Starting her career as a dancer in the Beastie Boys’ video for “No Sleep till Brooklyn,” Ruth Collins has been in so many touchpoints in my movie-watching life. There are Psychos in Love, Firehouse, Doom Asylum and appearances in three Robert Findlay movies, Lurkers, Blood Sisters and Prime Evil. It just stands to reason that she’d be in not just one but two Joe D’Amato movies — this one and ElevenDays, Eleven Nights 2.
in Any Time, Any Play, she’s a nightclub singer named Kelly whose ex comes back to work at the club, which means that she decides to sleep with anyone and everyone — hmm, Any Time, Any Play — until they get back together, which upsets the mob bosses that really run the place.
Shot around the same time as Passion’s Flower in the same area — and even sets — as the first Eleven Days, Eleven Nights, this one suffers by comparison. Laura Gemser does show up in a cameo as a saleswoman and as always breaks my heart.
Otherwise, this is one of the 90s D’Amato movies that only lunatics like me need see.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We wrote about this movie all the way back on September 27, 2018 so we added some new info to this article as we celebrate a week of Joe D’Amato.
A film with many AKAs — Anno 2020: I Gladiatori del Futuro (Year 2020 Gladiators of the Future), Futoro, 2020: The Rangers of Texas, 2020: Freedom Fighters and Sudden Death — the film we’re going to call 2020 Texas Gladiators starts with a long battle after the end of the world, bringing you in before there’s even any story. Who even cares if there’s a story? People are getting killed left and right!
We have 5 heroes here — who would assume are the Texas Gladiators– and they are Nisus (Al Cliver, Endgame, Warriors of the Year 2072), Catch Dog (Daniel Stephen, War Bus which is a totally different movie than War Bus Commando), Jab (Harrison Mueller, She), Red Wolfe (Hal Yamanouchi, Rat Eater King from 2019: After the Fall of New York) and Halakron (Peter Hooten, the original Dr. Strange!).
They have to save this monastery, but they just sit and watch as more people get attacked, a priest gets crucified and a nun gets so upset over everything that she grabs a piece of glass to slice her own throat What are they waiting for? Are they just going to watch everyone die?
Then, to make them look even more inept, Catch Dog tries to rape one of the survivors! You guys are the heroes? Well, at least they kick him out after that. And that unfortunate woman is Maida (Sabrina Siani, Oncron from Conquest!), who hooks up with Nisus. Years later, they’re all settled down, the rest of the guys have gone their own way and Catch Dog has started an evil gang. Just like your friends from college. Except that Catch Dog hasn’t forgotten anything.
Of course, Catch Dog’s gang attacks the town where Nisus lives with his family. Surprisingly, they fight back the invaders, but then a vaguely Nazi army attacks and defeats our hero, shooting him across the forehead. Then the army kills and rapes everyone and everything, taking the town apart.
The leader of this army, Black One (Donald O’Brien, Dr. Butcher M.D. himself!) tells everyone that he’s in charge. They then take Nisus and force him to watch his wife get raped. This movie has more violent sex than — oh, Joe D’Amato and George Eastman directed it? Yeah. It figures.
In one of my go-to reference guides to Italian exploitation, Spaghetti Nightmares. D’Amato says that Eastman “didn’t feel confident enough in the action scenes and so I dealt with those, leaving him to the direction of the actors. But in this case, the name recorded at the Ministry (director’s credit) was mine.”
Later in that book, Eastman pretty much makes anyone who likes these movies feel bad about their chocies: “These (post-atomic) films, which were made in the wake of the various Mad Max movies, were decidedly crummy. The set designs were poor….and the genre met a swift and well-deserved death. I only wrote these awful movies for financial reasons….no attempt at originality was made at all.”
So what happens with our hero? He attacks one of the guys and gets shot a hundred times and dies. Is that the end of the movie? Nope. Instead, our old friends Halakron and Jab find Maida, who has been sold to a gambler, and Halakron wins her in a game of Russian Roulette. They all get busted for a bar fight, where they get tortured in salt mines. Luckily, Red Wolfe comes to save them.
