This would be the last non-adult film that Joe D’Amato would direct. But if he’s going out, he’s bringing along some old friends like Cinzia Monreale (who was in his Buio Omega), Maurice Poli (Papaya dei Cairibi) and Donald O’Brien (Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, Immagini di un convento).

It’s shot in Austria, which may explain the Teutonic decorated dorm room. I don’t know. I do know that O’Brien is a handyman accused of putting Monreale (who many will recognize as the blind Emily from The Beyond) into a coma and the rich kids that get away with it while also making his death look like a suicide. So she brings him back from the dead an hour in and everyone dies.

It’s sad to be honest. It feels like Patrick more than Frankenstein and maybe it’s for the best that D’Amato went off into the world of adult. But he also made The Crawlers on the way out and I’d rather think of that as his last movie.

Oh man, this movie. You know, Joe D’Amato did a lot of adult-themed movies but he did them because — well, up until it was straight porn — he knew how to do them right. And weird, too.

Gerard (Gabriel Tinti) mourns the death of his mistress Leonora (Andrea Guzon), who has left behind tape recordings of their lovemaking, which he listens to as he records his memoirs, bringing back memories of meeting her in the midst of acarnivall and taking her in public and then inside an opium den alongside the exotic Haunani (who else but Laura Gemser?).

Now, as he readies her body for burial, he must raise her children Ursula (also Gurzon) and Edmund (Marco Mattioli), whose constant nervous outbursts about class-related issues can only be calmed by allowing him to nurse on a woman’s breast, even his sister’s, because hey Joe D’Amato directed this.

Also — Ursula is sexually obsessed with the older man and listens to the audiotapes to the point that she re-records them in her own voice and even threatens to auction herself off the highest bidder, meaning that Gerard must face off with uncaring police and fascist military types to keep her modesty. And she’s working in the same house of ill repute that her mother worked in, which is run by Rosa (Dagmar Lassander).

Lili Carati also appears as Gerard’s roommate and occasional lover and the lover of Edmund for a time. Carati was a model turned actress who was in To Be Twenty, Escape from Women’s Prison, L’alcova, Christina and played the Occultist in Violent Shit: The Movie, which was dedicated to her as she died before it was released.

D’Amato used his real name — Aristide Massaccesi — as his cinematogapher credit for this film. It looks gorgeous, with a dreamy close that echoes the first scene of the film. D’Amato often gets discussed as someone who didn’t care about the movies that he was making. One look at this movie — which also echoes his other major success Buio Omega — and you’ll know that he did have his heart in this movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally posted these movies back on May 18, 2021 and May 21, 2021 when we had a week of Bruno Mattei. Well, the scum always rises to the top, huh?

Emanuelle and the Erotic Nights (1978): Known in Italy as Emanuelle e le porno notti nel mondo n. 2, this movie is more like the Superman and Batman of Italian scummy cinema teaming up, as Joe D’Amato and Bruno Mattei (credited as J. Metheus) team up to unleash their absolute lack of restraint upon audiences, bringing along Laura Gemser, Black Emanuelle herself, to host the proceedings.

This being a mondo, you may wonder, how long until a real animal is abused? Oh, not long. That said, the majority of this film is given over to strip clubs and magic acts. Unlike other D’Amato and Mattei adult mondos, this is relatively tame by comparison. If you want full and unfiltered Joe and Bruno, you’d want Notti porno nel mondo.

Gloria Guida, Miss Teenage Italy 1974, appears in this. You may recognize her from The Bermuda Triangle and as the titular character in Blue Jeans. Ajita Wilson, who was in Fulci’s Contraband, also appears.

I’m always amazed that these mondos continually feature sex change footage, which is often faked. Who was clamoring to see this? That said, I do love Mattei’s super quick-cut editing style and unlike many mondos, this never gets boring.

