first outing doesn't waste any time introducing her on an airplane to Africa on one of her many professional trips across the globe. 
Here she goes by the professional moniker Emanuelle, the catchy calling card she uses for her career as a photojournalist instead of her real name, Mae Jordon. Upon landing in Nairobi, she witnesses a world of transplanted Europeans and stays with a diplomat and his wife, Gianni and Ann Danieli (Infanti and Schubert). The circle of free-wheeling associates also includes the more aggressive Richard Clifton (Gemser's real-life husband, Tinti, who appeared in most of her films), his exhibitionist wife Gloria (The Crimes of the Black Cat's Marchall), and the batty, wild-haired William Meredith (City of the Living Dead's Venantini, a real scene stealer here). Emanuelle becomes sexually involved with both of her hosts, while the culture clash around her proves to be both intoxicating and overwhelming.
doesn't seem all that invested in delivering sex scenes (it's half an hour before you get anything really resembling one), instead finding titillation in flirting and splashy party scenes. Aside from Gemser and Tinti, the big series contribution that came fully formed here was 
the spectacular score by Nico Fidenco, a popular singer-songwriter who ended up scoring all of Gemser's official entries along with other exotic erotica like Porno Holocaust, Images in a Convent, and Sesso Nero. The highlight here is the catchy "Black Emanuelle" theme song performed by Bull Dog, which transformed into the "Make Love on the Wing" theme that ran through some later entries. 
of the films in the set) with English-translated or English SDH subtitles. (A short dialogue scene after the main titles at the airport missing from most versions is here as 
well.) The hardcore inserts are also presented in SD in an 8m21s reel if you're so inclined and need a good laugh. A new audio commentary is included with film programmer Jazmyne Moreno; most of the track is dead space with a handful of very condescending remarks thrown in, so skip it. At the opposite end of the spectrum is a marvelous featurette, "Exoticizing Blackness and Erotic Sovereignty in Black Emanuelle" (33m20s), with adult film historian Mireille Miller-Young exploring the series' impact on Skinemax viewers, the portrayals of race and international culture in erotica, her own experiences with Manhattan naughty TV, and the post-'60s state of exploitation cinema that informed these films. An archival interview by Notturno with Gemser, "I Am Your Black Queen" (11m12s), is also included here and was previously on Severin's standalone release of Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (more on that one below). The new "The Reluctant Icon" (19m55s) by Janisse, Stephen Broomer, and Manilo Gomarasca is a very solid place to start your journey in this set, especially if you aren't familiar with Gemser; narrated by Janisse, it covers all the important bases including her modeling career, her segue into acting, the cinematic climate at the time, and the longstanding romance she shared with Tinti that made them Eurocult's ultimate couple. Finally you get the trailer (an HD reconstruction) and an archival interview with Fidenco, "Black Emanuelle's Groove" (13m54s), about how his song career at RCA segued into soundtrack work on westerns and evolved into the scores for this series instigated by his friendship with Albertini. 
original Black Emanuelle, the series quickly diverged into two paths -- one considerably 
shorter than the other. First Albertini delivered the Gemser-free Black Emanuelle 2, bringing back Infanti but diverging completely from the storyline of the first film. Instead they found a new "star," one-hit sexploitation star Shulamith Lasri (christened here as "Sharon Lesley") who, to state the obvious, is no Laura Gemser thanks to a script that makes her more of a tragic cipher. Fortunately the sequel offers a string of other insane ingredients to compensate, starting with an opening montage showing our new heroine in a variety of ridiculous degradation scenarios ranging from a police state inquisition to a Southern plantation. It turns out these scenarios are all part of the warped psyche of our title character, who's suffering from a series of sexual neuroses and acute amnesia at a posh mental clinic. Her doctor, Paul (Infanti), tries to get to the bottom of her problems which cause her to hit on anything in pants but then go batty when things get physical. Through a series of flashbacks (starting in Beirut!) she uncovers her traumas, which include a New Orleans jazz musician father (played by Don Powell, who also composed the eccentric music score and crooned dozens of Italian movie themes), who apparently spent his spare time puking in the gutter. Of course when dad really shows up, it turns out she made the whole thing up. Oh, and you also get a hot and heavy session 
with a basketball player, not to mention guest star Dagmar Lassander in one of her last real sexpot roles.
"The sickeness that disturb me most is myself - Sigmund Freud" [sic, obviously]. As a result, the frequent chit chat sessions about Emanuelle's uneasy state of mind result in some priceless hilarity, with the hefty amounts of nudity (Ms. Lesley spends at least half of her screen time disrobed) keeping everyone distracted from the fact that nothing's really happening. Cable viewers probably didn't care, though some of the more sadistic moments wound up getting excised from many TV and video prints. This one first turned up on DVD in the U.S. from Severin as part of Black Emanuelle's Box 2, and customers who snagged the box instead of the individual films were also treated to a bonus CD containing the bulk of three Fidenco scores. Fortunately Severin's presentation appears to be complete, and trash fans should find plenty to enjoy. The anamorphic transfer on the DVD looked fine at the time given the source, though the photography is pretty much confined to bland medium shots. The audio is dubbed English only. Extras include the English theatrical trailer ("Love and cruelty can unite in the strangest of human needs!"), which packs in as much skin as possible for three and a half minutes, and "Diva 70" (15m52s), a very interesting Nocturno video interview with the chain-smoking Lassander, who talks about her career, her middle class husband's hot-and-cold relationship with her work, being five months 
pregnant and still acting, doing club appearances, acting for Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci, and the reasons she appeared in 
this film (her agent told her to do lots of cameos). 
