We were drawn to Il sesso della strega, aka Sex of the Witch, because of its excellent posters painted by Lamberto Forni, an artist whose work you've seen here before. But as often happens, the movie didn't live up to the promo imagery. The strange tale begins with Sir Thomas Hilton, a wealthy wine grower, who dies of old age. His family gets a surprise when the will is read: all those closest to Hilton, including his secretary, benefit from the profits of his holdings, but nothing can be broken up or sold, his sister gets nothing, some heirs don't benefit immediately, and if anyone dies their share is distributed among the others. Basically, the will is a blueprint for the Hiltons to start murdering each other. When that happens, the spurned sister is suspected of being a witch. But is she?

None of it matters. The movie is an merely excuse for a lot of overlong softcore sex scenes of the worst kind. You know the ones we mean—interminable slow wriggling devoid of even a hint of erotic heat. You have to really drop the ball to make naked people boring—especially naked Italian women from the ’70s, with their enormous bushes*—but director Angelo Pannacciò, aka Elo Pannacciò, accomplishes that here, in his debut. It's impossible to care about the movie's central mystery, and despite Pannacciò somewhat giallo visual stylings there's just nothing to get enthusiastic about. Except those posters. Nice work, Forni. Il sesso della strega premiered in Italy today in 1974.

*We love enormous Italian bushes, both tactilely and visually. This one is large, but not stupendous. You know when a bush is really big? When the moment it's revealed you think there's suddenly been a citywide blackout.

Laura Gemser’s Emanuelle series started innocuously enough, but soon she was running into slavers, zombies, and Amazon cannibals. It’s the latter she contends with in Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali, aka Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, and she handles them and their voracious appetites for human meat the way she handles pretty much every obstacle in her movies—by getting naked. In truth, Gemser has nothing to fear from flesh eaters—she’s nothing but skin and bones. But of course her angular, stick-figure exoticism is her appeal.

You really have to appreciate how hard Gemser tries to breathe life into this one, gamely wading into fetid swamps, battling murderous anacondas, and letting ham-fisted Italian dudes paw her tender parts. Her co-stars Gabriele Tinti, Mónica Zanchi, Annamaria Clementi, and Nieves Navarro likewise give their all—including some innards, a uterus, and plenty of dignity—but the mixture of sex and gore is jarring, and the Mondo Cane style shock documentary realism is totally inappropriate. Oh, and we’ll add that the scene in which a chimpanzee smokes a cigarette—and French style, no less—is just wrong.

We gather that this was a pioneering effort by director Joe D’Amato at genre mash-up, but being neither scary nor erotic, we can only shrug at the final result. However, on the plus side of the ledger you get a groovy score from Nico Fidenco, some lush tropical scenery, and several unintentionally funny “cannibal cam” sequences. In the end, the film imparts one important lesson, which is that there’s never a bad time to get your hump on, even when homicidal cannibals are lurking in the undergrowth. Above you see the movie’s nice Italian poster, painted by Lamberto Forni. Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali premiered in Italy today in 1977.