Emmanuelle 5

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.

If your thing is frequent viewing of all varieties of colossal mammillae and the constant fornication the heroine engages in with every Tom, Dick and Harry (and I emphasize Dick.) don't miss this movie!!! If you have an IQ anything above moron, avoid it like the plague. The acting is beyond atrocious . The story line? You mean there was one? This film is such an accumulation of excrement that no professional would review it .All the participants must have used phoney names. If anyone was paid , it was an abomination! To be fair though, Dominique Gabrielle does have one hell of a figure. It is the crime of the century that they made her act.

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.

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 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.