to be an oddball one-off, producer Edmondo Amati brought Gemser back and teamed her up with a filmmaker 
who would prove to be the most significant director of her career: Joe D'Amato, also credited often under his real name as cinematographer Aristide Massachesi. Already proven in the exploitation field with the dreamy Death Smiles on a Murderer and the insane Emanuelle and Françoise (a.k.a. Emanuelle's Revenge), D'Amato took to the series like a duck to water. Shot in 1976 but released in many territories much later, Emanuelle in Bangkok is basically the Dr. No of the Gemser-D'Amato saga (outdone by its successors but the one that laid the groundwork) as Emanuelle hits the Far East in search of her latest interview conquest, the elusive King of Bangkok. Hot-to-trot masseuses, loudmouthed tourists, and horny politicians soon enter the mix, along with some out-of-left-field mondo footage of a mongoose ripping a snake to shreds in a cage. Oh, and in a nod to the original Just Jaeckin film's notorious "cigarette act," lucky viewers get a naughty nightclub performance involving female privates and ping-pong balls.
course also still functions as a good excuse to show Gemser and another woman getting it on. As usual Gemser gets to enjoy some screen time with Tinti as her archaeologist buddy and potential love interest, while the cast is peppered with 
welcome faces like Venantini (making his second series appearance), Ely Galleani, Ivan Rassimov, and Giacomo Rossi-Stuart.
The Severin Blu-ray is a big step up all around, correcting the film's running time to 94m28s versus the PAL-mastered 
91m33s DVD. The English and Italian tracks here both sound excellent, the film looks far superior in every possible way, and the (now English) credits are sourced from film. A new commentary by Aaron AuBuchon is a solid companion to the film sifting through historical influences on the film at the time, the various artistic elements at D'Amato's disposal to craft a sort of cinematic expedition, and the scholarship around these films versus their grubby reputations for such a long time. In "A Reflection of the Times" (6m52s), actress Debra Berger chats over Zoom about the heyday of Italian film, the path she followed from her father William Berger, and her thoughts about the portrayal of her sexually fluid character. In the archival 1999 interview "Ivan the Terrible" (7m9s), Rassimov looks back at his fun experience making the film, his fondness for the director and cast, and the lighthearted nature during the shoot even during sex scenes. A lo-res home video promo is also included. 
could have predicted where D'Amato and company would head next with Emanuelle in America, the most infamous film in the entire 
series and arguably its finest film as well. Heavily censored in most territories upon its original release, the film spawned tales of its more extreme excesses involving a graphic (but fake) snuff movie and a stable interlude with Pedro the horse. Of course, once home video allowed us to set us on the full-strength version that all turned out to be true, and the film has since stood proud at the top of the genre-defying Eurosleaze heap. 
something that the traditional XXX material isn't even close to the most attention-getting footage here. 
issuing the film on DVD completely uncut with extras including a 13-minute excerpt from the Totally Uncut doc (more on that below), the Gemser audio interview, and filmographies. Eurocult fans were delighted at the time, and somehow that title sitting on the shelves of brick and mortar stores all over the country didn't raise any red flags at all. In 2019 after the film passed over to Studiocanal, Mondo Macabro issued a Blu-ray in 2019 featuring an impressive scan that improves in all the ways you'd expect; completely uncut, it features the English and Italian mono tracks with optional English subtitles and a new commentary by this writer and Cinema Arcana's Bruce Holecheck. Video extras include the "Erotic Experience" cut of the Nocturno doc Joe D'Amato: Totally Uncut (62m21s) with the director going through the majority of his 1970s career, and "From Two 's to One: The Story of Em(m)anuelle" (35m30s) with David Flint charting the strange history of the cycle from the real Arsan through Kristel and the Gemser series. A 2023 German mediabook edition from Excessive (with a variety of four different covers) features two Blu-ray containing the uncut version, the audio commentary, a new German commentary by Lars Dreyer-Winkelmann, a "Blue Extasy" 84-minute featurette with the cast and crew (which was divided up into the featurettes on the Severin disc below), the Super 8 31m22s version, and the 92m93s German theatrical cut. 
