Friday, November 06, 2015

BLACK EMANUELLE, WHITE EMANUELLE aka VELLUTO NERO (1976)

I have to give credit to Brunello Rondi for somehow keeping me watching 1976's BLACK EMANUELLE, WHITE EMANUELLE (aka VELLUTO NERO) a plotless softcore romp through Egypt. It's hard to even classify this as an Emanuelle flick as star Laura Gemser isn't playing the same photo-journalist character as in EMANUELLE IN AMERICA or EMANUELLE AND THE WHITE SLAVE TRADE.

This time out she's "the world's most famous model" and is in Egypt for some reason with boyfriend / photographer Carlo (played by real life husband Gabriele Tinti), a repugnant douchebag who verbally, physically and sexually assaults Laura when he's not making her pose next to rotting dog corpses or piles of dead bodies. And, if that's not enough to make you hate him, in one scene he wears a Boston Bruins shirt!

On the plus side all four of the female leads including a nympho mother and her two daughters – one a borderline psychotic, the another a manipulative minx with Annie Lennox's haircut – all get nude. Frequently.

Al Cliver (ZOMBIE, DEVIL HUNTER) shows up as some kind of mystical deep thinker who gets oral from the mom then gets it on with her and the oldest daughter (the oddly hot Ziggy Zanger) while an aging Hollywood queen caresses them all. The whole perplexing thing climaxes at some Egyptian ruins, though Laura is nowhere to be found, probably exhausted from the previous night's hypnotism and goat sacrificing.

While the flick has a beginning, a middle and an end that's about the only things it shares with, you know, movies. The story meanders along at its own head-scratching "pace", teasing the viewer with the thought that something of consequence might happen, only to toss in some nudity and then move on. By the end I found myself so fascinated by this non-film that I couldn't turn it off or guess what happens.

A wildly different type of flick than Joe D'Amato's EMANUELLE IN AMERICA, though I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. – Dan Taylor

Dan Taylor is the editor and publisher of Exploitation Retrospect. He is old enough to remember when Emmanuelle had two m's in her name and was played by Sylvia Kristel. For more reviews check out the ER website, like us on the Facebook and follow us on the Twitter.

BLACK EMMANUELLE, WHITE EMMANUELLE is available from Amazon.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I love the movie black Emanuelle.