I predatori della verginità perduta

I just received this movie today in the mail (after a three week wait) and I have to say it wasn't that bad. Parts of the film followed or reminded me of another Joe D'Amato film called "Lady in the Iron Mask" that deals with a plot with pirates and that it had almost the exact cast as well.

Raiders (Eng. dubbed DVD version) is about a man who gets kidnapped and his loving daughter is forced to give up her virginity to a pirate to save him. I enjoyed the sex scenes and the cool pirates "stock footage" better then Lady in the Iron Mask. But what happened to Anita Blond, she was only in the movie for 10 minutes (doing you know what) and that was all you saw of her? Raiders is a good movie, a true classic. I can't wait to get Selen on Treasure Island another Joe D'Amato pirate porn adventure film.

Raiders (1998)

* (out of 4)

D'Amato porn has a group of pirates kidnapping a man (after doing his maid of course) whose daughter must then give up her virginity in her quest to get him back. Having gone through many of D'Amato's porn movies I've noticed that a lot of them had fairly big budgets but that's not the case here. Most of the pirate stuff on the seas is just stock footage and the whole movie has a very cheap feel to it. The soundtrack was so poorly recorded that at times you can't hear what's being said or done. The "story" was pretty bland with some stupid dialogue but I guess that's to be expected. The biggest problem, for those you want to see porn, is that a lot of the action is rame lame and boring. There's nothing erotic here or even hot so to me that says this is yet another example of the director not really being interested in the film. I've said this before but D'Amato often said he hated making these movies and it shows here.

"Adventure" is a misused genre category that (for me at least) conjures up derring-do, action & thrills in some remote or glamorous part of the globe. It used to suggest Errol Flynn swashbuckling or in more modern times Harrison Ford (and Michael Douglas of ROMANCING THE STONE).

In IMDb, the term is used (don't ask me why, since I've complained on numerous occasions to the powers-that-be about this) not just in the usual sense but more so to gather up thousands of stray female bondage videos produced for fetishists that lack the hardcore XXX elements to qualify them for the Adult slot.

Joe D'Amato near the end of his career directed a quality swashbuckler SEXY PIRATES, which I have reviewed on IMDb. Before that he made the lousy porn video RAIDERS (oddly misspelled as RIDERS on screen), covering exactly the same territory but very poorly in XXX mode.

Comparing the two is instructive, since it shows the severe limitations that continue to dog ambitious hardcore porn projects, over 40 years since the XXX feature film was invented. Basically it's a question of balance -the ideal storyline film paying adequate attention to both story values and characters while maintaining the quantity of arousing hardcore footage expected by its target audience seems to hover near the three hour mark, not palatable unless you're a Jacques Rivette fan accustomed to that running time as the norm.

For RAIDERS it would appear that the perhaps 80-page SEXY PIRATES script has been thrown to the winds, leaving about 5 pages to shoot. For starters, the well-lit lovely 35mm filming style of SEXY PIRATES gives way to the crummy, "wide world of sports" look of shooting RAIDERS on video, both with D'Amato as his own d.p.

RAIDERS has a muffled English-dubbed soundtrack which one has to crank up all the way for even minimal intelligibility. That's because D'Amato has made it as a wall-to-wall sexer, with the briefest dollops of plot.

Video opens with pirates invading a mansion, kidnapping the governor (John Walton) and humping a young girl, including double penetration. Story picks up with the appearance of the beautiful blonde daughter of the governor (her hair remains perfectly coiffed no matter what action subsequently transpires here), asking Chris Charming for assistance in freeing her dad.

Chris advises her to seek the aid of pirate Don Juan de la Pena. Before departing, she shtups Chris, including the video's highlight of his well-photographed in magnifying tight closeup money shot.

Like in SEXY PIRATES, it's a case of enlist a pirate to catch a pirate, and when she offers De la Pena gold, he insists on some sugar added to the pot, so she humps him forthwith.

The villain is played by Zensa Raggi, seen humping the lustrous Anita Blond. She receives top billing here, even though she appears only in this single extraneous sex scene. The two co-starred in D'Amato's similar but way wackier LADY IN THE IRON MASK.

There's more filler, as a maid has a threesome. It's back to a perfunctory use of stock footage to depict a battle at sea, which is not matched at all to the main narrative. In SEXY PIRATES D'Amato carefully tried (and succeeded) at making a real movie, but here it's just footage jumbled together.

Without any buildup or story credibility, the beautiful daughter suddenly has Raggi at gunpoint, freeing her dad from his cell. She thanks De la Pena with another sex scene, the video pointlessly ending with his cum shot and a few seconds of stock footage of the boat.

I like to think that D'Amato made SEXY PIRATES to prove to himself that he was capable of real filmmaking after toiling in the porn wilderness for over 100 generally low-grade XXX-ers at the insulting level of RAIDERS. I'm surprised that the one nugget amongst the dross has yet to be discovered by the so-called fans.