One of the intriguing things about Joe D’Amato is how often the women in his movies turn the tables on the men, whether through supernatural, emotional or sexual (or some combination of them all) ways. Emanuelle and Francoise is a great example, as even though things don’t necessarily work out all that well for the lead, she does get her revenge — twice — on George Eastman’s character and ultimately is the winner of their battle of wills.
Filmed in New Orleans, Dangerous Obsession is the story of Tony, who has lost $10,000 in a poker game and has just 24 hours to pay back his debt. To do so, he agrees to steal a sports car and kidnap Liza (Carmen Di Pietro, War Baby), a television host. Of course things work out as they do in a D’Amato movie and they’re attracted to one another, so they end up baking the potato, as they say, but this also works out like a D’Amato movie as she drugs Tony, handcuffs him to ger bed and makes him her sex toy effectively turning the tables on the expectations of the viewer.
Even when Tony is released, he’s still in love with her. Her mental state is obviously deranged, but Tony knows — that’s pretty much the kind of drugs you can’t get anywhere else.
The really strange thing about 90s D’Amato is you never know if you’re going to get a movie where he just knocks out a paycheck or one that has interesting camera angles and feels like an effort. This would happily fit into the latter and is on the level of the first Eleven Days, Eleven Nights movies.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Man, I love this movie. We wrote about it all the way back around October 30, 2018 and I still watch it at least once a year. Stay tuned — there’s even a drink that goes with this movie.
Originally called Rosso Sangue (Red Blood), this movie is also known as Zombie 6: Monster Hunter, Horrible, The Grim Reaper 2 and Anthropophagus 2. This really has nothing to do with Anthropophagus (well, D’Amoto and Eastman were involved there, too and that movie ends with Eastman’s guts all over the place and this one starts that way), as it’s more of a Halloweenripoff. And I don’t mean that as an insult. It’s actually my third favorite of the sequels.
Mikos Stenopolis (Eastman) starts off being chased by the Vatican priest (Edmund Purdom, of all people) who created him. So let’s get this crazy set-up out of the way: a Greek monster who can’t be killed because his blood coagulates very quickly was created by the Roman Catholic church somewhere and when that maniac escaped, he ended up in some small American town that only cares about the game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Los Angeles Rams, so I’m just going to assume that they’re in New Castle or Zelienople.
The chase leads to a fence where Mikos is impaled. He makes his way to the front door of the Bennett house, holding his bloody guts as he passes out. He’s revived in a local hospital — shades of Haddonfield Memorial — and escapes after murdering a nurse with a drill. This being an Italian film, that entire murder appears in great detail.
The priest — let’s call him Father Loomis, cousin of the other Father Loomis in Prince of Darkness — informs the authorities that there’s only one way to kill Mikos: destroy his cerebral mass.
Synchronicity rears its head when Mr. Bennett, in a hurry to get home and watch Terry Bradshaw thread the needle to Lynn Swann, hits Mikos with his car. He just keeps going. When he gets home, he’s brusque with his wife and kids. Seems that his daughter, Katia, has a spinal condition and must stay in traction. All she wants to do is use a compass to continually draw the same drawing over and over again, while her brother Willy is obsessed that the Boogeyman is coming to kill him. Guess what, Willy? You’re right.
Mikos spends the rest of the movie randomly killing anyone who gets in his way, like a young Michele Soavi playing a biker and a butcher who gets the top of his head sawed off. He finally makes his way to the house. Peggy is on her way to watch the kids when she gets a pickaxe to the head. And the other woman who was watching them? Well, she gets her head forced into a lit oven that bakes the flesh off of her face in an extended sequence before being stabbed in the neck with a pair of scissors.
Willy goes all Tommy Doyle and runs to get help while Katia finally frees herself from her bed. She stabs him in the eyes with her compass and leads the killer on a chase throughout the house, using loud music to distract him. The priest arrives and struggles with Mikos, just in time for Katia to chop off the killer’s head with a ceremonial axe.
The police arrive late, but Katia assures her little brother that everything will be fine as the camera reveals that she is holding Mikos’ bloody head.
Absurd inspired the German black metal band who took their name, who eventually went from watching gore films to killing people for real as their music went further and further into far right extremism.
Your enjoyment of this film will be colored by how much you like gore, how much you understand that Italian movies are often very hard to understand and how much you’re willing to forgive a film. Personally, I loved it. The oven kill scene is really uncomfortable to watch and the gore is incredibly effective.