Catch Dog’s gang attacks, but our heroes fake their deaths. They also meet up with a gang of Native Americans. Jab has to defeat one of them in battle to get them to join with our heroes. Of course, he wins. He’s Jab, bro.
Maida gets to kill Catch Dog, but Jab doesn’t make it. He dies in his friend’s arms because this is an Italian movie and even the heroes can die. Luckily, Halakron gets to kill Black One with a hatchet. So there’s that.
Halkron, Red Wolfe and the Native Americans win the day, save everyone and then ride off into the sunset, because post-apocalyptic Italian movies are just spaghetti westerns with shoulder pads. Italy is Texas. Texas is Italy.
There are better post-apocalyptic films than this. But there are worse ones, too. It’s a hard one to get, but luckily Revok can help you.
EDITOR’S NOTE: They don’t come much rougher than this movie, which we originally posted about on August 5, 2018. As a bonus, there’s a cocktail recipe to go with the movie! Drink up!
I’ve recently been reading the book Satanic Panic: Pop Culture Paranoia in the 1980’s and reminded of my own misspent youth. In sixth grade, a teacher knew that I was religious and thought I could warn my fellow classmates about the dangers of evil music and movies. He gave me a mimeographed sheet of heavy metal (and non-metal) bands to study and by the time I got to Black Sabbath, my soul was sold to rock and roll.
By eleventh grade, I was squarely in the devil’s camp in the eyes of my teachers. My love for bands like King Diamond and Danzig, along with my predilection for drawing Leatherface in class, marked me as a subject of interest. Obviously, I was doing drugs and black mass rituals — I could easily discuss Dungeons & Dragons, too. I was to be more feared the dead-eyed athletes who would soon realize their lives were peaking at 17 while mine hadn’t even started yet.
It’s to those times in my youth, when I wanted to escape my hometown and sat in my room blaring Samhain’s “November Coming Fire” and reading Fangoria, that this movie perfectly fits in. It is disgusting. It is unrepentant. It has no moral or social value. It is filled with the kind of gore than makes churches throw VHS tapes into a blazing bonfire. In short, it is everything amazing and wonderful and metal about horror movies.
The movie starts with two Germans exploring a beautiful Greek beach. Someone emerges from the ocean and murders them. Meanwhile, five travelers are joined by Julie (Tisa Farrow, who some may know as the sister of Mia, but we all know her as Anne from Zombi 2), who asks for a ride to the island. However, Carol (Zora Kerova, Cannibal Ferox, The New York Ripper) uses her tarot cards to learn that something bad will happen. No one listens to her.
The pregnant Maggie (Serena Grandi from Delirium) stays behind on the boat and is abducted by the killer, who quickly beheads a sailor.
The island is in ruins and completely abandoned, except for a woman in black, who writes go away in the dust. Upon finding a rotting corpse that has been eaten, everyone runs back to the boat, which is floating unmanned, then goes to the house of Julie’s friends. There, only the family’s blind daughter Henriette has survived.
The young girl panics and attacks Daniel, but when she is calmed, she tells everyone of the maniac that is stalking the island. Daniel is wounded and needs medicine, so Andy and Arnold head to town. Meanwhile, Daniel flirts with Julie, which causes Carol to run into town and Julie to follow her. While all this drama is going on, the killer rips out Danel’s throat.
Everyone travels to a mansion that belonged to Klaus Wortman, who died along with his wife and child in a shipwreck. This caused his sister, the woman in black, to lose her mind. And to hammer that point home, we soon see her hang herself.
Everything seems like its going to get better when a boat rifts to shore. On board, Julie finds Klaus’ journal. It turns out that he is alive…and the killer! Soon, Maggie is confronted by him and we learn that it’s George Eastman, who is in so many awesome Italian movies, such as Baba Yaga, 2019: After the Fall of New York, The New Barbarians, Blastfighter, Rabid Dogs, Hands of Steel, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, oh man! So many amazing films! This is his star-making role though and he really goes for it. He has a flashback where we learn how he accidentally stabbed his wife while trying to convince her that they should eat their dead son to survive. After eating his family, he went insane. Soon, Klaus breaks out of his flashback reverie, stabs Arnold and rips out and eats the unborn baby inside Maggie’s belly. Holy fucking shit, this movie!