Notti Porno nel Mondo (1977): Not to be confused with the above movie — that’s the safer one — this film finds Joe D’Amato and Bruno Mattei at the helm, starting things off with Laura Gemser appearing as Emanuelle with one m, saying, “It’s your old friend Emanuelle again…”  before taking us on a journey.

What a horrific journey it is!

Also known as Sexy Night Report, there’s a 70-minute edited version of this movie that’s still pretty rough. But man, the unedited one? You need to wash your eyes with fire after watching it.

Sure, this being a mondo means most of the footage is faked. So yesh, while a good portion of this one is beyond unreal, with scenes like a man in an ape costume “performing” with an exotic dancer and another where an Amsterdam red light girl shows off for a crowd before choosing a man from the window watchers, leaving his wife outside. Then, the movie descends into what I can only imagine Sodom and Gomorrah looked like to Lot’s wife before she was turned into seasoning.

Yes, in case you wondered if you were still watching a mondo, we have chickens getting their heads cut off, rituals in foreign countries, ping pong balls being launched out of a special place, a magic trick that turns someone into a hermaphrodite and, of course, a man’s member being chopped off again and again, as the scene is replayed from every angle, looking faker and faker each time.

It’s like Mattei — Jimmy Matheus! — and D’Amato — uncredited! — were thinking, “We’ve shown these raincoaters naked women for the last ninety minutes or so. Let’s show them a pisello get sliced off and then someone get their head cut off to remind them who we are.”

We get it, Bruno and Joe. Or Vincent Dawn and Aristide Massaccesi. Or David Hunt and David Hills.

Marina Hedmann — speaking of extra names, she was also known as Marina Lotar, Marion Bibbo, Bellis Marina Hedman and many, many more —  from Emanuelle in America, La Pretora, Play Motel and plenty of adult films (she was one of the first Italian actresses to appear in porn) appears.

If this looks way better than it should, despite being shot all in the same room even though they claim it’s all over the world, because Enrico Biribicchi shot it. He lent his skills to plenty socially unredeeming movies, including The Return of the Exorcist, Emanuelle in America, Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, Buio Omega, Erotic Nights of the Living Dead and Porno Holocaust. He was also the cinematographer for Antropophagus.

This being a Mattei movie, rest assured that plenty of recycled footage appears. There’s some stuff from several Erwin C. Dietrich movies, some of Jess Franco’s Mondo Erotico and even stuff from D’Amato’s Eva Nera*.

Notti Porno nel Mondo is absolutely ridiculous, a movie that I would never recommend to anyone but absolute maniacs with no taste whatsoever. If you read this far, that’s probably you.

*Thanks to Adrian on Letterboxd for figuring out where those scenes came from.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Kinski and D’Amato? Sometimes life just gets too wild. We originally wrote about this on March 31, 2018 and now it’s back with new information. Enjoy!

Once you watch this film, you’ll wonder — just how did this play on TV? It was part of the 13 titles included in Avco Embassy’s Nightmare Theater package syndicated in 1975 (the others were Marta, Maniac Mansion, Night of the Sorcerers, Fury of the Wolfman, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Horror Rises from the Tomb, Dear Dead Delilah, Doomwatch, Bell from Hell, Witches Mountain, Mummy’s Revenge and The Witch) and several of these films aired intact on regular television! I can’t imagine — nor will you once you read this — what people thought! I even found a mention that the scene where Klaus Kinski inserts a pin into a girl’s eye aired uncut on Pittsburgh’s beloved Chiller Theater (indeed, it played on  July 7, 1979 and December 26, 1981, thanks to the amazing listing on the Chiller Theater fan site).

1906. Austria. Greta von Holstein (Ewa Aulin, Candy from Candy as well as Death Laid an Egg) has been used and abused by all of the men in her life, including Dr. von Ravensbrück, a rich cad who knocks her up and leaves her to die in childbirth.

Three years later. Her hunchback brother Franz, besotten with incestual love, brings her back to life with a magic medallion inscribed with the secret of life over death. He tries to get back into her pants, so she throws a black cat at his face. It eats his eyeballs, because, well, this is a Joe D’Amato movie. She then escapes into the world where she seeks revenge on the von Ravensbrück’s family.

