emanuelle movies, these films go from narrative to travelogue to mondo, with simulated moments of lovemaking standing in stark contrast to real moments of horrifying violence, like a battle between a mongoose and a snake. And that ping pong trick that other movies joke about? This movie has it.
Yet it’s also a movie that synchronizes pistons on a ship with the first lovemaking scene like high art and has a heroine that refuses to be possessed no matter how many men try to destroy her, breaking hearts and remaining independent and perhaps it’s my hope for a better world and my innocence that I see something life-affirming in the Black Emanuelle films, a series of movies devoted to softcore lovemaking interspersed with brutality. But hey — that’s me.
The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust will be showing five horror films at the Harris Theater in downtown Pittsburgh from January 1-6, 2022.
Click on any of the titles of the movies to see our reviews, as we saw several of these at Fantastic Fest this year.
Saturday, January 1 — The Thing: Kick off Januscary with a FREE screening of The Thing when you purchase tickets to the other films in this series! Do we have to tell you just how important this movie is? I sure hope not!
Saturday, January 1 – Thursday, January 6 — Hellbender: Toby Poser, John Adams, and their daughters Zelda and Lulu made The Deeper You Dig and this film follows that with the tale of a mother and daughter who share a love of metal, isolation and witchcraft before the lur eof power takes hold. Get more info here.
Sunday, January 2 – Monday, January 3 — Night Drive: Russell is a driver in Los Angeles who’s reeling from a series of bad decisions. While his life seems to be caught in a downward spiral, a business proposition from an alluring but enigmatic passenger named Charlotte proves too good to turn down. Get more info here.
Sunday, January 2 — Eyes of Fire: The seminal American folk horror film, unavailable on home video for decades, is playing JanuScary as a new 4K restoration from Severin Films and AGFA. An adulterous preacher is ejected from a small British colony with his motley crew of followers, who make their way downriver to establish a new settlement but wander into the heart of darkness in a film that definitely inspired The Witch. Get more info here.
Tuesday, January 4 — Let the Wrong One In: Matt is a little too nice for his own good. When he discovers that his older brother Deco has turned into a vampire, he’s faced with a dilemma: Will he risk his own life to help his sibling, with blood being thicker than water? Also — Giles from Buffy is in this. Ticket info is here.
Wednesday, January 5 — We’re All Going to the World’s Fair: Casey, an isolated high schooler, has decided to take the World’s Fair Challenge, a role-playing horror game with the alleged power to enact real-world body modifications and emotional effects. Showtimes and more info are here.
The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s Harris Theater is one of the most active arts facilities in the region showing art films nearly every day of the year. Formerly known as the Art Cinema, the Harris Theater represents a milestone in the redevelopment of Liberty Avenue. The Art Cinema was the first moving picture house in Pittsburgh to commercially show art movies until competition from other city theaters led to its conversion to an adult movie house in the 1960s. As part of its mission to transform the Cultural District, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust purchased and restored the facility. That may make us sad a little — yes, we love that Pittsburgh got nicer downtown but we do love a scuzzy theater — but hey, the Harris is BYOB!
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