I wish that those teachers who thought I was a Satanic terror in 1988 could see me now, jumping up and down with glee at 2:44 AM on a school night screaming “GEORGE EASTMAN!” while drinking a beer and holding a small dog.
What follows can’t really top that, but fuck it if Eastman isn’t going to try, including eating his own intestines after Andy hits him the stomach with a pickaxe! That’s a commitment to your role!
The American version of this film, The Grim Reaper, has 35 cuts in an attempt to get an R rating. That’s correct – nine minutes are missing, including the baby being devoured and the killer eating himself. It just ends when he is stabbed in the stomach. It also replaces the electronic Italian score with the music from Kingdom of the Spiders.
Director Joe D’amato and George Eastman would return in a spiritual sequel called Absurd. If you want to see this, grab the insanely awesome Severin Video rerelease or watch it as The Grim Reaper on Tubi.
EDITOR’S NOTES: We originally featured this kind of, sort of Emanuelle film back on May 17, 2021. It’s a movie that George Eastman claims he did instead of going to get a cappuccino that morning. It’s way better than that.
This movie is quite literally the Batman and Superman of Italian sleaze filmmaking uniting to create some art. Those two men have many, many names, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll use the names that they used most often: Joe D’Amato and Bruno Mattei.
Producer Franco Gaudenzi wanted to bring the movie The Wild Pussycatto Italy, but it would have never made it past the Italian censors. For some reason, if the movie was made in Italy, it would pass. This is the country where it’s legal to call your movie Zombi 2, but illegal to use Mrs. Ward’s name. Let’s forget the complexities of law when it comes to exploitation cinema and move on.
D’Amato and Mattei took up the challenge of remaking this movie for Italian audiences with both writing the script and co-directing the picture, even if only D’Amato got directing credit. What was important for the producers was that the film could play theaters and it passed the Italian censorship board on November 5, 1975 after some lesbian elements and scenes with sodomy were removed.
Ironically, when this was brought to Switzerland by Erwin C. Dietrich, he added in actual hardcore scenes with French actress Brigitte Lahaie (who is inFascination) and dubbed it into German, releasing it as Foltergarten der Sinnlichkeit (Torture Garden of Sensuality) and Die Lady mit der Pussycat (The Lady with the Pussycat).
Truly, scumbag pictures bring all the nations of the world together, do they not?
Francoise (Patrizia Gori, The Return of the Exorcist) has had enough of the abuse from her gambler cad of a husband Carlo (George Eastman!), so she jumps in front of a train. Her sister Emanuelle — no, not Laura Gemser just yet, she’s played here by Rosemarie Lindt from Salon Kitty — gets revenge by drugging Carlo and restraining him in a soundproof room. There, she teases him through two-way mirrored glass as he’s forced to watch her make love to numerous men and women, all while he’s repeatedly dosed with LSD.
Finally, Emanuelle enters the room and attempts to castrate Carlo, who has been repeatedly fantasizing about killing her and finally does so for real. His joy is short-lived as while he’s hiding in the secret room, he gets locked in and the police closed down the crime scene for thirty days, basically leaving him to die.
Also known as Emanuelle’s Revenge, Blood Vengeance and Demon Rage, this is exactly the kind of movie that you’d imagine D’Amato and Mattei would make together, filled with numerous sex scenes, frequently spinning and zooming camera angles and a cannibalistic feast sequence.
Back when we reviewed Emanuelle In America, the guys at Severin said, “If you thought that was rough, watch this one.” Their release has a great George Eastman interview in which he says that D’Amato had the ability to do bigger and better things, but preferred doing ten B movies a year than one A film. You can get the Severin edition of this film and see just how good-looking a completely irredeemable piece of trash — I say that with love — can look.
Written, directed and filmed by Joe D’Amato — using the name Michael Wotruba — this film wasn’t seen much in the U.S. until Lightning Video released it in 1985 as Heroes In Hell.
