A few years ago a friend of mine gives me a video tape of this flick titled ‘Marco Polo’ starring a guy he termed one of the most talented Italian actors ‘you’ve never heard of’ named Rocco Sifferedi.  Cool because I’m a bit of a history buff and I like undiscovered talent so I pop it in the VHS.  Quite honestly I should have known better because I know this dude, but some how he casually left off ‘The Erotic Adventures of…’ that came before Marco Polo, and though this Sifferedi cat may have had some enviable talents, acting wasn’t on one of them.  One more thing I recall from this ‘film’ a good fifteen years later is that it had an actress in it by the name of Lydia Channel who as an impressionable young man I would have proposed to on the spot despite the laundry list of sexual transgressions (illegal in some states) she committed in this thing for the world to see.  Yes, this was hardcore Italian pornography and what I thought was my introduction the late Italian director Joe D’Amato who jumped back and forth from hardcore porn to schlock horror and softcore flicks in a career that spanned over 30 years and close to 200 films.  I say ‘thought’ because it turns out that D’Amato also directed ‘The Grim Reaper’ which I saw with my cousin 10 years before ‘The Erotic Adventures Marco Polo’.  ‘The Grim Reaper’ will always hold a special place in my heart as it featured a man and a woman floating on a raft with their dead son.  Hunger finally becomes unbearable and the man informs his wife that they’re gonna have to eat the boy.  The wife responds “You can’t!  He’s our son!”  To which the husband replies “He’s not our son!  He’s Meat!”  He proceeds to kill her and eat them both and becomes the murderous Grim Reaper.   That was hilarious.  This long diatribe brings us to the great D’Amato’s 4th film in the long running Black Emmanuelle series of films with ‘Emmanuelle and the Last Cannibals’ which is bad even for an Emmanuelle film. Truthfully speaking, Marco Polo was better than this.

Everyone’s favorite Super Model / Investigative reporter / fashion photographer Emmanuelle (Laura Gemser) is at it again, this time working undercover at a mental ward doing an expose on evil doctors and nurses.  One particular crazed patient catches Emmanuelle’s eye because she eats a nurse’s titty.  Curious about that, Emmanuelle sneaks into the crazed girls room who would have eaten Emmanuelle too if she didn’t soothe her by rubbing on her vagina.  It’s an Emmanuelle movie, okay.  Seems this lunatic has a weird symbol on her which propels Emmanuelle towards her next investigative gig, finding the cannibals that tainted this poor thing.

Emmanuelle enlists the services of anthropologist Dr. Lester, who she promptly sleeps with.  In the list of things that are easy to do on the planet, number one may be making toast and two is probably getting Emmanuelle into bed – bed optional.   Emmanuelle should probably have one those Staples ‘That’s Easy’ buttons on her back to be honest with you- but we love her nonetheless.   Anyway, off to the jungles of the Congo or wherever the hell they are along with a native guide, hot nun Sister Angela (Annamaria Clemente) and smoldering virgin Isabella (Monica Zanchi) who likes to watch Emmanuelle get busy, which is one damned time consuming endeavor.  Along the way they meet the very suspect married couple Donald and Maggie McKenzie and their Mandigoesque guide Salvador.  Now it’s time for people to have sex in the jungle, takes showers under waterfalls, get gored by cannibals, gang raped by natives, take knives in the vaginal region and have your nipples cut off and devoured.  Yes this may seem a bit much for you and me but it’s all in a days work for Emmanuelle.

Even by Emmanuelle standards this was a sloppy affair by D’Amato.  Wooden acting, which is a pretty much a standard in these movies is worst than ever, the editing is choppier, the direction is suspect and narrative is virtually nonexistent.  Yes Laura Gemser is nice to look at nude and all, but unless this is your very first Laura Gemser movie then you’ve seen all there is to see as far as that’s concerned many times before.  But to add the to large amounts of nudity D’Amato does toss in a healthy dose of ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ style gore with lots of blood flow, intestine devouring, a scene where a dude gets his penis cut off and eaten, and more than one titty getting cut off.  What did D’Amato have against titties?  This isn’t first D’Amato flick I’ve seen where a titty had to needlessly suffer.

One of the great scenes in this flick is where the virginal Isabella is kidnapped by the natives, drugged with some old school GHB and then systematically gang raped by every single member of the tribe while Emmanuelle and the anthropologist looked on beyond the woods in horror.  Only after the last of the fifty or so natives was finishing up his business did they FINALLY come up with a lame plan to save her.  Where I come from, that’s not good looking out.

Lame beyond expectations, and we did still expect it to be lame, ‘Emmanuelle and the Last Cannibals’ was still a disappointment.  You would be better served tracking down a copy of the ‘The Erotic Adventures of Marco Polo’ to see my man D’Amato in his natural environment.  Lydia Channel.  I wonder what becomes of old porn stars?