Severin Films re-released this film with all of their trademark quality and insanity. It’s the first uncut release of the film in the U.S. and features an interview with Eastman and Soavi, as well as a bonus soundtrack CD. They’ve also rereleased Anthropophagus. I love that Severin gives films as disreputable as these all the care and concern that Criterion would to a movie from a director much more esteemed and talented (but so much more boring).
BONUS! Here’s a recipe to drink while you watch this movie on Tubi.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We first posted this on February 23, 2018 and I think about this film almost every single day. I’m deranged.
Legend has it that David Cronenberg for the idea for the torture TV channel that lends its name to his opus Videodrome from this Joe D’Amato film, which is also known as Trap Them and Kill Them. Think of this — a film that upset Cronenberg for its mash-up of snuff, cannibalism and sex. Take it from me. This one totally lives up to its promise. Or lives down. You almost have to appreciate it for how lurid it is, as if it just screams at you, “I am the kind of movie you should feel ashamed for watching.”
First, a history lesson. This film isn’t about the French film Emmanuelle, which starred Sylvia Kristel and had an extra “m” in the title. Nope, that series was made to cash in on the trend and features Laura Gemser, an Indonesian-Dutch actress who is more dark brown than black. But why quibble? This is exploitation filmmaking, after all. The Black Emanuelle films follow the formula of the original, all about a young woman discovering her sexual identity. But I have no idea how they morphed into a series where she becomes an investigative journalist who increasingly discovers more and more depraved behavior. Is there a thin line between swingers clubs and cannibals in the jungle? I would hope that there is. After five increasingly batshit Joe D’Amato vehicles, Gemser teamed with Bruno Mattei for two women in prison movies starring the titular heroine.
It’s really Emanuelle in America that sets up the craziness of these films, as D’Amato casts her up as a journalist that goes from learning how the rich and famous have sex to seeking out a snuff film conspiracy to giving up on journalism altogether when her story gets, well, snuffed.
Somewhere in between that picture and this one, our heroine has had a change of heart and is back in the yellow journalism game.
We start in a New York City mental hospital, where Emanuelle is undercover, looking for a lesbian nurse who is abusing her patients. Her idea of undercover is wearing lots of makeup and carrying around a stuffed animal. And how does she get her info? Well, once she learns about a girl who was raised by the Apiaca, a tribe of cannibals thought to be lost, she meets the girl and has sex with her. We realize this girl is a cannibal when she bites a girl’s nipples off within her first minute of screen time. That’s the kind of movie this is, one where the heroine makes out with a girl who just ate a piece of someone’s tit.
Again — I’m warning you. You’re in for some real scum here.
She contacts Professor Mark Lester (Gabriele Tinti, the husband of Gemser who also appeared in Enter the Devil and Lisa and the Devil), a curator at the National History Museum, and gets him to join her on a visit to the Amazon. How does she convince him? Well, she has sex with him. Come on. Get with the program.
They’re also joined by several others, including Isabel, MacKenzie (Donald O’Brien, Dr. Butcher, M.D.), Sister Angela and Maggie (Nieves Navarro, All the Colors of the Dark).
The film alternates between Emanuelle in danger and Emanuelle having sex. There’s a scene that defies logic with Emanuelle and Isabel making out while a monkey steals their cigarettes, lights one up and watches. Yes. A real, honest-to-goodness monkey.
Look — if there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching cannibal films. most of the white folks aren’t on the straight and narrow. MacKenzie is really after some diamonds and his wife, Maggie, is just here to sleep with the natives.
Soon, much like Shakespeare — if the bard had dared to make a film that combines a Cinemax After Dark film and an Italian gutmuncher — everyone dies except Isobel, Lester and our girl. She covers her body with tattoos — pay attention, Dr. Butcher, M.D. — and convinces the natives that she is a goddess. Everyone escapes on a rubber raft and gets over it, surely after plenty more sex.
Trivia note: American hardcore band Trap Them take their name from this film.
Gemser would become a costume designer after acting, working on several films, including Beyond Darkness, Quest for the Mighty Sword and Door to Silence. She also created the most demented costumes ever for the movie Troll 2. And she also was responsible for this, which I found thanks to the Found Footage Festival:
Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals isn’t the kind of adult film that’ll get you in the mood, unless you’re a maniac. But when you get bloody peanut butter and sexy chocolate together, you get a movie that should not, cannot and yet does exist.