Walter, the son of the doctor who done her wrong, and Eve, his wife, take her in after an accident outside their home. They both fall in love with her, which gives D’Amato license to shoot long lovemaking scenes. You may know him on one hand for his horror films, like Beyond the Darkness, Frankenstein 2000, Absurd and Antropophagus. But you may also know him for his adult films like Porno Holocaust and the Rocco Siffredi vehicle Tarzan X – Shame of Jane. Here, he combines his love of the female form with his eye for murder and insanity.

Eva is becoming jealous of Greta. But what he doesn’t know is that her new lover is wiping out people left and right, just for fun. The butler in the gallery with a razor. The maid in the woods with a shotgun. A lab assistant in the lab with a metal club. Even the family doctor (Klaus Kinski, do I need to say more or tell you he was in Schizoid, Crawlspace, Marquis de Sade: Justine and more? Or that he was also maniac who was drafted to the German army, spent time as a POW and drank his own urine to get sick and get home earlier? This is not the craziest Kinski story, by the way…) is strangled right after he learned how to use her amulet to bring back the dead that he had been experimenting on (as you do).

Eva’s jealousy wins out, so she walls her up alive in the rooms beneath the castle, killing her. But Greta isn’t done yet. She shows up as a ghost at a party and lures Eva toward falling off the roof. That night, Greta’s ghost gives Walter a fatal heart attack in bed. And all of this was just to lure her old lover, Dr. von Ravensbrück, to the funeral, where she leads him to a vault and suffocates him.

A police inspector wonders if he’ll ever add up the case, as he finds the corpse of Greta’s brother near her empty grave. She’s gone and he wonders whatever happened to her. The person he has been telling the story to? Greta.

I was really struck by Berto Pisano’s music in this. He also contributed the strange soundtrack to Burial Ground. Here, his music is jazzy and then atonal, with sharp stings to call out the action.

I feel like I need to take a long shower after watching this movie. Which isn’t a bad thing, really. It’s an effective mix of giallo and gothic romance, with plenty of sleaze and gore for those seeking those thrills.

In the book Spaghetti Nightmares, Massaccesi said that he used his real name on this film because he was “encouraged by the budget…and by the presence of two important actors like Ewa Aulin and Kalus Kinski, who were appearing at the time in several Italian films, and whose presence was opposed on me by production and distribution. Kinski, in spite of everything, is an excellent professional actor.”

When asked how he felt about the movie, he wasn’t kind to himself: “Not many fond memories there. I’m afraid it’s a very imperfect film, pandering and mechanical, but this is due to the fact that I wrote the script on my own. When you don’t work with someone else who challenges your ideas, stimulates them and corrects you where necessary, helping you to make what you write credible, it’s much harder to come up with a good product.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

Facetious tales of pleasure-loving wives and penitent husbands – Decameron number 69 AKA More Sexy Canterbury Tales AKA More Filthy Canterbury Tales* is most assuredly a Joe D’Amato movie. At the time, he didn’t want to lose work as a cinematographer, so he used the name Romano Gastaldi, which mixed up assistant director Romano Scandariato name a bit. In the English version, he’s listed as Ralph Zucker. However, D’Amato used his real name, Aristide Massaccesi, for the cinematographer credit. He also shows up briefly as one of the monks who this film revolves around.

Obviously, this is a decamerotici film, a series of movies that had their main popularity between 1971 and 1975. Much like every trend in Italian exploitation, it all started with the success of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life, which were The Decameron, Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights. Beyond the box office success of those three films, the Italian censors were beginning to relax their grip and allow more nudity, so more than fifty of these films were made in four years. D’Amato also made another film in this subgenre, Novelle licenziose di vergini ogliose, which features Giovanni Boccaccio, another of the direct inspirations for these stories.

