The Niece

LA NIPOTE is a sexy Italian comedy, which I've viewed in the "enhanced" (read: XXX inserts added) French-track porn version retitled UNE NIECE MALICIEUSE for dirty-minded Francophiles. Either way it's a fine spotlight for star Orchidea De Santis.

De Santis is not entirely unsung -she received a nice notice from IMDb's resident expert on the genre lazarillo, but she is not widely known like the Feneches and Mutis. Here the voluptuous blonde is in fine form, always bending over as the housemaid Doris, who has sex with every guy in sight. I liken her to a fluffer (in U.S. porn parlance), say Marlene Willoughby, not overly attractive but much more stimulating sexually than the usual "classical" beauty.

In the French version, apparently released 6 years later when porn had turned XXX, the emphasis is on gynecological closeup shots that are pure porn. Most of these are poorly matched to the original footage -for example we never see Orchidea actually engaged in the naughty bits. But confusingly there is one money shot where the camera pans up to reveal one of the male characters, so I'm not sure what happened -probably he was added whole cloth to the movie by the Frenchies.

Also, an emphasis in the French edition, per its title, is on visiting niece Agnes (or Adele in the Italian version listed in IMDb), a prim and proper young brunette who eventually causes trouble in the household. The uncle Michel (Luigi in the original) lusts after his niece but makes do humping Doris for most of the film.

Key subplot involves nerdy young Antoine (Antonio in Italian), surrounded by porn magazines but found attractive by all the women. The MILF wife of the menage, Francine (Zoraide in Italian), is an impressive sex performer, though her French body double does a lot of explicit stuff that shouldn't be credited to her. I wonder if there ever was a brou-ha-ha regarding doubles in these pasteup Continental sex films, the way there currently is regarding Natalie Portman and her dance double in BLACK SWAN?

The farcical slapstick is amusing, and the femme cast delivers alluring performances. I recommend the XXX version not only for French-speakers but in general because it delivers the logical conclusion to most otherwise teasing scenes, for a change.

Director Nello Rossati's all-time classic is THE SENSUOUS NURSE starring Ursula Andress, but this rather crude forerunner is worth a look, too.

I read the other two reviews where they talk about the XXX hard core version being released in France. I just received a xxx hard core version all in Italian. So, I compared my original G rated Italian version to this new one with the XXX inserts. There are many "extra scenes" in the old copy and/or the XXX version cut lots out to make the film shorter so they could include the Hard stuff. The XXX version runs 91 mins. (after all the inserts and editing). The regular one is 1:42. Whole sections were cut out but most cuts were shortened scenes. Here is the "funny" part...someone accidentally showed the XXX version on the Happy channel (sort of like the Family Channel here) during the dinner hour. I am sure someone got a scolding for that mistake. Larry Anderson

Every vacation, engineer Luigi Favaretto, with his wife Zoraide and friend Piero, comes to the country house to fully devote himself to his hobby - hunting. Only he hunts more for the delicious maid Doris. At the same time, Pierrot, who hates hunting animals, takes great pleasure in hunting Zoraide. Luigi's hunting plans are disrupted by Adele, the 18-year-old niece of Zoraide, who suddenly showed up to them after the death of her mother.

Director Nello Rossati is perhaps most famous (well, outside Italy anyway) for a film called "The Sensuous Nurse", which featured original Bond girl Ursula Andress and played on late-night cable in America in the 80's. Perhaps as a result that film got a very decent DVD release (with subtitles even) a few years back. This film is pretty similar to that one; however, it has met a very different fate--the French got ahold of it at some point, dubbed it into French, and added about twenty minutes of hardcore porn inserts! The plot (which between the French dubbing and random XXX footage was pretty hard for me to follow) involves a typical bourgeois Italian patriarch, his unfaithful wife, his shy, virginal son and his saucy, voluptuous maid (Orchidea DeSantis)--all elements of "The Sensuous Nurse" as well--but there's also a resident stud, and in place of a sensuous nurse trying to kill the patriarch with sex, there's a malicious niece trying to, uh, kill the patriarch (her uncle) with sex.

The problem with this movie is that the actress playing the niece, while certainly cute, is not all that great of actress and is neither a very sexy nor very evil presence. (The movie gets a nice spark out of Orchidea Santis, but she disappears about halfway through). If only they'd cast someone like Ornella Muti, Jenny Tamburi, or Leanora Fani as the niece, this would have been a much stronger movie. The bigger problem, however, is the XXX inserts. The (apparently headless) "stunt doubles" here are without exception much less attractive than the actors they're doubling and the "bonus footage" is awkwardly incorporated into the film. It also doesn't fit well with the saucy, but relatively innocent tone of the original film (which was obviously more of a softcore/nudie comedy). I also suspect, given the amount of insert footage and the short length of the film that this XXX version of the film is severely cut as well.

Very few of the films in the 70's Italian "erotic family" comedy/drama genre, all inspired by Salvatore Samperi's "Malizia", have gotten any kind of decent English-friendly release (including "Malizia" itself), but this one is in especially rough shape. . .