Pornhound Goes to the Movies
Emanuelle in America (1976)

d. Joe D'Amato; scr. Maria Pia Fusco; ph. Aristide Massacessi; m. Nico Fidenco; ed. Vincenzo Tomassi; cast. Laura Gemser, Garbiele Tinti, Roger Brown, Riccardo Salvino, Lars Bloch, Paola Senatore, Maria Piera Regoli (100 mins)

It was 1am.  A cold winter night.  I’d just dropped a young call-girl named Danielle off to a client downtown and was waiting in the car for her to be done so I could drive her to the next client.  Danielle was a hot, curvy 20 year old looking to make a little extra money as a hooker indulging Catholic school girl private fantasies.  Danielle had given me her number and was willing to do me after work, just to show me what she was worth.  She had an ounce of pot and we were going to get high and fuck.  In the back of my mind was a Frank Zappa song “Catholic Girls at the CYO as they learn to blow” from the legendary Joe’s Garage.

I had a two hour wait, an erection just itching to lay Danielle to the wall, a portable DVD player and a new DVD to review.  Thanks to the folks at the ever-vigorous Blue Underground I was going to watch, uncut, Laura Gemser in a little vintage Joe D’Amato sleazefest: Emanuelle in America.  This was the most notorious of the collaboration between director D’Amato (real name Aristide Massacessi) and soft-core starlet Gemser, an exotic Eurasian beauty uninhibited in every way.  The DVD was hardcore: no third-generation dub VHS from mail order catalogues in the USA, this was the restored print: pristine, widescreen and uncut!  My thoughts were no longer on Danielle, but on Gemser and my dick was just as keen and my eyes needed the fix that only the Grindhouse can deliver.

I’d seen enough Massacessi to be prepared.  Whilst his “spaghetti nightmare” director compatriots Lucio Fulci, Bruno Mattei and Ruggero Deodato were getting their rocks off on infantile cannibal zombie slaughter, Massacessi went into the porn ghetto. 

In my deviant mind, that made him the unheralded auteur of Italian exploitation.  And face it: I’m sitting in a car waiting for a $1000 a night hooker, I don’t want to see another fucking eye-gouging Fulci film.  Fuck no!  It never got any better than Fulci, but he wasn’t too interested in pussy and I was divorced, horny and in the company of junkies and whores where every drug and sexual fantasy was available – to me Massacessi was the real deal.  Grindhouse at its finest: a trip into absolute immorality!  Even the most explicit of rape-revenge films, that once-banned I Spit on Your Grave, had a moral code – the righteous revenge.  Hell it was even feminist! Massacessi could give a fuck about righteousness and his films did what I wanted to do to Danielle: nail morality to the wall for the sexual thrill of it!

I had to get high for this one though.  I’d taken a trip I’d scored from a junkie whore a few hours ago and I was itchin’ to top it off with a little hydroponic. 

I kept my kit in the car to get while I waited for the whores I delivered to get done and tell me about their dirty deeds, done dirty cheap.  I wondered what Massacessi would offer the dope fiend and porn-hungry gore hound.  And where better than Emanuelle in America.  So, tripping high I followed the sexual exploits of an uninhibited, independent, intelligent woman with a gorgeous body the camera just adored as she investigates a colony of sexual deviants / modern day libertines who wish to take sexual ecstasy to as extreme a high as possible.  After some routine coupling, the deviance begins… and dope fiend beware!

Laura Gemser watches.  Later that evening Gemser’s in bed with a man who shows her a film.  It’s a snuff film.  She watches intently.  Hooked, she wants to see more, know more.  And so do I.  And so does Massacessi, and of all people in the grindhouse, he can be relied on to deliver the goods.  Gemser drops acid, is flown to a South American dungeon and peers as uniformed guards rape, torture and murder naked women.  As she watches, she’s felt up, fingers in her snatch as inside the dungeon boiling oil is poured down a naked woman’s throat until she burns vomit.  Hardcore Grindhouse! 

Although faked, this is the origin of the snuff film as a genre! 

Roberta Findlay and Allan Shackleton had started the snuff film wave a couple years earlier in Snuff, a film which had feminists in picket lines and would eventually spawn the feminist chant “pornography is the theory, rape is the practice”, but the snuff in that film was an obvious gag – the rape and butchered actress could be seen apparently to smile and laugh.  Massacessi’s was the closest to the real thing as could be imagined for the time, its style would influence Paul Schrader’s Hardcore, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and through until Joel Schumacher’s 8MM: it was the origin of snuff, the very spot where the urban legend was born, brought to you by Blue Underground.  Massacessi’s camerawork, use of sound and non-actors influenced the way people thought a snuff film, if it existed, should look.  For all intensive purposes, this was snuff as art!

Emmanuelle in America is grindhouse history.  Massacessi is a visionary moral degenerate.  Blue Underground know his work deserves to be seen. 

Thus the transfer here is impeccable.  For anyone who remembers VHS dubs, take the trip and go DVD.  In the extras, David Flint gives an overview of the Gemser / D’Amato films and there is an intriguing interview with Massacessi in which he talks about how hardcore porn is the death of erotica: if it is, he’s ringing the death-knell.  It’s mono only, but that ain’t a hassle in the grindhouse – this ain’t the surround-sound multi-plex. 

As the great Joe Bob Briggs might say…check it out! 

(Now, next review I’ll tell y’all a little more about Danielle.)