A bizarre incident at a hospital yields a link to a forgotten cannibalistic tribe of the Amazonian rainforest. Accompanied by a small team, investigative reporter Emanuelle tries to find the tribe and get a sensational story. It turns out not all members of the team share the same goals, and the law of the jungle is harsh, claiming many victims in cruel ways...
Director Joe D'Amato is sometimes hailed as the King of Sleaze. (Black) Emanuelle is the hottest journalist around, she's well known for her hard-boiled work ethic, and this time she meets cannibals in the jungle. Quite obviously, this movie is not for the kids, it's for adults, a half-erotic, half-horror production from the heyday of Italian exploitation cinema.
Before Emanuelle finds any cannibals, the movie shows us huge amounts of both male and female skin (pretty much every part of the body) in a seemingly endless row of medium-core erotic scenes. This might, or might not, be enjoyable for the viewer, but it's certainly expected from an Emanuelle movie, especially the Italian kind. If you like some vintage erotics, then it's probably a reasonably nice watch, but the amount of screentime is way beyond anything suitable for an adventure story.
In between all the nudity, we get little pieces of the story, and almost precisely at about half the runtime of the film, it takes a turn from erotics-heavy to hard adventure. The change in pacing is dramatic, and it becomes obvious that there's a real effort to make it a flashy, exciting deep jungle movie, complete with quicksand, nasty traps, hidden treasure, etc. Emanuelle and her team are trying to find their way through the wilderness in the usual manner, as seen in pretty much every such production, the animals are dangerous, the cannibals are deadly, ...
The material is great: The story has mystery, adventure, and cannibals, Laura Gemser's iconic, exotic looks perfectly round off the visual appearance of our jungle expedition team, the violence and gore scenes are sometimes gnarly, sometimes blunt, and certainly enough to provide noticeable shock value, there are a handful of nice zooms and edits adding a bit of an artificial touch, the film stock (mostly) looks great, fully saturated with a moody color grading (albeit quite dark in some scenes), the little ending "twist" nicely underlines Emanuelle's irresistible beauty and gives it a hint at the surreal - the design and atmosphere of "Emanuelle E Gli Ultimi Cannibali" is remarkably, and amazingly close to an actual fumetto per adulti come alive, both in aesthetics and in content, you can almost see the comic strip panels and feel the pulp magazine paper. If only...
Yeah, if only it was the entire movie. Before we can submerge ourselves in the primary-colored world of a good old horror comic, we have to sit through endless love scenes. A little bit of erotics doesn't hurt, and it's a classic ingredient of Italian pulp fiction, but in this case it's almost two separate movies in one. Maybe this sounds attractive for some viewers, but it just breaks the idea of both a satisfying erotic feature film, and a horror one. In fact, this split-theme movie format was used a couple more times, but it obviously wasn't successful.
"Emanuelle E Gli Ultimi Cannibali" is a bit of a wasted opportunity. If Joe
D'Amato had devoted more of the runtime to telling the adventure story, this could've been among the top five oldskool jungle
cannibal movies. Not as serious as "Ultimo Mondo Cannibale" (1977), not
as disturbing as "Cannibal Holocaust" (1980) - but as a nasty, juicy comic strip that checks all the boxes with flying colors.
But, roughly speaking, it's just a ~45 minute movie that most people probably want to skip - and another one, that's actually pretty entertaining, if you like vintage cannibal horror. It still has some erotic scenes, but just the right amount to not bring everything else to a halt, and otherwise it's moving forward really quite steadily.
"Emanuelle E Gli Ultimi Cannibali" could've been a real classic, but as it is, it's a heavily mixed bag with basically two ingredients that don't necessarily mix too well. Or, that just aren't mixed well. What a pity. But if you can make it through a lot of skin-on-skin activity, you're rewarded with a nice little jungle shocker.
Verdict: Both a hit and a miss, if you like. The hit is good! 5/10
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075984/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuelle_and_the_Last_Cannibals
Trailer video:
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