with the usual English sub options, and the commentary is ported over. A new commentary with Kat Ellinger is filled with her enthusiasm for D'Amato and other taboo pushers like Jean Rollin, Georges Bataille, Walerian Borowczyk, and Jess Franco, with other topics including the contrasts in European Gothic cinema and 
bestiality in Euro cinema. In "The Danish Man" (10m39s), Bloch looks back at his Euro acting career (where he felt qualified mainly by being able to memorize lines) and reflects positively on D'Amato, a sentiment shared in "The Confessions of Diana Smith" (16m31s) with actress Maria Piera Regoli looking back at the colorful nature of '70s Rome and the networking tricks needed to mount a career. In "The Art of Sexy & Gore" (25m14s), art director Marco Dentici recalls working on two of D'Amato's films with this one in particular posing some satisfying challenges with its studio and apartment settings that called for some naughty decorative touches ("without being vulgar"). He also talks about creating the torture chamber setting for the snuff film, which resulted in an irate actress during one mishap. In "The Cutting of the Flesh" (10m36s), legendary effects artists Giannetto De Rossi looks at his own contributions to that infamous sequence and the verisimilitude that landed him in court. In "The Devil's Trick" (8m29s), makeup artist Maurizio Trani adds to those accounts with his own memories of working quickly with D'Amato and De Rossi to come up with a gruesome array of prosthetic trickery like the mouth restraint. In "The Journalist" (13m23s), screenwriter Maria Pia Fusco and Piero Vivarelli provide (somewhat noisy) audio accounts of ending up with Amati, the revenge aspect that was behind this story, the state of feminism at the time that allowed Fusco to "let off steam" by having a woman in charge, and the transformations that came up along the way to the end product. Finally in "The Naked City" (26m15s), Michael Gingold provides a tour of the filming locations seen in the film (sometimes more than once) with ties to a few other surprising titles and cameos in other series entries. The theatrical trailer is also included. 
the second most outrageous entry in the Gemser-D'Amato cycle has to be Emanuelle Around the World, originally released in Italy as Emanuelle - Perche Violenza Alle Donne? (or, roughly translated, "Why Is There Violence 
Towards Women?")-- which pretty much encapsulates the entire focus of the story. Once again a globe-hopping photographer, pretty and curious Emanuelle (Gemser) is first seen tumbling around naked in the back of a truck in New York with her latest conquest, played (uncredited) by porn actor-director Paul Thomas (most notorious for starting his film career in the G-rated Jesus Christ Superstar). When she gets wind of an international human slavery ring that preys on nubile women, she decides to recruit her blonde friend, European activist Cora (Schubert again), for an expedition into the darker side of human nature. Their exploits range from a visit to an Indian orgy orchestrated by a sex guru (Anthropophagus himself, George Eastman), an all-girl sex school equipped with giant phalluses, and the notorious finale beneath the Brooklyn Bridge in which a bunch of drunken senators decide to gang rape Carol. PC it ain't, but that's the '70s for you.
DVD 
of the theatrical cut, which was quite fine; apart from some print damage in the opening shots and somewhat hazy French credits, the quality is nice with rich colors that blew away all those miserable VHS bootlegs. The film can be played either in Italian or English (with optional English subtitles translated from the Italian track); it's dubbed either way, and personally the English track feels a bit more in keeping with the tone of the film, but opinions may vary. Along with the Fidenco interview, the disc also includes a blurry-looking, non-anamorphic U.S. trailer (with that great Jerry Gross Organization tag) under the same title. 
just socially acceptable 
enough for its target audience (i.e., no fake snuff footage). 
hybrid of softcore sleaze and Italian 
cannibal mayhem rushed quickly into production to cash in on the same year's Jungle Holocaust. Having just pushed the series as far as it could go in terms of out-there sex scenes, D'Amato and company decided to take a different tactic for box office success and ended up making a wild choice with the cannibal craze that would keep on escalating well into the early '80s. Not one to go for animal violence in his films (apart from the mongoose bit in Bangkok) and even avoiding a hardcore variant for this one, D'Amato ended up making one of the more accessible films in both of the areas he was exploiting. 
it isn't long before all hell breaks loose in this green nightmare as cannibals emerge and start 
dining on the intruders. 
isn't a pretty film by any means (and that stage blood is still a funky color as always), but it's quite remarkable how good it looks here if you're familiar with 
the history of the film. The English and Italian dubs (both of which are ridiculously loose and sloppy, with particularly dazed line readings for Gemser in English) are included here in DTS-HD MA mono options with English subtitles translated from the Italian track (and quite different from the 88 ones). In addition to the trailer, the release adds a whopping five new featurettes, making this firstborn fide special edition ever for this film. "The World of Nico Fidenco" (27m4s) is more of a career-spanning interview with the composer and popular vocalist, who recounts how he wound up getting a shortcut to Italian record chart stardom and parlayed his success into a long, very fruitful career working on films including all of the D'Amato-Gemser Black Emanuelle films. "A Nun Among the Cannibals" (22m53s) is a surprisingly funny and candid interview with Clementi who talks about getting an agent and landing her first role, her natural affinity for acting without training, her gratitude for post-dubbing on her films ("I have the memory of a goldfish"), and her reaction to being covered in animal guts. O'Brien turns up next for "Dr. O'Brien MD" (18m47s) with the future Zombie Holocaust star, sporting a beard and shot in SD at a restaurant, chatting about his start in the industry, early roles in The Train and Run Man Run, and collaborations with directors like D'Amato, Lucio Fulci, and Sergio Sollima. Next up is Monica Zanchi with Notturno Video's featurette "From Switzerland to Mato Grosso" (18m40s), with the Swiss-born actress sharing stories about how she got into acting and ended up appearing in films like Hitch Hike and Sister Emanuelle. She chats a fair bit about this film including her crush on Tinti and a fight with a costumer, as well as her views on doing nudity. Finally, the reclusive Gemser is represented with the "I Am Your Black Queen" archival interview mentioned above. 
