5.6 /10 3 Votes
4/5 Mubi Edited by Vincenzo Vanni Producer Joe D'Amato | 5.5/10 IMDb Directed by Joe D'Amato Cinematography Joe D'Amato Initial release 1975 (Italy) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Screenplay by Bruno MatteiJoe D'Amato Starring George EastmanRosemarie LindtPatricia GoriKarole Annie Edel Cast Rosemarie Lindt, George Eastman, Patrizia Gori, Annie Carol Edel, Maria Rosaria Riuzzi Similar Black Cobra Woman, Death Smiles at a Murderer, Beyond the Darkness, Erotic Nights of the Living, Heroes in Hell | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Emanuelle's Revenge (Italian: Emanuelle e Françoise le sorelline / Emanuelle and Francene, the Sisters) is a 1975 Italian film directed by Joe D'Amato. Unlike the French Emmanuelle series, this entry has been described as being closer to a sex-themed giallo. The film was written by Bruno Mattei and D'Amato.
Contents
A German edit of the film retitled Die Lady Mit der Pussycat adds sex scenes with Brigitte Lahaie that were not in the Italian cut.
Plot
A young woman named Francoise, who is abused and degraded by her gambler-husband Carlo (George Eastman), eventually kills herself by jumping in front of a train. Her sister Emanuelle avenges Francoise's death by drugging Carlo and chaining him in a hidden soundproof room with a two-way mirror, and torturing him by having sex with various men and women in front of the mirror, making him watch the torrid goings on without being able to participate sexually. She also injects him with LSD and causes him to hallucinate scenes of cannibalistic orgies. While he is still locked in the hidden room, Carlo hallucinates that he is hacking Emanuelle to death with a meat cleaver. As the coup de grace of her plan, Emanuelle enters the room and attempts to castrate Carlo with a scalpel, at which point he breaks free of his bonds and chases her around the house. Scenes of the huge 6' 8" actor lumbering around with a cleaver in his hand look like a test reel for George Eastman's later appearance as the monster in D'Amato's later film, Anthropophagus. Carlo eventually catches Emanuelle and butchers her in real life on her living room rug, when suddenly the police arrive at the house, alerted to the melee by a neighbor. Carlo retreats back into the hidden room and seals himself in to evade the police while they check the crime scene for evidence and cart poor Emanuelle off to the morgue, not realizing the killer is hiding behind the two-way mirror in the living room. Emanuelle's real revenge over Carlo occurs after her death, when Carlo realizes he locked himself in the hidden room without any food and the police have locked up the house as a crime scene for 30 days!
Cast
Reception
In a contemporary review, David Badder (Monthly Film Bulletin) stated that film had characters that eschew "any believable motivation" and that "deadly dull sex scenes irritatingly tricked out with arty-crafty camera work, almost guaranteed to send the bulk of his frustrated audience into a deep sleep" and the film was "burdened with a crushingly pretentious score". The review negatively compared D'Amato's work to that of Italian genre filmmakers Dario Argento and Riccardo Freda, stating that he had "none of [their] inspirational touches".