Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade (1978)

I love this movie so much

Thanks for the memories!

Sadly Over-hyped

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Liberated and uninhibited photojournalist Emanuelle (the ever-delicious Laura Gemser in peak yummy form) once again finds herself in considerable peril and enjoys her usual array of torrid carnal encounters while posing undercover in a prostitution ring that traffics in white slavery. Director Joe D'Amato, who also co-wrote the cheerfully raunchy script with Romano Scandariato, relates the eventful story at a brisk pace, maintains a blithely sleazy tone throughout, and captures the merry spirit of the 70's sexual revolution in the carefree pre-AIDS era of safe sex with total strangers. Naturally, D'Amato not only loads this picture with oodles of scrumptious bare female skin and sizzling soft-core couplings, but also covers the satisfying sensuous bases by including a wide variety bawdy pleasures that include straight copulation, lesbianism, masturbation, an especially hot'n'steamy threesome, and even a couple of (off-screen) gang bangs for good sordid measure. The sturdy cast of familiar solid pro Italian exploitation faces keeps the movie humming: The luscious Ely Galleani as Emanuelle's lusty'n'loyal gal pal Susan Towers, Gabriele Tinti as slimy flesh-peddler Francis Harley, Venantino Venantina as secretive businessman Giorgio Rivetti, and Pierre Marfurt as the dashing Prince Arausani. Special kudos are in order for Nicola D'Eramo as creepy transvestite Stefan, whose unexpected kung-fu fight set piece in a bowling alley provides a definite wacky highlight. The exotic globe-trotting locations add an impressive sense of scope. D'Amato's glossy cinematography makes neat and invigorating use of a constantly moving camera. Nico Fidenco's funky-throbbing score hits the get-down groovy spot (the catchy thumping disco theme song "Run, Cheetah, Run" is a real hoot!). An immensely fun drive-in flick.

Although it is still somewhat obscure, this is one of my favorite of the "Black Emanuelle" series. Some films like "Emanuelle in America" and "Emanuelle Around the World" are a little too sleazy, while others like the original "Black Emanuelle" are not quite sleazy enough, but this film is juuust right.While hanging around Africa for some reason, intrepid reporter/photographer "Emanuelle" (Laura Gemser) stumbles across a white slavery operation (OK, so it doesn't exactly make sense to have a WHITE slavery operation in Africa where hardly anyone is white, but oh well). After hiding and taking lots of photos of naked, barely legal girls being paraded back and forth in front of potential "buyers", "Emanuelle" has a run-in with the vicious male transvestite who's running the operation. His rather confused sexual orientation doesn't stop him from raping her, but later they team up. There's some pretty graphic violence and another unpleasant gang-rape scene, but it's hard to take any of this too seriously when "Emanuelle" herself obviously doesn't (She eventually makes her way back across the Atlantic on a filthy trawler by agreeing to gang-bang the entire crusty, old crew).Most of the serious sleaze is relegated to the second half of the movie, but the first half is much more sexy. "Emanuelle" teams up with a friend, played by very pretty Italian actress Ely Galeani (who was also in "Emanuelle in Bangkok") to get a scoop on a con artist hiding in the dark continent. Of course, they get the story, first by "doing" him and his friend and then by both "doing" him in a three-way scene while they all smoke strange drugs out of a hookah (god, I love the socially irresponsible 70's!). Galeani's character also has an interesting way of "paying" her African auto mechanic in an interracial sex scene that takes place in a lube pit while "Emanuelle" watches and pleasures herself (this scene was kind of borrowed from the first "Black Emanuelle", but director Joe D'Amato manages to improve on it). I also actually kind of liked the cheesy Euro-disco title song "Run, Cheetah, Run", which they play during all the hottest sex scenes with Galeani and Gemser, and which will have many viewers drooling like Pavlov's dogs whenever they hear it by the time the movie ends. Recommended.

The final Black Emanuelle collaboration between director D'Amato and actress Laura Gemser is perhaps the most conventional, structurally, of their films together. It still flits madly between genres, like some crazed canary battering its wings against its cage, but it does keep Emanuelle as a central protagonist in a recognisable three act structure, with a single plot going all the way through.The first half hour takes place in Nairobi, giving D'Amato the chance for some Mondo-like shots of wildlife and tribal ritual. Emanuelle is trying to secure an interview with a European businessman who lives the life of a baron in the country, and we see her infiltrate his defences through cunning guiles and seductions. This first half hour includes a typical soft-core encounter, as Emanuelle's friend and guide gets laid by her garage mechanic in his pit, plus a couple of nifty sexual montages, one interspersing lovemaking with tribal ritual, the other filming a love scene from behind columns, the camera tracking round and the screen going black as it glides behind a post; these two scenes bring into play the usual soft-core soft-soap of sex being associated with primitivism and loss of consciousness. But as usual, D'Amato has bitterer fish to fry, and the first half hour also has Emanuelle witnessing what looks like the trafficking of a woman against her will.Back in New York, after rekindling her affair with a fashion photographer, Emanuelle does a James Bond and goes undercover into the world of the white slave trade. A striking sequence in a plush hotel has her peaking in on an auction in which young girls are bought like cattle (we share her hidden POV); she then pretends to be a poor girl and is taken up by a trader, put on a sex farm and told to please the rich, powerful old men who go there. The owner, one Madam Claude (a reference presumably to Just Jaeckin's 1977 film of that name), keeps a tight house, forbidding her workers to stray outside of their allotted apartments on her ranch. Of course, Emanuelle strays and discovers that Madam is trafficking very young girls from the ranch to foreign climes. This discovery puts Emanuelle in considerable danger, a danger nicely prefigures by the nervy POV walk we do with her on arriving at the airport to depart for the San Fransico-based farm.The most intriguing character in the film is Stefan, the burly transvestite duenna at Madam Claude's. Always in drag, he bosses the girls around and seems like Madam's best arm, but despite being cast as a eunuch at a harem, he falls for Emanuelle's charms and sleeps with her. This makes him vulnerable, as when he catches her taking pictures for evidence he decides to help her – but that brings down the wrath of Claude's thugs onto his head, and despite putting up a spirited kung fu fight, he is violently murdered. Stefan operates in a strange position in the sexual politics of the film – he works for what is ultimately patriarchal power, farming girls like cattle for old men, but his emotions and his low position in the food chain feminize him as much as his dress. It is no surprise that a man who doesn't play the male role "properly" finds himself as disposable as the women seem to be in this world.Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade, like its predecessors Emanuelle in America and Emanuelle Around the World, uses the soft-core genre to ask some hard questions about the darkness sexuality can encompass as well as the commoditisation of women in a patriarchal system. It isn't as gobsmackingly out there as either of those films, but it does move at a steady pace as well as taking its audience into uncomfortable areas around the exploitation of women. It is no surprise that D'Amato made no Emanuelle film after this (except a cynical compilation) as he was beginning to repeat himself, and had darker areas to explore than could be borne by the soft-core genre which he'd taken to its limits.

This is a quite enjoyable little flick, though not as ingenious as Emanuelle and the last Cannibals. Unfortunately, it does not offer the same levels of gore and violence but somewhat compensates this shortcoming by excessive amounts of soft-core and an even more terrific sound-track by the same composer. The "safari"-scenes and the fight in the bowling-alley are unforgettable. Recommended to all fans of 70's sleaze but perhaps not to the general audience.