Rent Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977)

Spoilers follow ... - Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals review by NP

This is certainly a curio - a fairly average story sprinkled thinly over lots of softcore sex scenes, with very occasional moments of pretty graphic gore. How does this differ from certain Jess Franco films? Difficult to answer really (Nico Fidenco’s score – a definite highlight of this and his other Emanuelle films - is both wonderful and inappropriate in some of its usage, echoing Franco’s habit of overlaying graphic scenes with the least assuming musical suites that work against the action rather than enhancing it)); superficially they are similar in style. And yet this lacks the fluidly eccentric directorial strokes of Franco. I note this purely as a personal observation; there’s no reason to believe Franco or ‘Emanuelle’ Director Joe D'Amato were in any kind of competition. The dubbing is at times lacking, with such an effort made to match the words with the lips of the actors, sentences often have. Long. Pauses. In the. Middle. Of them.

There’s a moment where Emanuelle and Professor Mark Lester (Gabriele Tinti) grimly watch stabbings, flesh-eating, dismemberment and rape before leaving their hiding place saying “Let’s do something.” A little late perhaps!

It would be grossly unfair to condemn this film for its treatment of women; it is guilty, yes, of titillation and exploitation, but it is far from alone in that at the time it was made. You could say it balances it out with the fact that Emanuelle, a female, is the heroine and is responsible for using her sexuality (and skin tone) to ultimately save her group.

This film isn’t as bad as I imagined it might be. It is, however, tonally disjointed with scenes of genuine horror mixed with leisurely sexual antics. There’s no denying that Indonesian-Dutch born Laura Gemser is a definite presence onscreen.

This Emanuelle, or Black Emanuelle, is not to be confused with Emmanuelle, the French soft-core movie character based on the 1959 novel of the same name. This is the Italian variation. By removing one letter from the name, they somehow legally managed to skip through the copyright loophole and produce their own series of films, featuring Gemser.