“Wealthy but neglected wife Christina is seduced by a close friend of her husband and introduced to new erotic experiences.”

Yes, this IMDB listing really could be any erotic film released after Just Jaeckin’s Emmanuelle.

Also known as Voglia di guardare (The Pleasure of Watching), the real story here is that Christina, played by Jenny Tamburi from The Suspicious Death of a Minor and The Psychic, is being used by her husband (Marino Masé, Contamination) who is setting up this affair because he likes to watch from a distance.

So yeah, it’s Luis Bunuel’s Belle du Jour but D’Amato has lined up Lilli Carati (To Be Twenty) and, of course, Laura Gemser to liven up the story. This is from a time when D’Amato was making period dramas with plenty of eroticism in them. So this looks gorgeous, nearly dreamy, and has the added benefit of a heroine who develops her own agency and understanding of her feminine powers, using them to win out over the men who see her as an object to be watched or taken.

Can you learn something from Joe D’Amato movies (beyond the fact that the Vatican has a secret program to create super soldiers)? I think so.

EDITOR’S NOTE: While we just covered these movies on October 1, 2021 and October 31, 2021, you can’t do a week of Joe D’Amato without bringing up two of his most transgressive — and to be honest somewhat boring — movies. 

Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980): I work in my basement from when I wake up until when I go to bed, writing all sorts of words for people, from health care to highed education, parent-teacher groups and all manner of businesses large and small. There are times when all that writing and the way the world has been acting for the last 18 months which feel like 18 years when it just seems hopeless. Why am I doing this? Who am I doing it for? Why do I feel compelled to keep on writing and then in my spare time write some more about movies?

Because of movies like this.

Make no mistake, Le notti erotiche dei morti viventi is absolutely the sleaziest kind of movie there is, a film that combines all of the oatmealed faced zombies and gore of Italian cinema with the sexual congress of, well, Italian cinema. It’s as if someone said, “What if we saw people screw before we kill them horribly?” And that man, friends, was Joe D’Amato.

Now, the man himself said that this was an utter failure, telling Spaghetti Nightmares that the movie was”…a total fiasco. I had endeavored to mingle my two favorite genres, tending more toward the erotic side in this case, but the film was rejected by the public.”

Made at the same time as Porno Holocaust — another movie with the same cast, the same plot and the same mix of sex and death — just thinking of the plot of this movie makes me laugh like some kind of maniac.

It stars Mark Shannon, whose main career was working as a travel agency correspondent, but would take breaks to make adult films. He plays John Wilson, who has come to the Dominican Republic to build a hotel on Cat Island, a place with a voodoo curse so dangerous that it causes one of the two prostitutes who’ve recently serviced him to run in fear. Don’t worry. He was smart enough to finish their bedsheet gymnastics first.

As he chases her down the hall, he meets Fiona (Dirce Funari, who was one of the women in the infamous snuff sequence in D’Amato’s Emanuelle in America), who has just left an elderly lover at sea. After doing an oral inspection of Georgia O’Keefe’s inspiration, they become a couple of sorts for the rest of the film. I think we can all appreciate a meet cute in an Italian pornographic zombie film, right?

Meanwhile, Larry O’Hara (George Eastman, who wrote this) is either a sea captain or in an insane asylum. He starts the film off having wild frolicking sex with a nurse and ends it with the same woman in the same style as the film makes a Jacob’s Ladder cycle back to the mental ward, complete with another patient slack jawed and enjoying their coupling with a one-handed ovation.

There’s an absolutely mindbending scene where Eastman sits inside a darkened club that makes it appear that he’s smoking and drinking and bored and trapped in the infinite regions of space when Liz (Lucía Ramírez, Sex and Black Magic) appears to dance for him. Eastman makes no attempt to engage with her at all, even when she brings a champagne bottle on stage to, well, yeah. You know what happens. What you may not know is that she opens the bottle for him and does not use his hands and man, Joe D’Amato, you know how to rescue a man from abject depression.

Meanwhile, Laura Gemser shows up as a woman who bleeds green blood and can transform into a cat and has a blind grandfather who follows her and then she has sex with Eastman on the beach through his buttoned jeans.

