Emmanuelle 5

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.

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?

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.