Vintage Pulp | Dec 15 2023 |
There's no better place to try something new.
This is an interesting but uncredited Italian poster for the Alberto Cavallone directed and written Africasploitation flick Afrika (clever name, right?), which premiered in Italy today in 1973. By now you know exactly what to expect. What's amazing about these set-in-Africa movies, whether Italian, German, British, French, or what-have-you, is that they portray the continent as lawless and cruel (cue gratuitous shot of ox being decapitated) in a way that's bemusingly lacking in self-awareness coming from cultures that murdered one-hundred million inhabitants of those lands in the pursuit of profit.
On the lighter side, if we'd been customs agents anywhere in the tropics during the 1970s, we'd have taken aside every white arrival, looked over their paperwork, and said with a straight face, “It indicates here you boarded the flight with your usual inhibitions, but I notice you don't seem to have any with you now.” If only we had a time machine. With luck we'd have “processed” Anita Strindberg and Yanti Somer. At this point we accept whites-in-the-tropics movies as cinematic exercises in behavioural guardrail smashing. Sometimes those exercises are actually good, loaded with cliché though they may be. However Afrika, while suffering from the same old blind spot, attempts a serious story with a modicum of depth.
Set in Ethiopia, it's about a painter played by Ivano Staccioli who's tempted to stray from his wife when he meets a handsome gay college student played by Andrea Traglia. The studious and poetic Traglia is bullied in school, even raped at one point, and finds sympathy and understanding with Staccioli, and a job as his live-in secretary. This is not an easy household in which to live because its occupants are decadent and neurotic. Staccioli and Traglia's relationship is the sanest thing going on, but needless to say, it will lead to trouble and tragedy. This is all framed by a murder-or-suicide and police investigation, which means the central drama of a forbidden gay affair is told in flashback during interrogations.
We appreciated Cavallone taking a swing at a serious drama, and we enjoyed seeing Maria Pia Luzi, one of Italy's many exploitation stars (Women in Cell Block 7, White Slave Ship), given a chance to act rather than strip, but we can't call the movie good. It isn't the performances—everyone does pretty well in that department, considering the level of writing. It's just that the film is portentous and uninvolving. Take away the anti-Africa bias and it's a noble attempt at important subject matter, but in cinema you don't get points for trying. In our opinion you can give Afrika a pass.
Vintage Pulp | Apr 20 2020 |
Laura Gemser makes an emancipation proclamation.
As you've deduced from the above Italian poster for La via della prostituzione, also known as Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade, we've performed a quick turnaround to Laura Gemser, last seen two days ago. In this flick she plays a journalist, a role she inhabited often, and heads to exotic Nairobi with sidekick Ely Galleani. In a Nairobi market Gemser sees a man hurrying a woman through the throng. She'd seen the same pair in the airport, except then the woman was in a wheelchair and the man was pushing it. Gemser asks her local tour guide, “Do you know that man?” His response: “That one? Only by sight. I only know that he's American, and that he comes on business, but I don't know what kind of business. Someone mentioned white slavery. But why do you ask?” Did you just cringe a little? We did too, but we get it—the white kind is far more important than the regular kind, init?
Anyway, while were still marvelling over the sad but somehow uproarious tone deafness of those dialogue exchanges, Gemser was busy jetting from Nairobi to New York City to find more info about this American slaver. After promising her editor the biggest scoop of her career, she manages to charm her way into a slave auction taking place—in an amazing stroke of luck—right there in the Big Apple. She watches as girls as young as seventeen are sold to hairy-knuckled jetsetters, including that mysterious Yank, played by hirsute Italian Gabriele Tinti. Now that she knows the basic shape of the wrongdoing taking place, she needs evidence. How does she gather it? That's right—by infiltrating the slave racket as product. She's accepted as a high priced prostitute, and from NYC she's off to San Diego to work in a private club, where she hopes to blow the racket wide open.
You may be asking yourself, Wait, how is this all voluntary for her if it's a slave ring? That question is never fully answered. Somehow, though, she's accepted in the game as a freelancer, while all the other girls seem to be wholly owned chattel. It doesn't matter. This is sexploitation cinema, and what matters are nudity and sex, which means that mixed into the confounding plotline are an amazing number of sex scenes, which consist of cast members slithering softcore style against each other like salamanders while soporific music drifts across the soundtrack. It's all very silly, but the entire point of these films is to create gauzy eye candy, not dazzle you with cinematic mastery or make social statements more than a micron deep. Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade fulfills all the requirements of the genre, not brilliantly, but certainly adequately. It premiered in Italy today in 1978.
Femmes Fatales | Jun 11 2017 |
Personally, I find that I can't wake up in the morning without stimulation. What about you?
Elvire Audray was one of the more faces famous in 1980s Italian b-cinema, appearing films such as Lys, Nosferatu a Venezia, and the cannibal movie White Slave, which we discussed a while back. Here she gets her day off to a good start in a couple of photos made around 1985.
Modern Pulp | Sep 18 2016 |
Another blonde stirs up trouble in the benighted jungle.
Amazonia: Kopfjagd im Regenwald, for which you see a West German promo poster above, was originally Italian made as Schiave bianche: Violenza in Amazzonia, and was titled in English White Slave. We really enjoy lost world movies and this one looked like it fit the bill—fierce looking blonde woman on the poster holding a sword, jungle setting—so we tracked down a copy and had a look. We were imagining something along the lines of those entertaining ’80s actioners that all ended with big battle sequences and climactic decapitations. It was only after acquiring the film that we learned it was also known by another title—Cannibal Holocaust 2: The Catherine Miles Story. Uh oh. We are less fond of cannibal movies than lost world movies, but we forged ahead, bravely, with popcorn and beer.
Basically, a woman played by Elivire Audray is kidnapped by Amazon tribesmen and must submit to tribal customs in order to survive. But considering the fact that various loin-clothed alpha males soon begin to fight to possess her, the real question might be whether the tribe can survive her. All of this is wrapped inside a murder trial taking place after Audray's rescue, where a courtroom learns not only every sordid, sexual detail of her time with her tribe, but that her very presence in the jungle may have been part of a conspiracy, and her kidnapping might have been in reality a rescue. We can't really recommend this movie, but its eventual anti-capitalist twist is interesting, and at least you get to see plenty of Audray, below. Amazonia: Kopfjagd im Regenwald premiered in Italy in 1985 and opened in West Germany today in 1986.