Finally, everyone drinks J&B and we come — pun unintended — back to the start of the film as orderlies drag Eastman to his cell.

My favorite part of this movie was watching the absurd — D’Amato pun not intended — lengths to which some of the bigger star’s lovemaking scenes were created in very Cinemax After Dark style, which Shannon just went balls out. Literally.

Orgasmo nero II – Insel der Zombies (1981):

So yeah, in Germany, Porno Holocaust was actually considered a sequel to Joe D’Amato’s Orgasmo Nero (we just called it Sex and Black Magic here) and everyone had to be content to a title that isn’t as in your face. Don’t worry — this movie is still as repellant as it gets*.

Back in the 50s, governments used to regularly blast an island with nuclear bombs just to see how they blew up and to test the idea that perhaps these weapons would split reality into pieces. Well, all they did was create a place filled with mutant animals and a monster — a giant appendaged monster — that a bunch of stupid, stupid scientists are going to visit and all die.

That creature was once Antoine Domoduro and much like another D’Amato/George Eastman epic — Antropophagus — he was once a man with a family that all died in the atomic bomb blasts and now, all he has are two speeds: fuck and destroy.

D’Amato made Papaya, Love Goddess of the Cannibals and Tough to Kill in Santo Domingo and had such a good time that he returned to make Paradiso blu, Sesso nero, Orgasmo nero, Hard Sensation, Erotic Nights of the Living Dead and this movie all in July of 1979. That’s right — five movies in one month.

The first mainstream hardcore film in Italy, this movie ends with Tom Selleck look-a-like — and travel writer when he wasn’t making porn — Mark Shannon surviving and making sweet love to Lucia Ramirez on a very small boat in the middle of the ocean, which is more astounding than anything else in this movie, as I wondered how D’Amato was able to get all of his camera equipment onto this boat, shoot this scene and not have anyone fall off.

Italian movie directing at its finest.

*Or maybe not. The German softcore version is Insel der Zombies. Seeing how a full third of this movie is hardcore penetration, I can only imagine how short that movie is.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is Joe’s big directing bid and its lack of reaction pushed him into only caring about more commercial films (porn). It’s a shame because this is a work of sheer weird art made by a maniac. We originally wrote about this movie on October 5, 2020. There’s also a cocktail recipe based on this movie at the end of the article.

I love Joe D’Amato. I can’t hide my devotion and even when his movies descend into outright exploitation, I love him even more. This is probably his best film — a remake of the 1966 film The Third Eye — that he would talk down by saying, “I personally opted for the most unrestrained gore, since I don’t consider myself very skillful at creating suspense.”

It’s also a movie that he shouted — while filming — “We’re making a movie to make people throw up. We must make ’em vomit!”

I wish he was still alive so I could hug him right now.

Frank Wyler has just lost the love of his life, Anna Völkl (Cinzia Monreale, Emily from The Beyond). That may have something to do with his voodoo using, wet nursing maid Iris (Franca Stoppi, The Other Hell and the dog-loving mother in George Eastman’s Dog Lay Afternoon), who is only too happy to have her boss suckle on her bosoms for emotional succor.

So our protagonist does what any of us would. He digs up his woman and turns her into a body that will never age. Of course, any other filmmaker wouldnt show this process in graphic detail, but you’re not watching any other director make this movie. This is the kind of film where a hitchhiker is killed and when our hero gets too stressed out, his mother figure gives him an old fashioned and then helps him hack up the corpse.

The crazy thing is, Frank can pick up women, like the jogger he gets in the sack in less time than it will take you to read this. Of course, he has to show off Anna, the girl goes nuts and Frank ends up biting through her neck. Such is life. Or death.

Imagine how Frank feels when his dead lover’s twin shows up! Why it’s enough to call of his engagement to Iris, which is one of the oddest scenes in a movie that pretty much starts strange and finishes beyond strong in the category of astounding weirdness.

Come for the necrophilia. Stay for the awesome Goblin soundtrack.

You can watch this on Tubi or buy it from Severin.

BONUS: Here are two cocktail recipes!

Dark and Stormy (simple version)

• 2 oz. dark rum (Goslings Black Seal is traditional, but I use Kraken)
• 3 oz. ginger beer
• 1/2 oz. lime juice

1. Fill a highball (or Big Gulp) glass with ice. Add rum.
2. Pour in ginger beer and lime. Stir, garnish with a lime wedge and drink up.