After all of that, if want to watch Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals for yourself, Severin has released it on blu-ray with all the attention that it deserves. Make that more than deserves.
A bunch of small time hoods rob a grocery store for five grand without realizing that it’s a protected mob store. On the run, they hide in an adult bookstore, which by the fate of Italian exploitation movies is run by Lorna (Anna-Maria Clementi, Sister Angela from Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals) the girlfriend of the same mobster they’ve already screwed over. They kidnap her and head for Canada, but instead end up at the home of three college kids — Frank (Christian Borromeo, who was in another very similar movie, House on the Edge of the Park), Sue (Annj Goren, who was also in Hard Sensation and Porno Holocaust) and Faye (Brigitte Petronio, Cindy from House on the Edge of the Park) — and treat them exactly like you’d expect teenagers to be treated in a Joe D’Amato movie.
Written by George Eastman* and having softcore and hardcore versions, this is worth watching for the streets of Times Square in the late 70s, filled with several great marquees. D’Amato was also this film’s cinematographer under his real name Aristide Massaccessi.
*IMDB lists Tito Carpi, who hundred-plus writing credits include Tentacles, Giovannona Long-Thigh, Escape from the Bronx and so many more, as the writer.
Caracas, Venezuela-based filmmaker Eduardo Rodriguez studied film at Florida State University and bowed with his first short in 2002. He’s since made five low-budget features, his last being, You’re Not Alone (2020). Here, in his sixth feature, he weaves a tale about Siri, a single mother, and Eve, her daughter, traveling on their way to a new life in their new home. Along the way they pick up Iris, a female hitchhiker. Then Siri goes missing. Then Siri and Iris soon discover Eve has been kidnapped by a mysterious presence in the lurking in the desolate woods.
The film’s small, unknown cast is headed by Johnny Whitworth (Empire Records; Cage Wallace from CBS TV’s The 100) and Najarra Townsend (as Siri; the action-indie Abducted and the horror-comedy Cold Feet).
Recently screening at Fantastic Fest 2021 in Austin, Texas — some of those films we reviewed with our “Fantastic Fest Week” of reviews — we are pleased to announce that Uncork’d Entertainment has picked up The Darkness of the Road for distribution as a digital stream and DVD on December 14. Other recent Uncork’d Entertainment released we’ve reviewed include Death Alley, The Mutation, Stalker in the House, Time Now, and The Handler.
The Darkness of the Road is yet another impressive film coming out of South America. We also enjoyed our recent watch of the awesome on-the-budget apoc throwback, Carrion (2021).
Somehow, someway Joe D’Amato got Margaux Hemingway, Apollonia (yes, the female star of Purple Rain) and Dan McVicar (The Bold and the Beautiful) in one of his movies, had the budget to shoot in New Orleans and responded by delivering a film that has less sleaze than normal but still doesn’t skimp on the nudity that this movie promised to rental and cable viewers.
Ellen Foster (Hemingway) has watched her husband commit a murder and goes on the run. He sends a hitman after her in the guise of a journalist with whom she has a Mardi Gras affair with but of course, things are not as they seem.
If you spent your small Friday hours watching Cinemax or Showtime in the 90s, you know exactly the kind of movie that you’re getting into. That’s not a bad thing, as making these kind of movies was something that D’Amato could — and often did, seemingly — in his sleep. This time, he just has a more expensive cast.
Also the most attractive woman on the set — apologies to the lovely Ms. Hemmingway and Ms. Kotero — was Laura Gemser, off camera and designing the costumes that were just cast to the floo during the sex scenes.
Friar Tazio da Velletri desires Lisa (Christa Linder, whose career takes her from appearing with Blue Demon in Invasion of the Dead and in Boris Karloff’s last movie The Incredible Invasionto showing up in the Westen Day of Anger, the Carlos Enrique Taboad quasi-giallo Vagabundo en la Lluvia, the Eurospy movies Kill Me Gently and Countdown to Doomsday, Harry Reems’ last adult film Bel Ami (she had a body double), Fulci’s Dracula in the Provinces before a move to America and being in Hooper and an episode of Trapper John M.D.; talk about an eclectic resume!) but she’s married and you know, he’s a priest.
He spreads the rumor that he’s a famous priest able to drive the lust out of women, which brings plenty of lusty women his way, and you know the rest, right?
Joe D’Amato was also worked on Sollazzevoli storie di mogli gaudenti e mariti penitenti – decameron № 69 at the same time as this movie and after a right with the producers, he left the film to be finished by Romano Scandariato.
