Emanuelle Around the World (1977)
Umbrella DVD (region 4)

d. Joe D'Amato; pr. Fabrizio DeAngelis; scr, Maria Pia Fusco, Gianfranco Clerici; ph. Joe D'Amato; m. Nico Fidenco; ed. Vincenzo Tomassi; prod d. Marco Dentici; cast. Laura Gemser, Karin Schubert, Brigitte Petronio, Ivan Rassimov, Paul Thomas, Don Powell (97 mins)

European cinema was swept away in the mid-1970s by the success of director Just Jaeckin’s Emmanuelle. 

The combination of nudity, soft-core coupling (usually in soft focus), rich and carefree characters and exotic locations unfolding in the manner of a travelogue added sophistication and allure to the sexploitation movie, a staple genre then moving from nudie comedies to hardcore features as pornography was increasingly legalized in European markets.  Emmanuelle made an international sex symbol out of Sylvia Kristel and spawned a number of sequels.  Enterprising sexploitation producers took note of this success and put forth ventures of their own, slightly altering the spelling of the title name to avoid copyright infringement.  One such venture was the film Black Emanuelle, starring Eurasian beauty Laura Gemser.  It proved so popular that Gemser would team with director Aristide Massacessi (known outside of Italy by the name Joe D’Amato) for a series of films, of which Emanuelle Around the World is the most representative and enjoyable.

After the engagingly playful Emanuelle in Bangkok (also released by Umbrella DVD) Massacessi and Gemser attempted something more ambitious.  Indeed, although the films were essentially soft-core travelogues, Massacessi was interested in convoluted and involving plots which often took the title character into the depths of sexual depravity as much as the heights of sexual ecstasy. 

Of the Massacessi-Gemser collaborations, Emanuelle in America is the most provocative, bringing hardcore explicitness to what was initially a softcore genre, while Emanuelle Around the World is the best constructed and most effective as erotica.  It is here that the appeal of both the title character and actress Gemser is best demonstrated, and the movie emerges as a gripping, erotic and often provocative adventure: the ultimate product (or relic) of both the women’s empowerment movement of the feminist-dominated 1970s and the values of the so-called permissive society as they fused in the sexploitation genre.

Gemser plays the title character as a modern, liberated woman: a fearless and sexually uninhibited photo-journalist travelling the world on story to story.  Frequently compelled to investigate the extremes of sexual behaviour and exploitation, she bares her sleek, dark-skinned physique repeatedly in elaborate and often dreamily sensuous scenes of sexual play, frequently set to a winning music score which captures the enthusiasm and free love rhythms of the 1970s acid-rock and lounge music culture. 

In Emanuelle Around the World, Gemser is sent by her newspaper editor to investigate a sex guru in India.  After seeing the orgies he presides over in the name of God, and even joining in, Gemser seduces the guru.  Finding him an inadequate lover, she takes her photos and goes off on her next assignment.  She meets a woman researching violence against women and tracking a sex slave ring through Europe.  Gemser takes it upon herself to go undercover as a sex slave to expose the exploitation.  Full of telling irony springing from a genuine concern for moral values in transition and the extremes of sexual behaviour in an era of permissive sex and women’s independence, Emanuelle Around the World is an enthralling and stylish erotic adventure and well worth a DVD release in as decent a transfer as Umbrella DVD have here provided. 

Although Massacessi is often dismissed as a hack, and known to legions of gorehounds for his horror works (including the notorious Anthropophagus), his work in erotica drew the best out of him. 

Massacessi in an interview remarked that he saw hardcore porn as the death of erotica, and in the Emanuelle films he cumulatively assessed the influence of hardcore aesthetics on the softcore film just at a time in the 1970s when they began to merge.  Stopping just short of hardcore, Emanuelle around the World is Massacessi at his most commanding.  The sex is by turns arousing, decadent and, in the rapes, disturbing: yet all the while revealing the complex moral dilemmas facing independent women in a world in which sex for pleasure is an operating principle and in which men prey on this to attain not only libertine freedom, but illicit power and money through the worst excesses of sexual exploitation.  Indeed, Gemser’s sexual mastery is such that she can fearlessly detach herself during rape and emerge unaffected, suggesting both the perils of modernity and the consequences of sexual freedom, themes that would be put to the fore in the truly disturbing (and hardcore pornographic) Emanuelle in America.

Emanuelle Around the World is quickly paced and full of incident, unusual character and erotic spectacle.  Although there are serious themes to be found concerning the treatment of women, the emancipation of gender in society and even the function of rape as sexual spectacle, Emanuelle around the World works best as a uniquely erotic comic-strip fantasy full of bizarre sexual tableaux, exotic locations and involving suspense.  Indeed, the formula perfected by Massacessi and Gemser here suggests a kind of James Bond-like sexcapade, with Gemser a journalist rather than spy.  If you are inclined to watch films after the benefit of a few bongs, then you may just find that Massacessi knows exactly how to direct a high through ever-greater reaches of erotic excitement and playful social observation. 

Indeed, as Massacessi frequently alluded to marijuana and acid in these films, the tone he achieves here is intended in part to be seen by like-minded viewers. 

Although not the classic of “drug-fuck” cinema that is Emanuelle in America with its LSD snuff movie experience, Emanuelle Around the World is an engrossing slice of erotica from one of the most intriguing, provocative and ultimately morally ambiguous directors to emerge from the generation of Italian exploitation filmmakers known as the “spaghetti nightmare” creators.  Alternating scenes of consensual sex with scenes of forced sex makes for a dazzling and trippy sense of sexual provocation.  Massacessi always dares the dope fiend to take their high to the next level and re-directs their trip in odd plot twists which blend different genres in superb fashion.  At plot level, this is the most involving of the Massacessi-Gemser collaborations and is one of the best sexploitation movies of the decade that saw that genre at its most creative, taboo and ambiguous.  Sadly, the DVD can only offer a trailer and still gallery, but Emanuelle Around the World is absolute must-see sexploitation cinema well suited to the sensibilities of both the dope fiend and the grindhouse.

If you are interested in 1970s sexploitation or in Gemser’s career, as she is after all one of the foremost cult figures in erotica, Emanuelle Around the World is a most rewarding viewing experience.  Gemser fans will love this one: top drawer erotica.  Gemser has developed quite a cult and it is good to see that Umbrella DVD, in their devotion to unusual 1970s erotica, have released not only the dvd here reviewed but also Emanuelle in Bangkok and Private Collections.  If you are familiar with director Massacessi (aka Joe D-Amato) only from his horror films, then this work will make you re-appraise the man’s reputation.  Great stuff!