Eunus

How can you.destroy the power of.a good setting and decent cinematography? D'Amato has the answer. Presumably the weakest in his series of films shot in the Philippines and obviously inspired by L'amant and Indochine, this is one of the worst in the entire Joe D'Amato filmography, even counting his low-budget trash films.

The storyline is too simplistic and predictable, the characters too shallow and they do little to drive the plot. Editing is amateurish, alluding that the original reel had been butchered in a haphazard manner. The film is not in any way representative of Joe D'Amato's erotic cinema, let alone its 'Oriental' sub-set.

Brigitte Maier was a major porn star in both Europe and America during the first half of the seventies and her presence seems to be the main attraction and apparently, the largest cost item for the film. Al Poe draws the most convincing portrait of a depressive porn stud ever on film and the film's mysterious director tries to make his/her best as well despite the poor script. It would possibly turn into a fringe and interesting experimental film if the producers' chief concern weren't to cash in on Maier's then already fading notoriety.

Crime family saga is a cinematic sub-genre with more or less established conventions (mainly thanks to Godfather films) and it does not present comforable terrain to come up with original ideas. Anurag Kashyap and his crew securely overcome such obstacles and create a distinguished amalgam of particularism and universalism. The entire story is set in a very restricted locality (in and around Wasseypur and Dhanbad, except brief Varanasi sequences) and in specific periods of time but the themes it handles are thorougly universal in both time and space.

It may be argued that violence is aestheticized to an adamant degree but it is for granted that it is never gratuitous. Each depiction of violence has its own merit in progression of the story.