If it were up to me my friends I would do nothing but watch total crap garbage exploitation movies such as this one, the legendary Joe D’Amato’s ‘Porno Holocaust’. However it is not up to me so I’m forced to go to soulless multiplexes far too often to watch soulless big budget Hollywood movies surrounded by asshole film critics who take the term ‘self-important’ to insanely dizzying heights while still failing to shut the fuck up while I’m trying to watch said soulless big budget Hollywood movie. Fortunately for me there are the masters such as D’Amato and Deodato, actors like Seagal and Gemser and companies such as Media Blasters and The Asylum who wash away the stench of the high quality, but still soulless movies such as those running through the Cineplex nowadays, and give me my garbage exploitation sleaze fix. ‘Porno Holocaust’ is horrible my friends. It’s a horrible porn movie, it’s a horrible horror movie… but you do have to admire that absolute nerve of it all.

We’re going to guess that Joe made this movie right off the heels of his other horrific classic ‘Erotic Nights of the Living Dead’ since the movies are very similar, have the same locales and pretty much the same cast. Laura Gemser drops out of this one but fortunately for us she is ably replaced by Lucia Ramirez who had a smaller role in ‘Erotic Nights’ and is another dark skinned, rail thin, stunning beauty completely devoid of emotional response. Just like Laura. Lucia one ups Laura in that she is willing to have authentic emotionless sex on film where Laura only engaged in simulated emotionless sex on film.

The movie is about some scientist jumping on a boat to explore some odd phenomena at an island where nuclear tests were conducted. Mind you it takes a good forty five minutes before our scientist and ship’s crew make it to this island because there is sex to have. Our star Captain O’Day (Mark Shannon) has to meet and seduce our beautiful seismologist Annie (Ramirez). Our beautiful botanist The Countess (Annj Goren) has to engage in some lesbian love with our beautiful nymphomaniac biologist Simone (Dirce Funari). The Countess has only begun to get down in this movie however because apparently when one is in Rome (our crew is allegedly from France)

one must pay top dollar to experience the experience, the experience being The Countess engaging in a hardcore threesome with two black dudes who look absolutely petrified, with The Countess looking disgusted to be doing this thing, which had me believing that somewhere off camera someone had a gun pointing at all three people in this scene as they forced their way through it.

Finally we make it to the island, even though the truth of the matter is there isn’t much more going on here than there was on the mainland. People engage in more sex while intermittently looking at plant samples and giant crabs while being watched by something unseen and breathing heavy in the woods. For a minute I was getting a little excited thinking that our crew would be attacked by even bigger crabs but this was not to be. Instead they are attacked by a ‘mutant’ with some really bad facial prosthetics and a malformed dick. In case you’re curious, this mutant kills the men with a club and then rapes the women into bloody pulps. That would be your holocaust.

One by one our crew are getting picked off and popping up dead. However none of this has stopped The Countess from wanting to get on down. As she informs the erstwhile Capt. O’Day, ‘You can have a countess… and it may never happen again’, they will all be dead soon is what she was getting at. Not exactly inspiring me with erotic passion but then I’m not the super virile Capt. O’Day who proved to us in this movie that he can engage in sexual activity under the most oppressively stressful situations.

Eventually everybody will be dead except the Captain and his true love Annie with a big final face off between our mutant zombie and the studly captain. Excitement and tension will not ensue.

Sure enough ‘Porno Holocaust’ is gawdawful terrible, amazingly even worse than ‘Erotic Nights of the Living Dead’ with the best part of this film, just like ‘Erotic Nights’, being Dirce Funari prancing around nude. Seriously, girlfriend had one fantastic figure back in 1981, that is if you like women with perfectly shaped hips, nice round behinds and small breasts. Not that I was paying that close of attention. Also like Ms. Gemser, Ms. Funari only goes the simulated route when it comes to getting down on screen. Not that I was paying that close of attention.

As far as the movie itself goes, the sex scenes just drop out of nowhere. A couple of people are walking on the beach collecting mutated crabs when one says, ‘let’s fuck’ and that’s what they do to the backdrop of Nico Fidenco’s soaringly campy musical score. And there’s never a bad time to have sex in this movie. In the end while the Captain and his lady love were floating on a rudderless boat without food or water heading to what they assumed where their eventual deaths, everybody they know either clubbed or raped to death… so why not just get on down one more time again to pass the time. Personally I’d be trying to preserve body fluids. But again this affirms the studliness of Captain O’Day who did this thing on a small boat, standing straight up with no fear of tipping it over. The best part about that scene however was when the camera pulled back with our survivors overjoyed that a boat was nearby to rescue them, was observing the cameraman in the boat pop his head up too soon. D’Amato and crew probably could’ve edited that little bit out, but honestly why bother. We’re not even going to get into the horror movie aspects because we’d only be discussing possibly the worst horror movie ever made and we have too much respect for Joe to do that to him.

About as bad as it gets ‘Porno Holocaust’ has almost nothing going for it beyond Dirce Funari’s ass it but yet it still wasn’t a disappointment. I don’t know why. And we soldier on until we ruefully watch the next one.