Emmanuelle 5

Penthouse queen Monique Gabrielle stars in this low budget Andy Sidaris style 'thriller' as an actress lured to some fictional middle eastern kingdom to be a sex toy for its cruel ruler. With that plot line it had exotic (or at least lurid) potential, but the final product lacks the conviction of its cheesy exploitativeness. Even the nude scenes are boring and tame, and the whole thing looks about as authentically middle eastern as a set from Harum Scarum. What make the other Emmanuelle movies appealing is the way they drip with local color and jungly Asian atmosphere, not to mention steamy hothouse sex, and the previous installment (Emmanuelle IV) was still churning this out.

This is yet another series that went on too long. Avoid.

For the fifth Emmanuelle film, eccentric filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk took the helm, and American actress Monique Gabrielle, of "Bachelor Party" fame, played the sexually liberated woman of the movie's title. As is often the case with exploitation flicks, multiple versions of the movie exist. I was unfortunate enough to watch the French home video version, which features disgusting hardcore inserts of actual penetration that are thrown into the movie at random, and completely undercut whatever narrative the movie attempts. It also contributes to the movie's overall feeling of being an unwatchable mess.

Anyway in this one the typically free-spirited and sexually "free" Emmanuelle plays a soft-core filmmaker who also runs a dance studio.

Emmanuelle's masses of fans strip her naked at a premiere and she tumbles into some nerdy guy's boat. She is so famous he recognizes her immediately, and tells her why he doesn't approve of the garbage she directs. Of course they have sex anyway.

Borowczyk is not untalented as a softporn filmmaker. His sex scenes are pretty tasteful.

Apparently the nerdy guy is some kind of billionaire, but our Manny is also fighting off the advances of an oil sheik from some made up Arab country - Bengladistan or some such. Before we get to see how that turns out, we have to sit through a hardcore excerpt, this time with a black man with a big moustache. How does anyone get turned on watching this crap?

Manny throws a little hissy fit when she thinks her billionaire nerd is trying to "own her", like every other guy, so she goes to Bengladistan. I'm sure the sheik will have more modern ideas about feminism. Totally smart decision there, Manny!

Bengladistan requires women to cover up like Saudi Arabia or Iran. Just another reason why this trip was kind of a dumb move on the part of our free spirited lass.

In Bengladistan Manny meets some American guy who looks like Paul Reiser and warns her about the sheik owning women. They have sex.

Indeed, Manny meets a young woman who has apparently been kidnapped by the sheik. Either Manny or the young woman then masturbates with a rolled up serviette in a scene that comes out of nowhere, but isn't graphic enough to be a hardcore insert, so Borowczyk apparently intended its inclusion in the movie, confusing as it is.

Of course Manny ends up in the harem, where we get scenes reminiscent of the director's earlier "Behind Convent Walls", ie. nude gallivanting and lesbianism from women wearing pseudo-religious garb. The sheik introduces Manny to some of his 50 wives, including a young virgin whom he never plans on consummating, a crazy woman and a blind person. One of them is a beautiful dark skinned woman who is "smoking a herb that will make her child strong and handsome".

Manny has barely finished the tour when she gets rescued by Eddie, who takes her down a river. They're not so busy trying to evade the sheik's machine gun wielding henchmen that they don't pause to have sex.

Then Manny apparently ends up back in the arms of the billionaire. What happened to the guy who saved her? Who knows? Who cares?

Gabrielle was a beautiful woman, but she's not even looking that good here. The movie should have been about the beautiful herb smoking one, how she came to be in the harem, and her life there. That could have been interesting. What we end up with is pretty tiring to sit through.

Well, as a small budget film, this one is SATISFACTORY.

In Deutschland, this would be referred to as "Einschlawtizen", meaning "Understandably bad due to budget restrictions".

Although not a full hearted effort, this film may please the 'duller" viewer.

Again, compared to Terminator 2, this doesn't stand 2 feet tall.

MaRX.

While I don't want to rave too much about the 1970's Emmanuelle films, either the "official" French series with Sylvia Kristel or the more notorious unofficial "Black Emanuelle" series of Laura Gemser and Joe D'Amato, there was always SOMETHING interesting about them. This movie marked the point though where the series became totally worthless. First off, they cast American B-movie bimbo Monique Gabrielle in the title role. It's not just that she is a worse actress than Kristel or Gemser (which she certainly is), but she is also totally wrong for the European flavor of the role. It's like casting Queen Latifah in the lead role of "Memoirs of Gisha".

They did hire interesting if erratic director Walerian Borowzyc, but when he and Gabrielle clashed they fired him. Roger Corman than did an incredible hatchet job on the film Borowzyc had made. Most of what he cut out, I've heard, were the sex scenes involving the black characters. The European fascination for these kind of interracial sex scenes was not exactly a blow for civil rights (anymore than Joe D'Amato's fascination for equine masturbation was a blow for animal rights), but whether these cuts made the film less racist or more racist, they certainly ruined the rhythm of the movie, left Gabrielle and her equally untalented male co-star with too much screen time, and it's even hard to tell in the final cut that this film was shot on location on the beautiful island of Reunion--thus the movie loses all the travelogue appeal of the early series (other than an idiotic prologue set at Cannes where Gabrielle's character is chased and stripped naked by a mob of fans).

After this fiasco the producers tried to recapture the European-flavor and old magic with "Emmanuelle 6" and by dusting off Syvia Kristel and teaming her with washed-up former James Bond George Lazenby in a French television series. But finally, the "Emmanuelle" movies fell victim to silicone, both in the increasingly overstuffed breasts of increasingly untalented actresses, and in the "futuristic", computer- themed plots, which were apparently aimed at sexually frustrated "Star Trek" fans. But even if socially-maladjusted computer geeks weren't getting all their porn off the internet, they would probably be laughing their asses off at the pathetic "hi-tech" nonsense of "Emannuelle in Space" and "Emmanuelle 2000". A sad end for a series that was never good, but certainly deserved better than this.

For Monique Gabrielle, "Emmanuelle 5" did not become a long lasting breakthrough, but kept her in business. The story is pretty straight: Emmanuelle is kidnapped by Rajid who locks her up in his harem. Rajid behaves like a dictator and snores: "Women are weak", so he obviously didn't get to know Emmanuelle well enough yet. Friends of Emmanuelle want to rescue her, but wait until plenty of women inside the harem have been filmed long enough ;-).

Director Borowczyk was celebrating the character of Emmanuelle: "She is free, without prejudice, and she has confidence in herself" (quoted from "Cinema" 4/87). And she even gets a machine gun this time which makes confidence easier, I bet... Even though is has very little to do with the original Emmanuelle, Vol.5 is at least fun, moving faster than any other contribution to the series. The scene which sticks to everybody's mind is right at the beginning, when an enthusiastic crowd tears Emmanuelle's clothes off at a film festival, so her only escape is a jump on a yacht whose owner is understandably bewildered. I voted 7/8/6/4/6/7 for the six cinema films of the series.

(Edit 2017) Nine years after my review above, I got a copy of the German version to watch. We are talking about an entirely different movie here compared to the US version. In the German version, which also includes censored remains of a French video version, there is hardly a linear story and the editing is experimental, to put it mildly. I am not surprised that the American distributors decided to shoot additional scenes and re-edit the whole mess to make it more commercial - less art maybe, but a lot more enjoyable.