Although it would be probably going too far to suggest that Aristide Massaccesi/Joe D'Amato was a sadean film-maker along the lines of fellow sleaze maestro Jesus Franco on account of his unashamedly commercial and impersonal approach, it is undeniable that many of the Italian's late 1970s entries show a distinct interest in producing transgressive, hybrid sex/horror/whatever forms. Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals , Papaya , Porno Holocaust , Beyond the Darkness and above all Emanuelle in America offer a mixture of sex and violence presumably calculated by D'Amato to double their exploitative potential but arguably failing to connect with any except that small, select audience with a dubious taste for their intermingling.
But while Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (AKA Trap Them and Kill Them, Emanuelle's Amazon Adventure) may not appeal to many outside the exploitation cognoscenti, at least uncle Joe signals his intent from the get go through the promise inherent in the film's very title and an opening five minutes that shows he intends to deliver on both the softcore sex and hardgore violence fronts.
We open with Emanuelle undercover as a patient in a mental hospital, her camera cunningly concealed inside a doll. A scream rings out and one of the nurses staggers into the corridor, a bloody mess where her right breast used to be before she was subjected to an impromptu mastectomy by one of the patients, who had been found a few weeks previously wandering on the edge of the Matto Grosso in Brazil.
Sneaking into the other patient's room – and fondling her for good measure – Emanuelle discovers a strange tribal tattoo above the woman's pubis.
Having returned to the newspaper with her scoop, further investigations reveal that the tattoo design is one made by the Tupinamba, a cannibal tribe hitherto believed extinct.
After giving her current boyfriend/(willing) sex slave a farewell fuck and recruiting the assistance of Professor Mark Lester (Gabrielle Tinti – Mr Gemser), Emanuelle heads for the jungle in search of another world exclusive. They rendezvous with Lester's old colleague Wilkes (Geoffrey Copplestone) whose daughter Isabelle (Mónica Zanchi) seems immediately smitten with Emanuelle, masturbating while watching Emanuelle and Mark make love…
Emanuelle, Mark and the rest of their party start off for the missionary station, encountering the McGregors (Donal(d) O'Brien and Nieves Navarro/Susan Scott), who are secretly searching for a fortune in diamonds, along the way.
But with the mission providing deserted, its inhabitants having fallen prey to the cannibalistic natives, Emanuelle starts to wonder if "the scoop of the centur" is worth it – will she and the others make it out the jungle alive?
While offering few surprises, heavily reliant on a variant of the idiot plot by which characters wander off into the jungle to get naked, have sex and be picked off by the cannibals, and laden with general stupidity and bad dialogue, it's hard not to enjoy Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals for these same reasons:
"How's the nurse now?"
"She'll be all right. But she has lost a breast. However it seems she asked for it. She was well known for her homosexual inclinations. She was the one who started abusing the poor girl"
Gemser and the other female pulchritude on display – Scott/Navarro being pretty fit for a 39-year-old and the younger Zanchi a tasty blonde goddess type – are easy on the eyes and uninhibited when it comes to pleasuring themselves, each other and the male members of the cast.
D'Amato's direction is superior to that which one might expect from an cinematographer turned hyphenate out of commercial necessity, with some atmospheric use of the jungle locations and effective suspense building POV shots from the omnipresent cannibals.
Nico Fidenco's score is a cheesy delight, even if the dubbing does leave something to be desired much of the time, with the voice (non-)talent for Gemser being particularly bad in a random pausing way.
Avoiding the worst excesses and WTF shifts of tone that made Emanuelle in America such a disconcerting and disturbing experience, Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals can be recommended to the sexploitation fan looking for a comparatively mild level of gore – mild, that is, compared to a Cannibal Holocaust …
Dutch company Italian Shock's Region 2 DVD of Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals presents the film completely uncut – with the "sexualised violence" of a nipple slicing that the UK censors objected to intact – and in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio. While the transfer is quite a raw and grainy looking one, it could be argued that this is to be expected somewhat given that the film was originally shot on 16mm and blown up for its theatrical release and that, in any case, the rough and sometimes underlit visuals help add to the documentary feel of the jungle travelogue sequences.
Sound is clear if unimaginative, Fidenco's cheesy/evocative score coming through a touch better than the dubbed dialogue.
With D'Amato deceased and Gemser in retirement/seclusion following the death of Tinti, putting together a decent extras package perhaps presented Italian Shock with a difficult challenge. Whatever the specifics, they have risen to the challenge.
First off we get Fidenco's full score for the film, clocking in at over 30 minutes and containing cues and themes absent from the Black Emanuelle's Groove compilation.
Next up are pieces on Gemser and D'Amato. The former comprises a slide show gallery, which plays silent; a career profile that reads awkwardly in a translated from Dutch to English manner and advances too rapidly – at least it makes a change – and a filmography of the "Laura and Joe" collaborations. The latter features useful notes on D'Amato's horror output and an extensive year-by-year filmography.
Finally, we have the obligatory trailer and a slide show, again playing silent.
All told, an enjoyable slice of exploitation that delivers the goods and a quality DVD package.
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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