films always had a whiff of the mondo movie about them with their focus on exotic travels, local customs, and 
interloping European onlookers, with D'Amato pushing things even further with his shock tactics. The series finally went full mondo when D'Amato came up with a new template that he exploited multiple times with collaborator Bruno Mattei in varying degrees, starting with 1977's Notti porno nel mondo (or Porno Nights of the World, a.k.a. Sexy Night Report) featuring newly-shot host segments with Gemser, rampant stock footage, and a few new sequences (mostly shot in nightclubs) showing various kinky activities in action. Gemser mostly hangs around her dressing room commenting on what we're about to see, and then we get pelted with a stripper doing a routine with a very bored Great Dane, naked rollerskating, a naked magic routine, mud wrestling, a sex marathon, and so on. Some of the footage is culled from the West German sex comedy Penthouse Playgirls, other bits are from the sex comedy If You Don't Stop It... You'll Go Blind, and the rest... God only knows. None of it really earns the term "porno" at all except in the softest sense, but the result is hilariously goofy if you're in the right frame of mind. The same approach was used by D'Amato for the far more explicit 1978 film Follie di notte (now on U.S. Blu-ray as Crazy Nights) hosted by Euro pop star Amanda Lear, which really has to be seen to be believed.
which finds her again beaming a huge smile as she pontificates about the loopy sexual peccadilloes of the world's inhabitants. Ostensibly staged around the strip in Las Vegas, this one is 
much weirder in its approach, kicking off with a naked occult ritual before moving on to a nudist contest, horrific boar violence, an implied donkey stage act, and other stock footage highlights. The undeniable show stopper here is a very fake, insane surgery scene involving a guy hoping to get a penis transplant, which must have caused quite a ruckus in the few theaters where this played. 
cinema, his salvaging of various projects, his collaborations with directors like D'Amato and Antonio Margheriti, and some of the other odd titles like Black Killer scattered along the way and his later big 
hit with D'Amato, 11 Days, 11 Nights. In "The Naked Eye: Sex and the Mondo Film" (43m29s), Elizabeth Purcell, Mark Goodall, and Joe Rubin deliver a visual survey of the more titillating side of the mondo film, its intersection with the sexploitation market, the origins of early exploitation that used exotic settings to get away with taboo material, a detour into nudist camps, burlesque shows, and gay erotica, the apex of the craze in Italy in the '60s, and the value of capturing a snapshot of the world at a specific point in time. In "Crazy, Crazy World" (13m33s), makeup artist Pietero Tenoglio chats about working on both films, meeting D'Amato on White Fang, and admiring the director's cinematic economy. The archival "After Hours with Joe D'Amato" (12m28s) is the D'Amato Eurofest interview previously seen on Severin's Bangkok DVD; also included are the English main titles for the first Porno Nights (as Sexy Night Report) and trailers for both films. 
for some nunsploitation; thus we were given Sister Emanuelle, which also makes a lot of room for 
the naughty antics of Monica Zanchi. Gemser's co-star from Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals plays wanton young teen Monica, whose propensity for luring young boys into public group sex lands her in a convent. Monica tries her best to break Sister Emanuelle, who quickly winds up in hot water with the Mother Superior for exposing her decidedly verboten garters and silky undies during a cat fight. Pretty soon Monica's watching after a hunky convict (Tinti) hiding on the premises and luring Emanuelle into sins of the flesh which may force her to break her vows forever. 
one of her more interesting performances, as Gemser is forced to convey a broader spectrum of emotions that usual. 
Severin's 2007 DVD presented a beautiful transfer that made for a welcome reprieve after the very fuzzy VHS editions (including a U.S. one from Private Screenings). The English dub is quite well done and works best here again; extras include the theatrical trailer and four bits of alternate and deleted footage from the Italian VHS, including some brief pseudo-hardcore insert footage that was left out of the main feature. 
last and least seen of the Gemser/D'Amato Black Emanuelle 
films. Originally released as La via della prostituzione, the film once again features Gemser as the titular photojournalist who bounces from one locale to another, this time driven by an episodic plot straight out of a '60s Olga roughie. While doing research for a story on organized crime, the nosy Emanuelle hooks up with her modeling buddy Susan (Galleani again). "You still go in for a lot of lovemaking?" asks Emmy, which nympho Susan answers by pulling over into a garage, flashing her undies, and nailing the mechanic. Then they head to the airport where the women spy a wheelchair-bound young woman traded off for a big wad of cash by a suspicious lothario (Tinti), but they're too busy posing as a couple of stewardesses and eyeballing a wealthy polygamist Arab to do much about it. Then they go off to a plantation where they take a sexy shower together. For vague reasons they decide to hop on a plane to Africa where they get involved with fashion shoots, bed down with more guys, and notice Tinti and the same sold woman. Emanuelle follows them and witnesses a boardroom sales session in which young women are trotted out and stripped in front of decadent European buyers, all involved in a white slavery ring. Further snooping brings her face to face with Tinti, lots of open hotel doors with naked women getting felt up inside, the usual implied gang 
rape scene, a lesbian nurse, and an 
authoritative transvestite who partakes in the funniest bowling alley fight ever committed to film. 
