Black Emanuelle en Orient

The first thing that struck me about EMANUELLE IN BANGKOK was Nico Fidenco's music score, a whistling, happy, bumbling little ditty that would be right at home on a YouTube video compilation of Tourette's Guy clips. Or maybe a toothpaste commercial, its stuck in my head now and fortunately for my sanity, its not bad. I'd whistle it for you if I could, and can't help but wonder if that's Alessandro Alessandroni doing his trademark thing there. He's the guy whistling on the old spaghetti western soundtracks, proof once again that while often derivative the Italians managed to create some new forms. The movies may often be cheap & boring, but they almost always have great musical scores.

I would paint this one into the same category. It looks pretty much like Joe D'amato took a sprawling vacation with some of his favorite stock players (Laura Gemser, her husband Gabrielle Tinti), a couple of Italian genre cinema leading males he maybe owed a favor to (Ivan Rassimov & my hero Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) and a few sexy Euro body babes with no problems with nudity, group groping and the occasional half naked lesbian make-out with Ms. Gemser (Ely Galleani, Debra Berger, Gaby Bourgois). He brought along a camera, maybe a mistress to hold the scripts while somebody made sure there was enough light, and went about their touristy ways while filming a scene or two here & there as they traveled about.

Two scenes sort of spoil the fun, first another barbaric episode of Italian filmmakers using animal violence to fill some screen time, then an inexplicable sequence where Ms. Gemser is sexually assaulted by a mob of greaseballs who make a point to humiliate her while getting their jollies off. Inexplicable because afterward she seems quite at ease with herself and chats pleasantly with her attackers as if they had just met at a diner. Then again its all just a silly phallocentric fantasy really, about guys with unlimited means traveling exotic lands in the company of attractive women in their 20s whom they have random sex with, often playing erotic group games for grown ups & swapping partners, though the version I saw was strictly a softcore engagement. The most arousing display being a scene where the girls all get up, strip down to their panties and dance like a harem for an Arabian prince.

Or something like that, to tell the truth I was hardly paying attention to the story and frankly couldn't care less. Like a spaghetti western you watch stuff like this for the individual moments rather than the cumulative effect, and most of it passed quite pleasantly with the occasional raised eyebrow. Like the scene were Emanuelle entertains a crowd in a private club by dripping hot candle wax all over her magnificent, nude body. For all we know and given the way Joe D'amato worked, the whole film might have been just an excuse to put that up on the screen. It may not pass as entertainment for some, but for those two minutes this movie was the only thing I was thinking about.

4/10

The title says it all!! There is no story, just lovemaking scenes at regular frequency as the scene shifts from the Orient to the Gulf with a cruise thrown in between. The only saving grace for the film are the Husband & Wife couple of Gabriele Tinti & Laura Gemser.

Notorious film director D' Amato's first entry in the "Black Emanuelle" series is somewhat better than its predecessor but, the version I watched on Italian TV is so sloppily trimmed that several sexy scenes end abruptly, thus making them quite senseless! Here Emanuelle attracts the attentions of a Thai Prince (Ivan Rassimov, of all people), her on-off archaeologist boyfriend (real-life husband Gabriele Tinti), a world-renowned historian and a shy Thai bell-boy, as well as 4(!) females - an Oriental masseuse, a repressed American tourist (played by the lovely Ely Galleani from A LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN [1971] and BABA YAGA [1973]), Tinti's "official" schoolmarmy girlfriend and, most intriguingly, an American Consul's (possibly manic-depressive) daughter!

I say intriguingly because Emanuelle is shown really losing her head for the young, inexperienced girl (almost up to the point that she starts considering forsaking her hedonistic lifestyle) but, before you can say, "Copout!", she gets a call from her newspaper sending her off to Paris for another assignment!! By the way, towards the middle of the film, Emanuelle's Bangkok apartment gets broken into and she loses her passport and all her valuable rolls of film (apparently because she was getting too close to Prince Rassimov who has a coup d'etat on his mind) and, for good measure, there's some local color (opium smoking and sensuous dancing) and even animal cruelty (in the form of a bloody mongoose vs. cobra duel). What the f***!

This is the first, and most likely the only Joe D'Amato film ever to hit Belgian television screens. Quite logical, since the titles on his repertoire go from nauseating horror films ("Anthropophagous", "Beyond the Darkness") to hardcore porno flicks ("Tarzan X") and sometimes even a combination of both ("Erotic Nights of the Living Dead", "Porno Holocaust"). D'Amato pretty much behaves himself here and follows the formula of the original "Black Emanuelle" film, released one year before, but that doesn't mean avid D'Amato-fans have to worry, as there still is an enormous amount of genuine sleaze to enjoy. "Emanuelle in Bangkok" has virtually no plot at all and you can't even fully believe the title, as our sexy protagonist's journey to the Far East is very brief and she only has contact with two Asian people (a masseuse and a bell-boy). The film most "crucial" sequences are set on a cruise ship and in Morocco, where she has an off/on relationship with a persistent archaeologist. I have no complaints, though, since the camera beautifully captures Laura Gemser's erotic adventures with men, women, couples and herself. Joe D'Amato's trademarks are bizarrely tinted sexual situations, and there's only one such sequence in this film, namely the Japanese stripper who puts ping-pong balls up her vagina. Weird… One aspect about "Emanuelle in Bangkok", as well as in the entire cycle, is downright brilliant and that's the music. Nico Fidenco's score is mesmerizing and, without exaggerating, at least ten times better than every other score that ever won an Oscar. The dazzling soundtrack alone makes "Emanuelle in Bangkok" a true cult classic that every fan of the genre will enjoy watching.

This is the first "Black Emanuelle" film directed by Joe D'Amato and it actually resembles the first "Black Emanuelle" more than any of the more notorious and depraved films in series which D'Amato later directed. The movie doesn't have much of a plot, and more of it takes place in Casablanca than in Bangkok or the Orient, so both the English and Italian titles are pretty inaccurate. For the record, Emanuelle has sex with an archaeologist (played by Gemser's real-life husband Gabrielle Tinti), a female Thai masseuse, a male Thai bellboy, some swinging American Republicans (Ivan Rassimov and the lovely Ely Galeani), the entire (strangely all-European) contingent of the Thai king's bodyguards, a Thai customs official (after her passport is stolen), the Republican wife again in an airplane bathroom, the archaeologist and his new fiancée, the fiancée again along with a black dancer and an entire horde of horse-back-riding Arabs, and finally the lesbian daughter of the American consul in Casablanca (Debra Berger).

Most of these sex scenes are all pretty truncated, which may frustrate the hairy-palmed viewers out there, but the movies probably would have been six hours long otherwise. There's also a lack of the depravity we've come to expect from D'Amato aside from an obviously unstaged snake/mongoose fight and the scene where Emanuelle is "gang-raped" by the king's bodyguards, which she either enjoys or doesn't mind too much since she later takes her lover's fiancée off to dance naked in an Arab tent and get gang-banged again. These scenes though are really no different than the African village scene or the (literal)train scene in the first "Black Emanuelle", and they take place mostly off-screen anyway.

Still the girls are very pretty, the cinematography and natural scenery are appealing, the music ranges from execrable to enjoyably cheesy. And this is now paired with two (slightly) better "Black Emanuelle" movies in the new "Black Emanuelle's Box" DVD set, so check it out for yourself.