Look, I saw the poster and I know that this was the second movie in a row that D’Amato made with Klaus Kinski, but I have to tell you, when Klaus strode on screen as SS-Brigadeführer Kaufmann, dressed in the finest death’s head costume that a beyond low budget Italian film can get, I jumped out of my chair and yelled, “Klaus Kinski is here!” Honestly, it’s such a good thing that we moved to the country and not the city where neighbors heard frequent screams of “Kinski! It’s Kinski!” and “I love Joe Don Baker!” and “I want to be George Eastman’s best friend!”
A group of American POW’s played by mostly Italians* have escaped from a German POW camp into the French countryside and are part of a plan to capture Kinski that involves stolen uniforms and escaping the very same soldiers that captured them before. And like Shakespeare, well, nearly everyone dies.
But you know, for forty minutes of B-roll footage, you get ten minutes of Kinski flipping out over Renaissance artwork, so you know, I’ll pay that fee.
*I mean, Lars Bloch — AKA Carlos Ewing — is Danish. Paul Muller is Swiss. And Rosemarie Lindt is German. The funny thing is, Both Block and Ewing’s names are in the credits even though they’re the same person. But hey — Kinski’s name is listed as Klaus Kinsky.
I would not advise you to watch sixty Joe D’Amato movies in a week. In fact, I don’t know why I do these things to myself, yet here we are, a finish line is somewhat close and I am both happy and sad and somewhat relieved that this is all nearly done.
What we have here is yet another Daniele Stroppa written affair for Joe, set in New Orleans again, as Jeff gets out of prison and pretty much instantly hooks up with Linda (Kristine Rose), who just so happens to be the wife of his brother Gordon and now they have to work together at his…well, it’s like a filling station or a hotel or a pharmacy or a place to get broiled crawfish.
I also love that in the middle of all the sexual tension or drama that happens in this place, there’s a sign that says that they rent Nintendo tapes which is as 1990s as it gets. Not cartridges or games. Tapes.
This all leads to not only a love triangle between brothers and Linda, but when a niece comes to visit — Jamie played by Cristine Frischnertz, who was also in D’Amato’s Any Time, Any Play — it becomes some other strange Italian shape that we only see in the softcore films of D’Amato. We should all be so lucky, but to be honest, the older I get, the idea of juggling any more than just my wife feels exhausting. How do these guys do it?
Jeff is played by Robert LeBrosse, who was also in 11 Days 11 Nights Part 3, Three for One, Deep Blood, War Baby, Any Time, Any Play, David Schmoeller’s Netherworld — which feels on brand — and the Coen Brothers movie Miller’s Crossing, which does not. His brother Gordon is actor Jack Ciolino, who only made this one movie, and probably still shows the VHS tape to relatives but fast forwards past all the softcore sex and synth.
Predators of the Antilles was released in the U.S. as Sexy Pirates and it’s the last non-adult film that D’Amato would direct. So how strange that this film is a throwback to old school swashbuckling with barely dirty nudity and sex scenes for a man who just spent five years filming Rocco Siffredi’s yam bag up close.
Joe also knows that if you want to make a fun adult-oriented pirate movie, you need a gorgeous leading lady. He ably succeeds with the casting of Anita Rinaldi, who was also in Top Model, and whose adult career took her to producing and directing. She’s Lady Elena Hamilton and her goal is to rescue her husband no matter what it takes.
What it takes means hiring her own crew, as the king won’t negotiate with pirates. So she asks Captain Graham to take her to Tortuga to enlist the legendary gentleman pirate Thomas Butler with the promise of offering herself to him biblically if he helps her rescue her husband. Shockingly — and keep in mind Joe D’Amato directed this — this doesn’t happen in the very next scene.
So with her husband being sold to the evil Don Diego de la Vega, a team of pirates is put together to rescue the nobleman, including Butler’s woman Pilar, an explosives expert, a monstrous protector for Elena, a sharpshooter and even a martial arts expert named Kato played by the astoundingly named Whu Tang Tung.
