Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

I think we’re going to with ‘Black Cobra Woman’ as the title for this D’Amato / Gemser collaboration even though ‘Eva Nera’ has the best box covers and ‘Emanuelle goes Japanese’ is too offensive even for me, besides the fact it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with this movie. So what we have with ‘Black Cobra Woman’ is an exploitation film featuring Laura Gemser being bored and beautiful, Gabriel Tinti being up to no damn good and Joe D’Amato recklessly and nonsensically moving this movie forward to mysterium. You would think we’ve seen it all before… and maybe we have… but this time we have snakes and Jack Palance along for the ride. Jack Freaking Palance.

A plane arrives in Hong Kong and it’s flying over a lake with a ferry boat in it. I wouldn’t mention it but it’s obvious auteur D’Amato wanted us to absorb that in since it consumes the first

five minutes of this movie and he incessantly cuts back forth to plane and back to the boat. I get it, a plane is about to land. Come on Joe! Actually I should probably cut Joe some slack on this one and blame his editor Bruno Mattei. Bruno Freaking Mattei. This is shaping up to be magic already.

On this plane Jules (Tinti) makes the acquaintance of Eva (Gemser) and gets himself an invite to her show. Personally I can’t wait to see what this show could be, because as beautiful as Laura Gemser may have been, she wasn’t much of dancer, singer or actress. Though I hear she’s a helluva seamstress. Seriously.  The important thing for Jules is that he gets his snake obsessed brother Judas (Palance) to attend this show, and Jules was pretty damned adamant about it. Judas… I guess Hitler and Genghis were taken when my man’s parents were thinking about appropriate baby boy names.

The reason Jules wanted his brother to go to this show so badly is because Eva is a Snake Dancer. And Judas loves snakes. Duh. Guess who’s in love with Eva now? First Eva has to break it off with her obsessive, abusive Japanese boyfriend who looks suspiciously like Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa, even though that cat is uncredited in this movie. That bit of nastiness done now Eva can hang out with the incredibly creepy Judas, but not as lovers, but more because Judas likes having crazy hot chicks who like snakes nearby. But as creepy as Judas might be, and his mere existence makes me uncomfortable, his brother Jules is creepier and dangerous to boot.

You see, Eva has kind of fallen for Gerri, the destitute MD (Michelle Starck), with these two women spending the majority of this movie naked, giving each other showers and massages. Jules thought it would be funny to let the worlds most poisonous snake, the Green Mamba, loose in their room to scare them. HAR HAR HAR HAR! But back tracking a minute, let’s hang out with Eva and Gerri. Not when they ate the snake steaks on the side of the road, but when they went to chill at the Lez bar. That scene was actually really dull… until the Kim Sisters came out to do their dance routine. Oh… My… God. Arguably the best scene in any movie ever. The Kim Sisters… simply Outstanding. I mean their choreography looked like it was a little off, but they more than made up for it in other areas of dance expression.

Back to Jules the asshole who accidentally kills Gerri during his joke, just like he accidentally put his girl Candy (Sigrid Zanger) in a coma in another joke fest. That Jules… man, that dude really knows how to pull off a practical joke. Eva knows damn well that Jules was behind this, and she goes on to use her beauty and her sharp right angles posing as curves to make him pay. In the movie ‘Caligula: The Untold Story’ Gabriel Tinti got it through the butt via the tip of a spear. In this movie… well… we mentioned that Eva was good with snakes, right?

But about Eva being good with snakes… all of the sudden she wasn’t so good no more as our movie came to its tragic end. Hell if I know what that was all about but Jack Palance sure did play it cool.

There’s really not a whole lot to say about ‘Black Cobra Woman’ as it has the usual stuff that we’ve seen D’Amato and Gemser and Tinti over and over again. Lots of Laura naked, lots of Laura looking disinterested even though she found a way to squeeze out a couple of tears this time around, lots of Gabriel Tinti being creepy, if you were a woman in this movie there was a damn good chance we would see you naked and of course lot’s of D’Amato’s trademark of putting in scenes that seem disconnected to his film, scenes that went on too long and went nowhere and scenes that apparently had no meaning that no normal person could possibly interpret.

Ah… but there’s only one director who could’ve shot and framed the Kim Sisters in the way Joe shot them. The Freaking Kim Sisters. And this movie had Jack Palance in it who could do creepy cool with the best of them. Of course ‘Black Cobra Woman’ isn’t a good movie, despite Gabriel Tinti’s butthole being introduced to a Black Cobra… hence the title… but as far as these things go it wasn’t so bad. Ok… it was… but those other movies didn’t have The Kim Sisters.