see Venantini making a return to the series, here getting a hefty amount of screen time and even a couple of sex scenes this time around 
to boot. 
the time 1982 rolled around, the 
Black Emanuelle cycle seemed to have run its course. However, that didn't stop grunge auteur Mattei and his frequent writer and co-director Claudio Fragasso (Troll 2) from giving the idea a new spin, namely cranking out a pair of films placing our photographer heroine in a women's prison. The first one was the wonderfully lurid Violence on a Women's Prison, an intentionally excessive wallow in violence and perversity geared to cash in on the recent women-in-prison revival going on with titles like The Concrete Jungle. Mattei had already dipped his toes into this material a little with the aforementioned mondo movies with Gemser, but having just found his real cinematic voice with the outrageous Hell of the Living Dead and The Other Hell, Mattei and his cohorts were really ready to pull out all the stops. 
fancy black 
lingerie. Laura is quickly mired in a hotbed of lesbian gropings and boundary-ignoring prison staff, quickly snapping one day when she flings a bucket of excrement at two jailers. That leads to the world's nastiest twist on mud wrestling and gets her thrown in solitary confinement where she's swarmed with rats (complete with Red Hots stuck over their eyes), after which she does strike up a rapport with Dr. Moran (Tinti, of course, looking tired here), a physician doing time at the men's jail next door. It isn't long before Laura and her fellow inmates start to get fed up with all the brutality, and her true mission starts to come to light. 
This sleazy gem was released as Caged Women in U.S. theaters by Motion Picture Marketing and debuted on DVD under its original European title from Media Blasters in 2002 featuring a 4m52s Mattei interview. In 2018, Severin Films reissued the title in a significantly improved presentation with much better colors and detail. The original grainy, cheap veneer of the film has been left intact, a wise choice compared to the attempts to smooth over Women's Prison Massacre on the American Blu-ray release. The English DTS-HD MA mono track sounds good for what it is, especially when it comes to that low-rent but effective score by Luigi Ceccarelli (who would go on to glory with Rats: Night of Terror). As usual this comes with multiple buying options including a Blu-ray, a DVD, and a Laura Gemser Deluxe Bundle with Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals plus that Gemser pin. On the extras side, "Brawl In Women’s Block" (29m3s) features Fragasso and usual co-writer Rossella Drudi, plus their adorable, camera-hogging orange cat, talking about how they first met (under false French pretenses) and worked their way up the Italian exploitation ladder with Fragasso doing a lot of directing for Mattei on multiple films. They also reveal the origin of the infamous blade concealing scene (you'll know it when you see it), opining that "women have these kind of thoughts!" Next up is the brief Mattei interview (2m47s) featured on the old Media Blasters disc, basically explaining how he wanted this to be a Gemser vehicle from the start; a radio spot is also included. In 2020, 88 Films released a U.K. Blu-ray featuring a new 2K scan, a booklet with an essay by Andrew Graves, the English audio track (LPCM 1.0 mono) with subs, an audio commentary by Samm Deighan, a "Clyde Anderson's Jail" (44m25s) interview with Fragasso, a "Dawn & Anderson" (26m47s) interview with Gianni Leacche, "Franco Caracciolo - The Gay Prince" (29m22s) with Andrea Meroni hosting a look at the actor with interviews subjects like Sergio Martino, and the trailer. 
with Violence in a Women's Prison and playing like some sort of deranged sequel with much of the same 
cast, Women's Prison Massacre (known in Europe under the far more evocative title, Blade Violent, and retitled Emanuelle in Prison for the packaging only in the Severin set) ramps up the action and bloodshed levels along with flashes of visual style unheard of in a Mattei film. Once again playing a plucky but decidedly humorless journalist, Emanuelle winds up in a framed drug bust and sent to prison where the haughty warden (De Selle) turns a blind eye to the oppressive bullying of tactfully-named, pigment-challenged Albina (a scene-stealing Flores). Oh yeah, and they occasionally put on make-up for performance art that looks like an unholy fusion of Cafe Flesh and Caged Heat. Things get even more out of control when a bunch of convicts led by "Crazy Boy" (Tinti) break into the prison during a fouled-up getaway and start taking hostages. A few sex scenes ensue when the characters aren't shooting, biting, and maiming each other on the way to a gory climax.
paced and outrageous with funky, bass-heavy synth music occupying the background. Gemser is watchable as 
always (though for some reason she leaves all the naked bumping and grinding to supporting cast this time out), but Tinti and Flores really steal the entire show as dueling psychos with their own sociopathic agendas. Loads of fun and irredeemably nasty, this one's a keeper. 