In between the three stories in this film, the framing device has some young monks attempting to get with some nuns while the Father Superior who tries to stop them ends up taken in by a very needy older nun.

In “Le due cognate,” an older husband leaves his young wife for a business trip and this leads to her  going heels to Jesus with a young sculptor, who also ends up sleeping with her husband’s sister. The second story is not as kind or nice, as in “Fra’ Giovanni,” a young priest falls in love with a woman during her confession at which point she seduces him and makes him pay for their sexual encounters. When she’s sick of him, she tells her husband, who puts the priest’s penis in a chest lid and squeezes it until the holy man must castrate himself. This will not be the last D’Amato story that ends with a man removing his own sex. And then, in “Lavinia e Lucia,” a young man sneaks into a rich man’s home and into his wife’s bed which is all good with the older man, who believes that the offspring of a hermaphrodite is always male.

At the end of all this, the monks walk back, exhausted by their sexual adventures and also because the Father Superior told them it was unfair that he never got to sleep with a young nun, so they all tried to satisfy the older nun.

Eventually, this subgenre would become the much more popular commedia sexy all’italiana genre, which was popular until 1981. But by that point, D’Amato — while he made a few, like Vow of Chastity and Il Ginecologo Della Mutua — had moved on to making horror and erotic films that combined the tropics with gross out moments.

*In Germany, it was known as Hemmungslos der Lust verfallen or Falling Unrestrainedly into Lust.

Using the name Jim Black and Robert Hall — as well as Dirk Frey — Joe D’Amato really went all out to get as many names as possible into this movie.

Nadine Roussial plays Livia the Arena Queen, a virgin who must win one more battle inside the arena to get her freedom. It’s an adult movie — hey there’s Mark Shannon in a cameo — and was probably made on sets from another at the same time D’Amato movie like The Emperor Caligula: The Untold Story or Messalina… orgasmo imperiale which saw Joe use the name OJ Clarke.Nadine Roussial is in the latter, so it makes a little too much sense. Look — when you have a set, use it.

Diary of a Roman Virgin used the D’Amato named Michael Wotruba name here. It’s the story of Livia (Lucretia Love, who may have been born in Texas but made her way to Italy to be in everything from  The Killer Reserved Nine Seats to Enter the Devil) who has made her way from a tragedy involving stock footage from The Last Days of Pompeii and who rise in power.

This also has scenes from Triumph of the Ten Gladiators and The Arena in it, because why let stuff go to waste, right?

These films are at the opposite sides of D’Amato making Roman epics. Of course, after the 80s, the sex would go even further in his films, as he’d make Sodoma e Gomorra, Caligola follia del potere and Antonio e Cleopatra as adult movies.

This movie actually played on Joe Bob’s Drive-In Theater on April 16, 1994 and that fact alone makes me beyond happy.

It’s Joe D’Amato — as Alexander Boroscky — working with a lot of people I’ve never seen or heard from before or since other than Mark Shannon and I’ll be frank with you dear reader. I’ve seen way too much of Mark Shannon’s ballbag in the last week.

I take that back. Thanks to Adrian  on Letterboxd, I recognize Marianne Aubert from some Erwin Dietrich movies.

The colorful Tiger Balm Gardens, the world-famous Aberdeen Harbor and the spectacular Ocean Park Fair Ground! These are the places where we will go and see some horizontal hijinks in Hng Kong!

Will Julie keep her newspaper job? Why was this made? How did it get made? Why did Joe only make one movie in Hong Kong? Who dubbed this?

So many questions!

Man, this movie is just filled with everything that I love:

Multiple titles: It goes by Troll 3, Creepers and Contamination .7 while having nothing to do with Troll 2 (not that Quest of the Mighty Sword does either), Phenomena or Contamination.