Tara Buckman blasted me into puberty when she showed up in the Lamborghini with Adrienna Beabeau in Cannonball Run and for that we should always remember and thank her. Well, maybe not totally into puberty — I was nine — but I finally understood why guys in movies were going crazy for women.
Frem memorably playing the mother who gets her throat slit in Silent Night, Deadly Night to roles in Hooper, Xtro II: The Second Encounter and showing up in D’Amato’s Blue Angel Cafe and the unforgettable Night Killer, Ms. Buckman has won me over.
In High Finance Woman — a title so ridiculous that I often drive around yelling it at people just to get their reaction — she plays Brenda Baxter, a successful broken who sleeps with people to get insider trading information. People like Albert (Louie Elias, the older brother of James Stacy, which means he was the ex-brother-in-law of both Connie Stevens and Kim Darby; he also had a scar on his chin from a fight scene gone awry on Spartacus when Kirk Douglas drowned him a soup cauldron), her rich man who is the only mentor she’s ever had.
Then she meets Alex (Charlie Edwards, whose only other role is in Hitcher in the Dark and God bless Filmirage), a poor journalist hired to write a story about her career. They fall in love, she reveals to him that she’s basically a high-priced escort for her clients, they break up, she starts dating Albert, Alex proposes, she breaks it off with Albert and then finds out that — surprise! — he’s the father of the man she’s engaged to, so Albert pays her off to never see her son again.
Then Albert dies and his mistress gets all the money. And that would be…Brenda, which means that she may never end up with Alex until his new job sends him to interview another high finance woman who is…yes, Brenda. Oh what a tangled web we weave, Joe D’Amato.
As with all 1990s Joe movies, Laura Gemser makes a cameo and yes, she’s a prostitute. But hey — free trip to America, right?
Look, some day Vinegar Syndrome is going to re-release all of these D’Amato movies for $40 in a cool slipcase in the proper aspect ratio and people are going to be losing their brains over getting them. Get in on the basement floor now, find them online and just have some fun. They’re not great, but they have great synth sax, incredible overacting and amazing posters. What else do you want?
Beyond his two decameron films, Joe D’Amato also made this commedia sexy all’italiana about a gynecologist who — despite his average looks — has a line of women who can’t wait for him to see to them. Most of the Italian sex comedies I’ve seen get lost in translation and feel dated — which makes sense, as they were made in the mid 70s in a foreign country — but this one actually made me laugh.
Dr. Giovanardi (Renzo Montagnani, When Women Had Tails, When Women Lost Their Tails) is brought in by Doctor Lo Bianco who is hiding out from his debts on an island. A libertine married to a lesbian — how progressive for 1977 — he gets set up by his secretary Pamela (Paola Senatore, Like Rabid Dogs, Ricco the Mean Machine) to put out for a wide array of clients, giving some the babies they want and others the exact type of lovemaking they adore, including one client who wants violent aardvarking so badly that she punches our hero right in the face as hard as she can, knocking him across the room.
The most amusing thing is that Montagnani played the same role as an irresistible male several times despite appearing in no way like a man who should be doing this.
Ugo Moretti wrote the Carroll Baker giallo Paranoia AKA Orgasmo and for that, we should be thankful. This is another of his scripts — based on The Alcove by Judith Wexley* — which is the story of Elio De Silveris (Al Cliver), a war veteran, who returns from the Second Abyssinian War with a prisoner of war. That POW, Zerbal, ends up being Laura Gemser and you know exactly where a Gemser and D’Amato movie is going.
While the master of the house was in combat, his wife Alessandra (Lilli Carati, Escape from Women’s Prison) had an affair with Elio’s secretary Wilma (Annie Belle, who dated Cliver from 1975 to 1978; she’s also in House On the End of the Park and Absurd). Now that he’s back home working on his book, Mrs. Elio is getting with the African princess and who can blame her?
There’s also Elio’s son and a gardner who are part of the coupling and decoupling in the house, which soon becomes a place of jealousy and then Elio gets the bright idea that he should start making adult movies — in 1937! — and soon there’s a power struggle for who really is in control. And then Zerbal enacts a ritual to prove once and for all who really is the master in this whole love square. Or hexagon. Or man, who knows, it’s a lot of people.
When D’Amato is making an adult film that works, it really works. This is one of those, a movie where the story is just as important as all the horizontal moments.
*Much like most of the quotes in Fulci movies and the Necronomicon, this book does not exist.
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