If this was your first D’Amato film, you may wonder why we did an entire week of his films. For those of us along for a much longer voyage, this elicits a smile, as we’re seeing him tone it down one last time. Sadly, D’Amato died of a heart attack on January 23, 1999. According to Luigi Cozzi, his death happened unexpectedly while he was busy preparing a new film. His last film? So on brand it was an X-rated version of Showgirls called Showgirl, starring Eva Henger and Nacho Vidal.
When an ex-model named Emy (Cinzia Roccaforte) is left alone by her husband (Jason Saucier, who ends up in a lot of late D’Amato movies like Top Model and The Crawlers, as well as Lenzi’s Hitcher in the Dark), she decides to make a cocktail and watch Antropophagus because, look, this movie is based in the reality of a Joe D’Amato movie where gorgeous women wear incredibly expensive lingeries while watching George Eastman eat people.
That’s when Roy (David D’Ingeo, who is also in the scummiest giallo there may be, Angel: Black Angel, and Argento’s Phantom of the Opera) comes in and kidnaps her at gunpoint.
Of course, beyond also kidnapping her sister Francesca, he also decides to take advantage of our heroine, but this is an Italian movie and she’s going to end up falling for the guy because, look, you don’t watch D’Amato movies and think, “How progressive.*”
So anyways — Roy needs fifty thousand for Emy and her sister, but the banks are closed for the weekend, and a housekeeper just got shot in the head, and then they decide to throw a party for reasons that I can’t figure out other than it allows Roy to sleep with Emy’s friend Dana, as all adult films demand multiple couplings even if they are softcore. And oh yes, Roy has the same lover as Emy’s husband, the mysterious Angela (Lisa Comshaw, who was in two hundred plus movies, most of them in the BDSM space) and also her sister has been stalking everyone and taking photos.
This movie is absolutely crazy because yeah, it’s shot incredibly cheaply and came about in the midst of the 1994 to death period where D’Amato made hundreds of adult films, yet it has so many strange moments that you can’t help but shake your head and admire it. I mean, at one point Roy climbs a ladder and starts making out with a statue. And things just happen at the most laconic pace when things aren’t getting progressively more nihilistic, because as always, D’Amato equally serves out lovemaking with loss of life.
Five people wrote this movie.
Five of them.
Remo Angioli: Using the name Harry J. Ball, which at least made me laugh. He also produced Nude for Satan and wrote and directed Fatal Temptation and Intimacy.
Andrea Angioli: Using the name Dennis J. Ball and also the Italian distributor for Can I Do It ‘Till I Need Glasses?
David D’Ingeo: The actor mentioned above, so perhaps that scene with the statue was all his writing.
Rosanna Coggiola: I guess it helps to have a woman’s point of view. She also wrote Pazzo d’amore and Vacanze Sulla Neve with Daniele Stroppa, another writer often inthe orbit of D’Amato.
Mark Thompson-Ashworth: The dialogue coach, film subtitler, dubber and screenplay translator/adapter who presented a 2002 D’Amato film festival.
It doesn’t look all that great, but for some reason, D’Amato’s soft core films put me in the same druggy haze that I get from murderdrone movies. It’s like when scientists stimulated the pineal gland with the Resonator in From Beyond. Here’s hoping that a snake doesn’t push its way out of my skull.
*That’s not entirely true. There are moments in his films where women show true agency and destroy the men who are hurting them. But generally, these movies live up to the Sam Spade quote, “When you’re slapped, you’ll take it and like it.”
Black Sex is also known as Sexy Erotic Love and Exotic Malice. That last title is probably best, because this is the scuzzier side of D’Amato, backed up with a script by George Eastman.
One of the first — if not the first — adult films to be shown in mainstream Italian theaters, this movie was made on the same 1979 Dominican Republic vacation that gave us Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, Porno Holocaustand Hard Sensation. In all, D’Amato made nine movies in this region in just one year.
The thing is, this movie may have adult sex in it, but it’s also the kind of movie that is just as ready to turn you off as it is to work you up.