commentary between AGFA's Anne Choi and film editor Perri Pivovar is a loose and conversational survey of the film pointing out its differences from the rest of the series, the signifiers of Mattei's cinema (and Fragasso's and 
Drudi's), and the mingling of exploitation and artistry in films like this. Speaking of Ceccarelli, "Jailhouse Rock" (39m2s) is a thorough video interview with the composer about his self-taught training, his first meetings with Mattei and Fragasso, the attitude he thinks is required for film scoring, and the tricks for working on rapidly dwindling budgets. "Razor Blade Smile" is a 14-minute interview with actor Pietro Angelo Pozzato about his experience rising up for working as an extra and musician to acting training and his entry into the Claudio Fragasso repertory company (including a cross-dressing character he inhabited even off camera at the time). In the video essay "Franca Stoppi: Matron of Hell" (17m13s), Rachael Nisbet delivers an informative overview covering the imposing actress' remarkable performances in films like Beyond the Darkness and The Other Hell along with some other lesser seen roles-- and her turn as the head matron here, of course. An English trailer (as Blade Violent) is also included. 
hard to believe D'Amato was less than three years into his official directing career when he took on this sexy potboiler, 
shot back to back in 1976 with Emanuelle in Bangkok. Here he and Gemser join forces for a non-Emanuelle tale of Eastern sex and sin, originally released in Italy as Eva Nera and in America as Black Cobra before being circulated on home video under such titles as Black Cobra Woman and, in its Blu-ray debut, Emmanuelle and the Deadly Black Cobra. (There's still no Emanuelle here, and the spelling change in the character's name here would have probably incited legal action a few decades earlier.) Adding considerable marquee value is American star Jack Palance, who was enjoying a stint in Italy at the time making this in quick succession along with such films as Rulers of the City and The Cop in Blue Jeans.
stay at his penthouse where she's free to indulge in wild snake fantasies and explore her bisexual side without any sexual obligations 
to her benefactor. However, something sinister may be afoot with Judas's reptile obsession bound to end in violence.
from the notoriously anti-English Italian label Cinekult. The Code Red Blu-ray from 2017 was a welcome development at the time with detail and color accuracy 
greatly improved across the board, and it's fun to finally make out little signs and architectural touches in the Hong Kong exterior footage. The darker scenes have a grit to them likely due to the Italian scanning equipment as usual, though it's fairly subdued here compared to some of the more notorious offenders out there. The sole audio option is the standard English track (DTS-HD MA mono), featuring Palance's original voice apart from a few amusing (and very confusing) instances in which a completely different voice actor does his lines off-screen. The track sounds like it was pulled from a theatrical print and is clear enough despite some obvious crackling around the reel changes. A now infamous audio commentary is also provided by Mirek Lipinski goes into detail about the shots done in Rome versus Hong Kong, Gemser's history and (shy) personality, her relationship with Tinti, and his now about '70s female pubic grooming, among many other topics. His speculations get quite amusing at times (especially regarding the reason Gemser wears sunglasses while driving), and you really have to hear him grappling with a critical reading of Tinti's big scene at the end. He also admits a lack of professional knowledge about types of snakes, bringing in tips from another expert to explain the functions of the various reptile actors throughout the film. Also included are the film's Italian trailer and bonus ones for The Curious Female, After the Fall of New York, Blastfighter, and Hands of Steel. 
Gemser film riding her box office popularity wave was Black Emmanuelle / White Emmanuelle, better known to cable and VHS f
ans under such titles as Black Velvet and Emmanuelle in Egypt), which teams up her with Laure starlet Annie Belle. Though no character in the film is actually named Emmanuelle, director Brunello Rondi (best known for writing lots of Fellini films) keeps things well within the series template by including lots of travelogue footage interspersed with plenty of softcore sex scenes. The real curio factor here is the fact that Gemser and Belle happen to be teamed up with their real-life romantic partners at the time, Gabriele Tinti and Al Cliver respectively, though oddly enough their screen time together ranges from static to flat-out unpleasant. 
getting character names, and... well, that's pretty much it. Apart from the Tinti-led photo sessions in which he forces a topless Gemser to pose with a worm-ridden jackal carcass and a big pile of camel poop, the weirdest highlight of the film is easily a druggy 
sequence in which Gemser attends a cult ceremony where she chugs goat's blood, hallucinates an attack by her evil doppelganger, and gets molested by a bunch of priests. One of the biggest assets here is the magnificent score by Dario and Alberto Balden Bembo, which still hasn't really gotten its due.
