Uncle Scoopy's Fun House

You may think that sequels are a fairly modern development in films, dating back to Rocky, the Godfather, and Jaws. After all, there is no movie called To Kill Another Mockingbird, or Some Like it Hotter, or Citizen Kane 2: The Revenge of Rosebud.

Well, maybe you're right about "big" movies, but sequels, serials, and pseudo sequels were the staple of grade-b filmdom for years. The first Tarzan flick had a seemingly endless string of sequels, for example. For the exploitation movies, sequels were their bread and butter. If a formula worked, they used it again and again. Sometimes, a rival company would title its films to make them seem like sequels to a successful film from the competition. A classic example is Ilsa: the Wicked Warden. It does not use the character of Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, and it does not even have a character in the film named Ilsa. But it stars Dyanne Thorne, the star of the Ilsa films, so the marketers and distributors wanted to capitalize on that name recognition and conveniently forgot that Thorne's character was named Greta!

Emanuelle in America has a very similar pedigree. The original "Emmanuelle" was a movie based on the real diaries of a real woman, Emmanuelle Arsan. Emanuelle in America is not based on Emmanuelle Arsan's diaries, and there's no character named Emmanuelle at all. It is about a globe-hopping sexual adventuress, a premise which is sort of related to the original Emmanuelle premise, since Arsan had been a diplomat's wife, and the REAL Emmanuelle films feature exotic locations. If you're really sharp, you've noticed that I keep changing my spelling of Emanuelle. The scam films changed the spelling to one "m", hoping to step one degree further away from litigation. I guess it worked. These guys didn't sue each other that much. These are small potatoes productions, and lawyers are expensive. Even if they had gone to court and won, a settlement would have been impossible to determine. In the shadowy world of drive-ins and grindhouses and unrecorded cash transactions, the sales and rentals were tabulated, shall we say, somewhat informally. If you could prove that you were entitled to 100% of the profits of Emanuelle in America, it would be very difficult to say how much that would be, and you can bet that the "official" profits were minimal, if there were any at all on the official books.

Emanuelle in America is actually one of the "Black Emanuelle" films starring Laura Gemser. (Gemser also had a non-starring role in the second of the real Emmanuelle films.) Not only is there no Emmanuelle Arsan in the Black Emanuelle films, but Gemser is not even black or African. She is an Indonesian, and her skin is a beautiful reddish-brown color. I guess that "Rust Emanuelle" didn't sound as good. Oh, yeah, and she doesn't spend much time in America either! Most of the action takes place in Venice, the Bahamas, and other ports of call.

So there you have it for Black Emanuelle in America. No black woman, no Emmanuelle Arsan, pretty much no America.

1. Before Tom Green came along, I think this must have been the Citizen Kane of horse hand-job movies. What am I thinking of? It is still the Citizen Kane of horse hand-job movies.

2. It seems that the film was meant to be modular, capable of being re-assembled into several versions, softcore, hardcore, or hardcore with extreme sexual violence.

3. The damned film doesn't have any credits except a list of names at the end. I could have identified two more actresses if I knew who played which part.

The film is strongest in the areas of sexual and violent content. There is plenty of sex and violence, and the portion in the film proper is photographed quite competently on good film stock. (The snuff film is made to look like what we imagine a real 8mm snuff film to look like.) Gemser doesn't do any hardcore, but she shows it all, and she's gorgeous.

The film is very weak in every other way. It's dubbed (poorly). It really has no story arc at all. Laura is a fashion photographer and free-lance investigative photojournalist. Some scenes are completely irrelevant distractions from the forward movement of the story, but I'm not sure that matters, since the story really goes nowhere.

Laura has a bunch of unrelated adventures. She goes undercover in a harem, and finds some weapons in boxes labeled "horse shoes". Then she films the orgies of the decadent rich people in Venice. Then she investigates a "pleasure island", which is a pay-for-play resort for the very rich. Then she starts to get wind of a snuff film ring, and investigates some kind of ultra-patriotic U.S. Government official, maybe a senator or representative (they talk to one another while walking in front of the White House!). She watches his favorite snuff film and feigns excitement, so the senator drugs her with LSD and takes her for a real snuff-related junket. She wakes up after dreaming that she saw a snuff film being made in some exotic place, but it turns out that she was not dreaming. She had enough wits about her to record everything with a secret camera. She turns it in to her editor, and he's impressed, but the publisher (presumably a member of the same corrupt world as the senator) won't let them use the material. Laura tells the newspaper to shove it, and goes on vacation in darkest Africa, or someplace with stone age tribes and elephants, and she finds out that her adventurous boyfriend has jokingly sold her to the tribal chief for some pretty shells and a goat. After a day in the village, Laura and her boyfriend wake up surrounded by Americans moving about the village in hustle and bustle. It seems that the chief made a deal to use his village as a setting for a Hollywood movie. Shocked and disappointed, Laura and her beau run away from the village and find a deserted beach. The movie ends.

I went into some detail in the above paragraph so you could see that nothing in the film is much related to anything else, and nothing ever gets resolved. Every dramatic conflict gets forgotten when Laura heads off for a new adventure. The fate of the weapons smuggler with a harem? Who knows? The fate of the people making snuff films? Still makin' 'em.

Based on this description, this is a C. It is supposed to be a movie which presents a flimsy storyline an excuse to showcase extreme sex and violence. In the uncut version, it certainly delivers. No rip-off here. If you want sex and violence, here's your film.

While I'm thinking about it, To Kill Another Mockingbird would have been a good idea, because it would have brought back Karmic harmony. You see, the Iroquois believed that killing a mockingbird was wrong, and that the evil could only be undone by killing another mockingbird. The lesson for you youngsters: if you go on a mockingbird hunt, always kill an even number.

Other crap archives. May also include newer material than the ones above, since it's sorta in real time.

Just a quick note on your bit about comedies and the AA's. THE PRODUCERS won for best original screenplay, beating out 2001 and keeping Kubrick Oscarless (at least for the major categories). From a bio of Mel Brooks: In 1968, he wrote and directed his first feature film, The Producers, starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, which earned him an Academy Award for the best original screenplay written directly for the screen. I go to your site everyday. Even though my friends are not subscribers, they all know about you and the site. We discuss a lot of your reviews and I often share your links from the Other Crap section. Thanks and keep up the good work.

"Now the Fuhrer, there was a painter. He could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon. Two coats!"