Beyond the Darkness and Stormy (complicated version, based on this recipe)

• 2 oz. dark rum
• 3 oz. ginger beer (go for a lower sugar and spicier brand)
• 1 oz. spiced simple syrup (read on…)
• Lime for garnish

Making this recipe means making your simple syrup a few days in advance. To do that, use this recipe:

• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 1/2 cups water
• 6 sticks cinnamon (making sure to grate a quarter stick into the mix)
• 30 whole cloves
• 10 allspice berries (or just double the ground allspice below)
• 1/4 tsp ground all spice
• 1 vanilla bean cut in half and seeds scraped out
• 1/2 tsp fresh grated nutmeg
• 1/4 cup fresh ginger sliced (you can always use a dash of dry ginger spice, but I have some rad frozen ginger cubes I’ve been dying to use)
• 3 oz lime juice

Making simple syrup is, well, simple. Throw everything in a pot and simmer it over medium — not too hot — heat. Once it gets warm, turn it on low and stir it until it thickens on your spoon. Let it cool.

Then, strain out the spices and store it in a container in the fridge.

Here’s how to make this magic work:

1. Fill a highball (or Big Gulp) glass with ice. Add the ginger beer and then the simple syrup. You’re going to be amazed, because the syrup will sink to the bottom.
2. Hold a spoon upside down at the top of the glass at the top of the ginger beer later. Pour the rum over the spoon like you’re an absinthe fiend. Prepare yourself to shit your pants at how cool this is. I’m not going to spoil it.

Created by Eugenio Ercolani (Aenigma: Lucio Fulci and the 80s, Banned Alive! The Rise and Fall of Italian Cannibal Movies) and Giuliano Emanuele (Italy Possessed: A Brief History of Italian Exorcist Rip-offs), this film was originally included with the 88 Films release of Buio Omega.

Thanks to interviews with George Eastman, Michele Soavi, Claudio Fragasso, Ruggero Deodato, Al Cliver, Rossella Drudi and more, this film gives a rich overview of the life and times Aristide Massaccesi, the man who is known by so many names, but also Joe D’Amato. It confirms what I’ve always believed: sure, D’Amato made some disreputable movies, but he also had a lot of heart and treated everyone he worked with incredibly well.

In some way, I wish this was more than just talking heads dryly discussing D’Amato, but I think somewhere, he’s smiling realizing that they put exactly as much effort into a dissection of his life as he would into theirs. And as always, George Eastman says incredibly horible things about someone and then says, “But I loved the guy.” I kind of feel the same way about that incredibly tall Italian grump.

We don’t usually cover adult movies all that often here, but this is Joe D’Amato’s last movie, so that seems like more than a good enough reason to watch this film.

I’d like to tell you that Joe went and made a remake of Showgirls, but really the only thing this movie has in common with that piece of exploitation by way of Hollywood lunacy is that it takes place mostly in an adult club. Hungarian-born actress Eva Henger (Miss Teen Hungary 1989) plays Eva, who is our Nomi Malone, even if we don’t even get a single recreation of any scene from that film.

There’s also an 82-minute softcore version of this movie which has to be really rough to get through. Helping matters is an appearance by Jazmine Rose, who showed up pretty frequently in mid 90s adult films with her then paramour Nacho Vidal (who is in this, but their scene together cuts before anything happens). She did 29 movies between 1998 and 2001 before becoming a chef, appearing on Chopped and having quite a culinary career.

If D’Amato had made this a decade earlier, he’d have gone to New Orleans and shot an entire pastiche of the movie he was ripping off, had Laura Gemser as Cristal Connors and really tried a bit more. That said, you can still see some of his eye for camera composition in this, even if it’s in the service of making a better looking shot in a day or two sex movie.

It’s not great but it is history.

Originally called La casa del dio sconosciuto (House of the Unknown God), this movie starts by informing you that it was very loosely inspired by Prosper Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille before quoting Blaise Pascal: “The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.”

Then a whole bunch of nuns get possessed and get it on.