"Black Velvet" (18m26s), which features an on-camera Cliver intercut with audio interviews with Gemser and Belle as they discuss the making of the film, the director, Cliver's role in Visconti's The Damned, the ramshackle production's impact on parallel 
Joe D'Amato projects, and Gemser's illness going in and out of the Morocco shoot. 
you get to Joe D'Amato's career in the '80s, things get very strange as he alternates between internationally distributed horror and 
sexploitation films, under the radar porn, and bizarre patchwork films that defy any explanation at all. Be it stitching together new footage with the remnants of a Jess Franco film to make Justine or cobbling together pieces of his own films and new footage to create entirely new adult film narratives like the two movies on our next Blu-ray in the set, you can get quite a headache trying to make sense of it all. 
something like 
that.
cult tragedy in Guyana, it didn't take long for exploitation cinema to cash in everywhere from made-for-TV 
movies to Italian cannibal films like Eaten Alive. One of the weirder entries (and certainly the most amusing) is Love Camp, a Gemser vehicle that follows the template of her Black Emanuelle films even if her character doesn't have a name this time. Not surprisingly, some editions including the U.S. home video releases have christened the film as Divine Emanuelle: Love Cult-- presumably to avoid confusion with Jess Franco's Love Camp, which is another ball of wax entirely. Austrian-born actor, crackpot author, and pop singer Christian Anders steps into the director's plate here (with some purported help from Greek sexploitation pro Elia Milonakos) to chronicle the story of the Children of Light, a sex-driven cult led by "the Divine One" (Gemser). Her Aryan boyfriend, Dorian (Anders), is responsible for scouting out new members, and anyone who doesn't screw like a bunny or dares to develop a monogamous attraction is trussed up in front of everyone else and viciously whipped. (That'll get 'em in the mood, eh?) Things get considerably more complicated when Dorian initiates a senator's daughter, Patricia (Trance's Brahmann), and begins to fall in love with her; however, when they decide to leave, they find the cult's "pro-love" stance only extends so far... 
fairly graphic and push the softcore limits about as far as possible (no wonder this rarely made the rounds on cable!), and Gemser fans will certainly get an eyeful. Anders doesn't ally excel in 
any of his capacities (though he comes closest by singing the catchy theme song, "Love Love Love," which was released as a 45 single!), but he keeps things bouncing along nicely by throwing in a sex scene or goofy dialogue exchange whenever the pace threatens to flag.
The Severin Blu-ray proves to be the real dark horse in this set, featuring a radically improved transfer of the film framed at 1.66:1 (adding more info on the sides, trimming down the excess headroom, and fixing some obvious vertical squeezing). The English and French audio tracks are included with English SDH subtitles, and the quality here is gorgeous thanks to a 4K 
scan of the original negative. But that's far from all... Anyone familiar with Anders' prior (and only other) directorial effort, the completely lunatic West German martial arts extravaganza Roots of Evil, had to wonder how he ended up doing a more straightforward sexploitation film. Well, as it turns out, what we've been watching (even the extended German VHS version) wasn't his cut at all; extensive reshoots and cuts at the producers' behest added several secondary sex scenes with German smut film vets (most recognizably Vampire Ecstasy's Nico Wolferstetter). The very different, much longer 104-minute version has been reconstructed here under the title Fanatico... When the Goddess Calls, listed as a work print but looking pretty completed here in equally immaculate quality. Watching Anders' martial arts disco music sex cult epic this way is a truly dizzying experience, and if enough folks make it this far into the set, this one should pick up a far more substantial cult following in the future. This astounding feat of restoration is seriously worth picking up this set all by itself. An extra 2m30s of one deleted scene and a sex scene from the German version are also included, plus the trailer. 
Emanuelle film arrived in the early '80s from 
one-shot director Bruno Fontana (adapting his own novel) with a Cyprus-shot World War II action drama filmed under the Italian title La belva dalla calda pelle ("The Hot-Skinned Beast") and initially circulated in English as The Dirty Seven. In what amounts to a gritty, sexed-up combat take on Snow White, Gemser gets dropped in the middle of a tense group of mercenaries as Sheila, their guide and a disruptive presence among the men who vie for her attention. The most benevolent of the bunch is Bony (Tinti), while the much more malefic Falk (Infanti again) has other plans. Much gunfire and occasional nudity ensue. 
about as good as they could via 2K scans from film prints with English audio.
producer's attempts to put some models in the film, and his rapport with the other "mercenaries." Then in "Sunlight and Violence" (15m43s), cinematographer Nino Celeste talks about the issues and positives of working with the Cypriot crew, the arduous shooting conditions, and the language barriers faced on set. A lengthy Dirty Seven trailer is also included. The big extra here is one that's been around on the VHS swapping and bootleg circuit for ages: Looking Good (60m58s), an '80s workout video hosted by Laura Gemser in the wake of the fitness craze inaugurated by Jane Fonda. Colorful, typical of the era, and strangely dubbed, it's a real pop culture curio with lots of slow motion and bright decor. The image quality here is excellent and much better than the copies we've had floating around for ages. This one comes with an audio Commentary with Made for TV Mayhem's Amanda Reyes and The Hysteria Continues' Erik Threlfall who have a blast delivering the definitive track about leotards, '80s fitness, the appeal of playing an aerobics dominatrix, and the function of leg warmers. 
known for its astonishing music score, the debut solo effort for 
beloved Lucio Fulci composer Fabio Frizzi, Amore Libero - Free Love is also essentially a proto-Black Emanuelle film with Laura Gemser shining in her first screen role. Here she plays Janine, a young diver woman in the Seychelles who entrances new arrival Francesco (Bottesini), an engineer staying with duplicitous colleague Chavad (Venantini yet again!). Soon he learns that the local culture has very different values than his own, as well as religious practices that could prove to be his undoing. With its eerie third act detour into the supernatural and an atmosphere of humid eroticism, this is an early but fascinating entry in the tropical fantasias that populated Italian cinema throughout the 1970s including D'Amato's aforementioned sex films and gialli like Tropic of Cancer (with Jess Franco providing a few West German variants as well).
