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.

Let's be honest, one does not watch a movie such as this for the intellectual kind of stimulation. It is softcore porn, and is closer to that genre than film. As such, the acting is near always amateurish and unrealistic; story line ridiculous if even existent; and most importantly, its structure is segregated into sex scenes with filler space between them to fake a movie format. A good softcore movie has many great sex scenes, and somewhat entertaining if imbecile filler space. "Emmanuelle 5" has only 4 sex scenes, mere 2 of which are decent, and 1:40 of BAD filler space. These numbers mean it's poop, don't waste your time.

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.

Poor Walerian Borowczyk. Such a promising career early on as an important player in avant-garde European cinema, his talents wasted by the time this movie was made. I can understand sometimes you have to pay the bills (ask Jean Rollin) by making porn, but this could have been made better. What, you ask? Porn? Indeed. This movie seems to have several edits for the domestic and international markets. American releases have had a 77 minute "R" rated cut I believe as well as the 85 minute "unrated" edition. The French version is roughly 85 minutes but will be virtually unrecognizable to most audiences. The first 20 minutes are an extension of Emmanuelle's "Love Train" movie which we see being screened by Cannes audiences. This 20 minute sequence contains 3 pornographic sequences, which look like they were intended for another film but found their way into Emmanuelle V. (The sex toys on display are those of Borowczyk, I guess to make these scenes "arty"). After these sequences, the film continues in the same way as the American versions except for a porno sequence in the ballet school and a porno lesbian encounter at the sheik's harem (with more of Borowczyk's "personal collection"). Monique Gabrielle does not appear in any of the porno sequences, just the softcore ones. The French version has little dialogue, but really, do you care what they're saying?

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.