Mark Lester — not the director but a businessman — has been diagnosed with an enlarged prostate requiring surgery in two weeks. Facing death — along with a syringe of painkillers — Mark decides to head to Santo Domingo, the place where he first met Maira (Annj Goren). She didn’t follow him because she felt that she was too poor, so she stayed behind on the islands, along with her voodoo-practicing family.
As the film unspools, Mark alternates between the genital discomfort and dreams of the woman he loved returning to life. It turns out that with her last breath, Maira cursed Mark’s name and now, her spirit — and those words — live in a bottle held by her father who claims that Mark will never leave the island alive.
Mark’s wife Liza — who claims that she owns him — arrives and fights with him about her sterility and the fact that his upcoming surgery will cost him the ability to ever become aroused again. Yes, this is certainly not a movie for the raincoaters. Of course — I mean, no of course because this is a film made of madness — Maira is really her younger sister who was raised to look and behave exactly like her because her father knew Mark would return and that he had to be ready to take everything from him.
So, after a movie of Maira cucking our protagonist, who is in turn cucked by his wife who hates him, and suffering agonizing pain throughout, decides to kneel down and slice off his manhood while he dies in the surf, held by the ghost of a woman who died because he left her so many years ago.
A feel good movie not to be watched with one hand!
That’s the funny thing. There’s a good story and potentially good movie here, but most audiences will never see this because, well, it’s a 1980 adult film from a director whose least sexual film still has a man have an oedipal relationship with his housekeeper and sleep with the corpse of his last wife. So yeah — this probably won’t connect with many.
I mean, who wants to watch a movie where the main character keeps shooting up drugs and getting drunk and lies in a hotel room in abject pain knowing he has to come home to get his penis removed so he just cuts it off himself and dies on his own terms, except that he’s a horrible person who caused the death of a girl who didn’t deserve it so her father ruined his other daughter’s life to transform her into a murder weapon?
Giovanni Boccaccio is considered the greatest European prose writer of his time (1313-1375, in case you’re interested) and he’s best known for The Decameron, a series of short stories that pretty much define much of the Italian literary tradition.
Six hundred years later, the cinema was referring back to Boccaccio with a series of films which are a subgenre of a subgenre, i.e. the decamerotici movies of the commedia sexy all’italiana, which get their start with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life of The Decameron, Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights. Those films take the stories people knew, added sex and nudity, and there were around fifty ripoffs that followed.
Joe D’Amato made two of them, this movie and More Sexy Canterbury Tales, which he directed, wrote and even acted in under the names Romano Gastaldi in the Italian version and Ralph Zucker in the English cut. He was worried that other directors wouldn’t use him as a cinematographer if it got out that he was directing. That’s why he is listed as the cinematographer of More Sexy as his birth name, Aristide Massaccesi. It’s also the first time that D’Amato would show the idea of self-castration which is reflected at the end of his film Sesso Nero (Black Sex) AKA Sexy Erotic Love AKA Exotic Malice.
In this story, Boccaccio is led by demons into hell and learns of the reasons why his fellow pilgrims are there, including two couples who swap partners, a friar who ignores his vows to take a young parishioner, a merchant whose wife deflowered his nephew, a homosexual merchant (merchants obviously are all going to Hell) whose lover must sleep with his wife, Nero, a music teacher who instructs his students in the art of tickling more than just the keys and Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet who invented more of what we know about Hell than the Bible itself.
When this was first presented to the Italian censorship board, the title pretty much put every one of Pasolini’s three films together: Le mille e una notte di Boccaccio a Canterbury (The Thousand and One Tales of Boccaccio in Canterbury). Between full frontal female nudity and a priest in a pile of excrement, it failed and needed reshot, with Return of the Exorcist director Luca Damiano director filling in as D’Amato was in America shooting Alberto de Martino’s Il consigliori.
Nearly every long-time Italian genre director made comedies. There are several more from D’Amato, but this one takes advantage of his love and talent when it comes to making gorgeous women like Gabriella Giorgelli (Seven Blood-Stained Orchids, Wax Mask) look even more beautiful.
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