Frizzi score though, a longtime fan favorite with a main theme that will stick in your head for a very long time. Director Pier Ludovico Pavoni keeps things straightforward by mainly delivering pretty travelogue images, and the editing here 
was handled by none other than Franco Fraticelli who handled most of Dario Argento's films from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage through Opera. This one has been extremely difficult to see in a decent presentation anywhere, including an unauthorized Mya Communications DVD (as Real Emanuelle) sourced from an Italian VHS with English subtitles. The Severin Blu-ray is a real treat, finally allowing the cinematography to shine and including both the Italian track and the elusive English version with optional English SDH subtitles. The film was shot without live sound and dubbed either way, so the English audio is fine. In "The Seductress" (9m56s), Yugoslavian actress Olga Bisera delivers an audio interview about her experience on the film, her time in the Seychelles, her romance with a local bigwig just after ending her marriage to an Italian producer, and the problems they had when the film ran over schedule. Also included are an alternate English title sequence (as just Free Love) and an English trailer. 
While the two men driving them engage in 
slapstick shenanigans, the man and woman share their stories involving an unpleasant wife (Velázquez) and a journey into sexual servitude instigated by Gabriele Tinti, of course. 
brings us a double feature devoted to the personality most directly impacted by Laura Gemser and the 
Black Emanuelle cycle: Ajita Wilson, a trans American model and actress best known for exploitation favorites like The Nude Princess and Jess Franco's outrageous Sadomania. Her second film, Black Deep Throat (or Gola profonda nera), was produced by infamous showman Dick Randall (who was also behind that Feeling Good workout video along with his wife), and despite the title, it isn't hardcore and doesn't involve the title skill at all (though Wilson would go all the way in several later productions). Instead the title is apparently meant to evoke the newsworthy informer to Woodward and Bernstein about Watergate as reporter Claudine (Wilson) is insistent on defying her editor and investigating a prominent European actor connected to sex parties and the sad fates of multiple young women. Cue the orgies, a weird music trauma that triggers Claudine's libido, and some slack investigative reporting. 
On the same disc is another in the line of D'Amato mondo cut and paste jobs, Porno Nights of the World N. 2., with 
Wilson stepping into hosting duties here instead of Gemser. Here she's an airline hostess and striptease expert (dubbed by the unmistakable Carolyn De Fonseca) being interviewed in Hong Kong by porn star Marina Hedman, which segues into a variety of naughty nightclub sequences involving ping pong balls, living nude painted statues, grainy stock footage, belly dancing, cross-dressing lesbians, mud wrestling, German S&M parties, and a ridiculous horsey sex twist on Swan Lake. It's completely goofy and ridiculous as usual, and the 2K scan here from the original negative looks ridiculously good (apart from the inevitable stock footage bits, of course). The English and Italian tracks are both included with English SDH subtitles. Trailers for both films are included along with "Ajita Wilson: An Elusive Icon" (16m3s), a video essay by Matt Richardson covering the depictions of ethnic womanhood at the time, the conventions of blaxploitation during the era, the contrast between current trans personalities and the late '70s, and the possibilities offered by European cinema versus Wilson's native New York City. 
Blu-ray we cycle around back to the great Joe D'Amato who takes 
center stage the 2016 documentary Inferno Rosso: Joe D'Amato on the Road of Excess, an entertaining Italian doc featuring archival snippets of the man himself along with interview with the likes of Michele Soavi, Eli Roth, Lamberto Bava, Claudio Fragasso, George Eastman, Alberto Di Martino, Jess Franco, Ruggero Deodato, Tinto Brass, Giannetto De Rossi, Gianlorenzo Battaglia, Franco Gaudenzi, Luca Damiano, Jean-Francois Rauger, Mark Shannon, Francesca Massaccesi, and Giuliana Gamba. It's a great deal of fun capturing his cinema-loving personality and life story as well as his gleeful indulgence in the crossroads of sex and violence on film. What emerges is a portrait of someone always changing gears and looking for something engaging, which resulted in a slew of films that are more popular now than when they were released. The doc doesn't shy away from his eventual shift to standard pornography but doesn't quite show anything super explicit either, so it makes for a pretty solid intro to him as well if you're a newcomer. 
retitling of Voglia di guardare which was circulated in English as Peepshow (the actual title on the transfer here) and Midnight Gigolo. It's a fairly typical bit of classy softcore erotica with Jenny Tamburi (Smile Before Death) starring as 
Christina, a married bourgeois woman slowly lured into brothel work by shifty Adrea (Somma). Her activities ignite the passions of both her husband (Masé) and her best friend (Gemser), with the madam in charge (sex film favorite Carati) calling the shots.