I mean, you can lock up gorgeous nuns but in the Mondo D’Amato they are going to spend most of the movie flipping out, touching one another and rehabilitating a wounded man by repeatedly hiding the bishop. Yet that young man has brought the devil with him!

Paola Senatore stars as Isabella, the duchess who has been left in this convent for her own protection and that doesn’t go so well. Marina Hedman is Sister Marta and you may remember her from Play Motel, a movie that rivals this one for sheer prurience. Aïché Nana plays the Mother Superior, which is probably an inside joke, as she’s most famous for dancing an infamous striptease during a private party at the Rugantino restaurant and nightclub on the Viale di Trastevere in Rome that got so much attention, it caused a national scandal and inspired the orgy scene in Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita. Sister Veronica is Giovanna Mainardi, one of the female guards of SS Experiment Love Camp. Sister Giulia is Maria Rosaria Riuzzi from Emanuelle and Francoise and Salon Kitty. Finally, the exorcist who tries to fix it all is Donald O’Brien, whose Italian film credentials are beyond reproach: Dr. Butcher, M.D.; Keoma; Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals; Yeti Giant of the 20th Century; The Sect; Ghosthouse and about fifty more.

This movie — moved along by the Nico Fidenco soundtrack — feels like a nightmare and then a dream and then another nightmare and then a priest leads the nuns through the convent trying to get Satan out of their midst while a murder happens and every nun unleashes their full wanton carnal needs as they struggle to the altar. Sure, it’s exploitation, but in the hands of D’Amato, it approaches scumbag art.

Images in a Convent is part of Severin’s new Nasty Habits box set. It also has Cristiana Devil Nun, Story of a Cloistered Nun and Bruno Mattei’s The True Story of the Nun of Monza. You can order it from Severin’s website.

Tales of the Red Chamber finds our pal Joe D’Amato making a movie as Robert Yip, which may be one of my favorite of his many stage names. And this movie has been reviewed by exactly no one — so far — on Letterboxd, which makes it one of the few D’Amato movies with little to no attention.

A Filmirage presentation, this tells the story of an elderly traveler seeking shelter from the rain in a bordello. As he warms himself by the fire, he repays the kindness of the madame with a series of stories, starting with a young man who does everything to win over a woman who is already married, only to learn that she’s a man. In the second story, a jealous ruler uses a special chastity belt on his bride to destroy the manhood of three men. Yes, it’s a mini-guillotine. Then, an old man buys love potions to calm his wife and also cure his impotency and ends up mixing them up. And finally, a cloth seller pulls off the old adult film pizza delivery story, as he needs to get paid and the lady of the house wonders if there’s another way she can settle the transaction.

Strangely, this softcore movie was made in the midst of D’Amato making nearly all hardcore movies and many folks thought Robert Yip was a real person and this was actually an imported Asian film.

After the media excitement around the controversy of Tinto Brass’ Caligula, there came — pun intended, always — plenty of ripoffs as is the Italian exploitation cinema way of life. They include the Bruno Mattei films Caligula And Messalina and Nerone e Poppea, Caligula Reincarnated As Hitler (AKA Cesare Canevari’s The Gestapo’s Last Orgy so it’s a really Naziploitation and not Caligulaspoitation or even Roman Porno, which comes from Japan, not Italy), Bruno Corbucci’s Messalina, Messalina! (AKA Caligula II: Messalina, Messalina and shot on the very same sets and using the same costumes as Brass’ film with no permission), Lorenzo Onorati’s Caligula’s Slaves (a ripoff of the movie we’ve about to discuss), Jaime J. Puig’s Una virgen para Calígula and this film, written by the unholy trio of George Eastman, D’Amato and an uncredited Michele Soavi.

Caligula (David Brandon, Jubilee, Stagefright) has been having nightmares of being stalked and killed by a man with a bow and arrow. This does not stop him from continuing his aberrant life, filled with murder, lust, mayhem and well, everything that makes a Joe D’Amato movie.

The film starts with Domitius (Soavi) attacking Caligula and being beaten down and then ruined for life by having his tongue sliced off and the tendons of his legs cut. Caligula keeps him alive and tortures him with female slaves for most of the rest of the film. Our antagonist follows this by assaulting Livia in front of her new husband Aetius. After she commits suicide rather than be touched for one moment more, the crazed emperor kills her lover and blames it all on Christians, something the senators can’t believe.

