Rating: 2.5/5
Hooptober 4.0 | 26/31 | people eating people (non-zombie) 2/3
Emanuelle, a photojournalist, sits in a NYC psyche ward, posing as a patient. She has a baby doll on her lap. When the eyes close, a shutter clicks.
Down the hall, a nurse burst out of a room, her smock partially removed and her right breast torn from her body. The orderlies rush in to see a girl haunched in the corner, eating the last remaining breast tissue. As they clumsily force her into a straightjacket, Emanuelle turns the corner and takes a photo.
Later that night, Emanuelle sneaks into the girl’s room. She fingers the girl into submission to get information. She learns that the nurse who lost a breast was abusing the girl — unlike what Emanuelle was doing, with the fingering and whatnot. The girl also has an unusual tattoo just below her belly button. Through some guy at the newspaper, she learns the tattoo is from an Amazonian cannibal tribe.
Her editor puts her in touch with Professor Mark Lester at the American Museum of Natural History, who has made several expeditions to the area and could be of use. The professor brings her back to his place to watch videos of cannibals decapitating men, sawing off their genitals, and eating their eyeballs.
After sex with the professor and a stranger at the docks, Emanuelle is now prepared to embark on her journey to the Amazon in search of a lost cannibal tribe.
This film was on an Italian horror list. All I knew beforehand was that it was a cannibal movie and that Emanuelle was a series. I didn’t realize I was also watching a sexploitation flick. The plot stops repeatedly for softcore sex scenes. It’s so frequent that it’s annoying, bordering on funny.
It’s also disorienting because the gore is quite brutal. We have brief moments of gore throughout, followed by a veritable orgy in the last act.
Overall, this is the purest distillation of pulp I can recall. Joe D’Amato knows exactly what softcore and cannibal audiences want, and blends the two as clumsily as necessary to fit all the troupes. Since I’m not a fangirl of either genre, I can’t say I like this. But it’s hard to hate something so hilariously crass.