Fake names: It has Fabrizio Laurenti (Witchery) directing under the pseudonym Martin Newlin while the man of many names, Joe D’Amato, goes uncredited even though he directed a fair amount of this film. He also wrote this — with Laurenti and the always dependably insane Rossella Drudi. Also, Daniele Stroppa as Daniel Steel and man, his resume has Convent of Sinners, High Finance Woman and Blue Angel Cafe on it just to name a few.

It almost came out in American theaters: We should all be so lucky! It did come out here as a direct-to-video Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment VHS.

Italians in America: Much like the beloved Troll 2, it was shot in the big lights, big city of Porterville, Utah.

Earth vs. the Earth: Nuclear radiation makes vegetation go wild and kill people. Where can you run when there’s nowhere to run?

Costumes designed by: Laura Gemser, making the wardrobe person the most attractive person on the set.

A cast of people you may know from: Mary Sellers from Ghosthouse; Stagefright; Eleven Days, Eleven Nights and La maschera del demonio! Jason Saucier from Hitcher in the Dark and Top Model! An uncredited Gabriele Tinti — there on vacation with his wife!

A wild soundtrack: Carlo Maria Cordio, you have gifted us with the soundtracks of Endgame, Killing Birds, Night Killer, Troll 2 and this movie. Thank you for your synth.

There are a lot of people that live to make fun of bad movies. I say that the only bad movie is a boring film. This movie is neither bad not boring. I mean, plants eat people, then people hack up the plants and put them into radioactive barrels and ship them off for somewhere else. The end.

There’s also a scene where an intelligent plant stops a car by doing the banana in the tail pipe trick from Beverly Hills Cop.

You can watch this on Tubi.

You can say what you want about Joe D’Amato’s movies, but the guy knew a very important fact: if you get someone as talented as Enzo Sciotti to paint the poster to your film, people will want to see it.

That said, this is the kind of D’Amato movie that fascinates me, as it stars Tara Buckman, an actress who has obsessed me since Night Killer, in a movie that’s at once closer to reality than that movie and also still so far away from the world that you and I live in.

Shot in Virginia — I assume right around when the aforementioned Mattei movie was made — Buckman plays Angie, a cabaret singer who steals the heart of Raymond Derek, a rich man with political aspirations, a gorgeous wife and a path toward the upper one percent. Their love takes it all away, yet when she fights for him, he reacts in the most pompous and entitled way possible. Truly, she is too good for him, even if she’s the traditional bad girl.

Look, this is a movie so confident of its sexiness that Laura Gemser shows up and keeps her clothes on. And also one so in love with its theme song that Buckman sings it four times.

I kind of love that you expect Buckman’s character to just be someone out to get the money out of our lead protagonist, but she’s better than everyone else in this movie put together, willing to use her body to keep her man going, selling every bit of herself and still remaining strong and whole in a world where everyone else is a compromised individual.

Yeah, alright, I get a lot out of Joe D’Amato movies. Perhaps more than you do. You may just watch this and laugh and say, “What a piece of junk.” I invite you to see the world through more positive eyes, a place where a softcore movie by a jaded porn-making hack can teach you a lesson in life.

Also known as Pistoleiros de Trinity, Go Away! Trinity Has Arrived in Eldorado, Stay Away from Trinity… When He Comes to Eldorado and Trinity in Eldorado, this stars Stan Cooper (AKA Stelvio Rosi, The Hanging Woman, Something Creeping in the Dark) and Gordon Mitchell (a man so into the Italian Western industry he was paid with a Western town of his own that other movies were fllmed at) as some criminals who decide to rob Mexican general El Dorado (Craig Hill, The Bloodstained Shadow).

So yeah, the signature on the movie may be Dick Spitfire, who is really Diego Spataro, but this is all the show of Joe D’Amato, who also was the cinematographer under his real name of Aristide Massaccesi. Supposedly, D’Amato was embarrassed by the material — other stories are that he didn’t want directors to think he was coming for their jobs and he wanted to keep on being a cinematographer — so he asked Spataro, who was producing, to use his name.

If that’s not enough to get you to watch, Erika Blanc briefly appears. There are also card tricks!