Meanwhile, as the couple is buried on a beach, Miriam Celsia (Laura Gemser) proclaims herself a priestess of Anubis and claims that the Christians must forget their God and turn to her god of vengeance, burning their bodies and setting off for revenge. She sacrifices her virginity to Anubis in exchange for strength for her revenge and then somehow falls in love with Caligula and that’s not how that’s supposed to work.

But it does work — he ends up causing his own downfall, bringing the movie right back to its original nightmare.

The first two times this movie went before the rating board — which is absolutely hilarious that they were forced to watch this — it was kept out of theaters. 22 minutes of footage was removed, replaced by 15 minutes of tamer scenes — no more fellatio, no more real horseplay, no more nine minute orgy scene. Supposedly, there’s a two-hour plus cut and when you think, “Hey this is 85 minutes,” you can only imagine what was cut.

I always have a but with D’Amarto. Despite the sheer volume of manaical acts in this…but it’s gorgeous. Seriously, he’s making a film that looks as good — and at times better — than Brass’ better known and more overblown film. He has no pretense toward being an artist or intellectual. He just wants to make a movie that makes money, yet he’s talented in spite of himself, making a movie with underwater camera shots, effective dream scenes and huge tableaus of debauchery.

D’Amato used footage from this movie when he remade it in 1997 as the adult Caligola: Follia del potere. By that point, he wasn’t making movies like this any more, even if he was making movies like this.

You can now order this from Severin, whether you want a Caligula Bundle that comes with a coin, foto-comic and a copy of Bruno Mattei’s Caligula and Messalina or you can order it all by itself. I’m ready for that cleaned up Italian extended cut. Alert the authorities.

Starting with Bitto Albertini’s Black Emanuelle in 1975, Laura Gemser would play the character — or variations of her — in a ton of movies like Black Emanuelle 2; Emanuelle in Bangkok; Black Emmanuelle, White Emmanuelle; Emmanuelle on Taboo Island; Emanuelle in America; Sister Emanuelle; Emanuelle Around the World; Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade; Emanuelle and the Erotic Nights; Emmanuelle: Queen of Sados; Divine Emanuelle; Emmanuelle in the Country; Violence in a Women’s Prison; Women’s Prison Massacre and the compilation Emanuelle’s Perverse Outburst. This would be the last she’d make with D’Amato, who based this on Just Jaeckin’s The French Woman, a movie that tells the true story of French brothel madam Madame Claude.

That’s why this movie is also known as Emanuelle and the Girls of Madame Claude, who is played in this film by Gota Gobert (Private House of the SS).

After a trip to Africa with special friend Susan, our heroine dashes off to meet a prince and a gangster, but then she notices a man pushing a gorgeous yet comatose and wheelchair-riding woman through the airport and somehow ends up getting involved in a white slavery ring. Yet it all feels like Emanuelle is somewhat tired, as over the last three years she’s done all that she can do. I mean, you go up against cannibals, snuff films and hit that many countries, you’d be exhausted too.

That said, a bad Laura Gemser/Joe D’Amato movie does not exist. There are just ones that are not as good.

I’d like to believe that nether Joe D’Amato or George Eastman — in one of their first collaborations — ever had issues with impotency, but man, the heroes in their movies do.

Annibale wants to leave all of his money — made from prostitition houses — to his nephew Andrea. The only problem is that the young man wants to be a priest and will have nothing to do with sex, so the entire family conspires to send woman after woman his way.

This is also the first time that Laura Gemser would work with D’Amato and she has an extended ballet dance stripdance that goes on for a long time but why would anyone complain about such a thing?

That said, this is a D’Amato movie and he loves to punish you for your male gaze as well as rewarding it, including an Oedipal complex at the root of Andrea’s issues as well as his fear of death which manifests itself as a gory nightmare that hints at the excesses that D’Amato would unleash in Buio Omega.

Vow of Chastity doesn’t get mentioned much in the D’Amato filmography as its kind of a footnote. But due to the relationships that started here and the hints of the director’s themes that would later be more visible, it’s worth a view.