Italy. 1981.
Crew
Director – Joe D’Amato, Screenplay – Tom Salina [George Eastman], Photography – Aristide Massaccesi [Joe D’Amato], Music – Nico Fidenco, Art Direction – Ennio Michettoni. Production Company – Kristal Film.
Cast
Mark Shannon (Captain Hardy), Lucia Ramirez (Annie Darmona), Annj Goren (Contessa Dorcin de Saint Jacques), Dirce Funari (Simone Keller), George Eastman (Professor Lemoine)
Plot
Captain Hardy is hired to take a crew of scientists out to an island on his boat. The island has been the site of nuclear tests and there have been unusual mutations reported among the animal species. Before they depart, Hardy becomes involved with one of the team Annie, while others among the group engage in sexual liaisons with locals and each other. On the island, in between assorted sexual encounters, they realise that hideously mutated human survivors still exist.
Joe D’Amato (1936-99) is regarded as the most prolific Italian film director of all time, having made nearly 200 films between the 1970s and his death in 1999. D’Amato was born as Aristide Massaccesi and hid behind over a dozen pseudonyms throughout his career – he takes the cinematographer’s credit on a number of his other films, including here, under his given name. He worked in many genres, although it is for his extensive output of erotic/pornographic films that he is best known. (See below for Joe D’Amato’s other genre films).
Porno Holocaust came during the bizarre period in the late 1970s/early 80s when D’Amato seemed to be trying to have feet in both the horror and the porn camps, resulting in some bizarre crosshatches like the mixes of erotica and the cannibal film in Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977) and Papaya, Love Goddess of the Cannibals (1978) and the erotic/voodoo/cannibal film Sex and Black Magic (1980), before specialising in porn films outright from the 1990s onwards.
As adult films of this era go, Porno Holocaust is quite an epic, coming in at an hour and 53 minutes in length. In terms of story, a good deal of this is padding. It is, for instance, three-quarters of an hour before the group even set sail to the island. This is taken up by various of the group and their liaisons with one another – captain Mark Shannon and scientist Lucia Ramirez; frustrated wife Dirce Funari and scientist Annj Goren; where Annj Goren goes to a club and pays to have a threeway with two Dominican natives. And then we get to the island and there are more interminable sexual liaisons. Certainly, some of these seem quite arty – one scene where Dirce Funari and Annj Goren (and not long after Mark Shannon and Lucia Ramirez) make out on a log on a beach as the waves come splashing in across them – while the locations are beautifully tropical.
However, much of this is still padding and we don’t get any – zombies? mutants? it is not clear what they are – until the one hour and fifteen minutes point. Certainly, there seems more devoted to non-porn scenes than is usual for these films. Even so, Porno Holocaust hardly has what can be called much of a plot. Once the creatures emerge, there is an abrupt change in the film, where we joltingly go from artful, often beautifully filmed sexual scenes to gore scenes as members of the party are attacked. There are a couple more porn scenes after this point, but it seems strange when people are in peril for them to suddenly stop what they are doing for several minutes and have sex. The mutants (for wont of a better description) hardly get up to much. Lucia Ramirez is abducted but Mark Shannon rescues her while the mutants are distracted and then they simply leave the island on a life raft.
The film was directed by Joe D’Amato (1936-99), a prolific director in the Italian exploitation industry whose career was predominantly in pornographic films (including a number of the other Black Emanuelle films and several other films starring Laura Gemser). He made over 200 films and is known under a variety of different pseudonyms. His other genre films include:- the giallo Death Smiles on a Murderer (1973), the erotic/cannibal films Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977) and Papaya, Love Goddess of the Cannibals (1978), the necrophilia film Blue Holocaust (1979), Anthropophagus (1980), the erotic/zombie film Erotic Night of the Living Dead (1980), the erotic/voodoo/cannibal film Sex and Black Magic (1980), Absurd (1981), the sword and sorcery film Ator the Invincible (1982), the post-holocaust film Endgame (1983), Ator the Blade Master (1984), the post-holocaust film 2020: Texas Gladiators (1983), the Ator film Quest for the Mighty Sword (1990), Frankenstein 2000 (1992), Contamination .7/Creepers/Troll 3 (1993), the pornographic reincarnation film Chinese Kamasutra (1993), the pornographic Ghosts in the Castle (1994), the pornographic Marquis de Sade (1994), the pornographic Tarzan X (1994) and its sequel Tarzhard: The Return (1998), the pornographic ghost film Erotic Bluff (1995), the pornographic caveman film Homo Erectus (1996), the pornographic psycho-thriller Primal Instinct (1996), Hell’s Angels/Demons of Lust (1997), Hell’s Angels 2/The Seven Sexy Sins (1997) and Hell’s Angels 3/The Devil’s Lair (1998), a series of pornographic vignettes set in Hell, the pornographic Greek myth films Aphrodite: Goddess of Love (1997), Hercules: A Sex Adventure (1997), Olympus, Refuge of Gods (1997), Samson in Amazon’s Land (1997), The Sexual Adventures of Ulysses (1998) and Love and Psyche (2000), Kamasutra (1997), a pornographic film with fantasy elements, the pornographic Queen of Elephants (1997) about a female Tarzan, a pornographic version of the story of the Phantom of the Opera with Phantom (1998), Elixir (1998), a pornographic film involving a youth serum, Eternal Desire (1996), a pornographic version of Highlander (1986), and Experiences (1999) and Experiences 2 (1999) about a woman sucked through her computer to participate in a series of erotic interludes across time.
Trailer here