Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980)

the audience applauded

Best movie ever!

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Erotic Nights of the Living Dead was made back-to-back with Joe D'amato's other zombie shagathon Porno Holocaust (released in 1981), and shares much of that film's cast, plus its island location. It also shares its ability to bore me witless, with the quantity and quality of sex seriously waning after the first half an hour, and very little in the way of decent gore, despite featuring more of the undead.D'amato regular George 'Anthropophagus' Eastman plays Larry, a sailor hired by mustachioed architect/stud John Wilson (Mark Shannon) to take him (and his current woman) to a mysterious island, which, according to local legend, is home to flesh-eating zombies which are ruled over by a cat. Once there, they meet a strange old man and his beautiful daughter (Laura Gemser), have sex, and run into lots of mouldy reanimated corpses.As you've probably surmised, it doesn't make whole lot of sense, and, at 112 minutes (in its uncut form), is extremely tedious. As always Eastman stays well clear of any hardcore action, preferring to keep his trousers on during sex, whilst Gemser indulges in purely soft-core fumblings. And all of the humping is strictly between the living (unlike Porno Holocaust, which featured a very randy zombie).Very occasionally, the film offers those seeking sleazy treats something to make them smile—a woman displays a unique way of removing a cork from a champagne bottle, and Gemser bites off Wilson's todger—but, on the whole, Erotic Nights of the Living Dead is a dreary mess.

After pushing the envelope and erasing the borders between horror, softcore and hardcore porn flicks in his Black Emanuelle movies, Joe D'Amato went the whole hog here and made a film which could be, at times, classified as all of these things. It ends up being quite a mish-mash, but by the end, as the images of coitus and demise have passed before our eyes in a two hour parade, the film seems most like a kind of motion picture memento mori, reminding us of the inexorable link between the little and big deaths.The film begins in a madhouse, with D'Amato regular George Eastman (who, intriguingly, wrote this film) staring back out of the screen at us through a wired fence. We then follow a pretty young inmate as she searches out Eastman in the bowels of the institution, finding him and engaging in passionate, unbridled (softcore) sex. A shambolic, drooling maniac has also followed them, and he keeps at a distance, touching himself and lolling his tongue as he peaks at their pleasures. We could almost take this as a meta-cinematic representation of D'Amato's cinema – we the audience are the drooling lunatic voyeurs watching our own fellow madmen portrayed in flagrante on D'Amato's cinematic canvas.The plot itself now begins, as Eastman is revealed as the island-hopping skipper on a small schooner somewhere in the Caribbean, operating a sea-bound taxi service for wealthy visitors. He humours the rich men whilst lusting after their booty-prize women. Meanwhile, we follow Mark Shannon's property developer Wilson as he sources information on a local island, hoping to build a luxury resort there, and in the meantime ogle and frolic with the local whores. His frolicking set the hardcore action of the film in motion, as the whores explicitly fellate him in the shower and he enacts cunnilingus with them on his hotel bed. After cutting between Eastman and Shannon for a while, the two come together when the skipper agrees to take the developer (and a gold-digger he has picked up) to the island ripe for developing. But we've heard sinister things about this place, the so-called Cat Island: it is home to a hoard of zombies headed by a cat (!), the locals are terrified of it and some of them keep jujus to ward the evil off. We've also glimpsed some zombies bringing instant death to those they encounter with a swift chomp to the throat… Before leaving, skipper goes to a local bar where a girl he is involved with strips and does an act which involves masturbating with a champagne bottle and then popping it with her vagina. This is a long, slow, melancholy scene – scored with wistful music – in which the skipper, alone in the bar, watches the act with interest, amusement, impressed but still with a nagging feeling of loneliness. In D'Amato's universe, the viewer is alone, shown exotic and erotic sights but removed, alienated, atomised and ultimately sad.The skipper and his two passengers sail to Cat Island and there encounter an old black man with an egg-shaped disfigurement on his forehead and his luscious granddaughter, played with an exquisite lack of affect by Laura Gemser. They warn the visitors against messing with things but Wilson insults them, offers them money and generally causes offence. Gradually, the dead rise and interrupt the various erotic scenes which ensure, killing Wilson and aggressively establishing their ownership of the island. Gemser is a kind of succubus, making love to the visitors whilst the dead rise in the background. The old man gives the skipper a juju which has some effectiveness in warding off the dead but which is lost in the final melee, leaving the skipper vulnerable. He does escape with the gold-digger but they have both been driven mad by the experience, ending up making manic love which puts them right where we first saw them, in the lunatic asylum. Their lovemaking and the drooling idiot's view of this is interrupted by the guards. Skipper and girl are dragged back to their cells (they are convicted of Wilson's death and cannibalisation) and the loon is told that he should stop playing with himself and grow up. The audience are thus instructed to put their own private parts away and the film ends.Erotic (or Sexy, as the credits have it) Nights of the Living Dead doesn't altogether work – it is over-long, languorous and under-developed in terms of plot. Yet its mix of hardcore porn, extreme gore and softcore frolicking make it a compelling example of D'Amato's refusal to stay put in any one genre. In throwing - almost willy-nilly - meat shots, coy fondling, bloody death and monsters at us whilst constantly reminding us of his male characters' ultimately sad position as voyeurs, sometimes conscious and lonely, sometimes drooling and out-of-control, and by suggesting that sex in the face of colonial exploitation and strident displays of wealth, he does go someway to offering a compelling vision of late 20th century Western man on the rocks of alienated enjoyment, whose erotic nights are indeed those of the living dead.

Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980) ** (out of 4) XXX versionInfamous Joe D'Amato film that mixes Italian gore with Italian sex. Three people head for a deserted island to have a lot of sex and to see if a hotel could be built on the island. They should have listened to all the rumors because zombies are there waiting. This is an extremely weird and bizarre film because the producer's wanted two films made. One a porno and another a horror film so the director just combined the two elements. Running at nearly two hours this thing goes on for way too long, which is why I wish the hardcore sex scenes would have been removed. There's a "soft" version out there that I keep meaning to see because I'm sure I'd like the film better minus the sex scenes. The zombie footage on the other hand is wonderfully done with a lot of great atmosphere and gore. D'Amato was a master behind the camera and the cinematography here is terrific as is the music score. Laura Gemser, George Eastman and Mark "Wart Nuts" Shannon star. This here is a lot better than the director's first horror/sex film Porno Holocaust, which was filmed at the same time with the same cast of this one.Sexy Nights of the Living Dead (1980) ** (out of 4)The version under this title is the pure horror version, which is missing all of the XXX scenes. For years I had been wanting to check this version out because I felt that the hardcore scenes in the uncut version were all rather ugly and did nothing erotic and instead they just dragged the film down. It was interesting watching the film without the porn scenes because you realize that the Joe D'Amato film has more problems than just the porn stuff. For starters, even without the hardcore sex there's way too many softcore scenes that are also not erotic. I was really surprised to see how silly the majority of the scenes are because it's clear that the main intent was just to show sex. Another major problem with the picture is that it just takes them way too long to finally get to the island where the zombie stuff happens. The zombies, as great as they are, are pretty much wasted because outside a couple scenes early on, the majority of their screen time happens at the very end of the movie. It's really a shame that they weren't given more screen time because I felt the horror elements were quite strong and they keep the movie interesting. Even though he was unable to make anything erotic, D'Amato did do a good job building up a rather bizarre atmosphere. This version clocks in at 100-minutes, which means it is missing twelve minutes worth of hardcore scenes. So, is this version better? I would say that it is simply because it's shorter and as I said, the hardcore scenes were rather ugly and added nothing to the picture.

In case you always wondered (or worried) whether or not you would get aroused by the sight of zombies having sexual intercourse...you still won't find out by watching this weirdo-flick. In spite of what the title suggests, "Erotic Nights of the Living Dead" does not feature copulating undead or strip-dancing corpses. This merely is a routine Italian zombie film, like "Zombi 2" or "Zombie Holocaust", with a handful of hardcore sex sequences thrown in during the first half hour. And as crazy as it may sound, it actually is a pretty decent zombie movie if you just ignore these totally redundant porno moments and focus on the beautiful island location and rather stylish gory make-up effects. There's the typically obnoxious businessman who buys a tropical island with a vicious reputation and intends to build a tourist resort there. Along with a macho sailer and a whore he picked up in some hotel, he goes to scout the place but stumbles upon an uncanny old man and his ghostly granddaughter that rule over the island. Laura Gemser, ravishing cult siren and regular D'Amato nymph, stars as the mysterious island girl but her role is rather limited and she doesn't really show much of her enchanting body. George Eastman clearly is in great shape again as the stud, but he still doesn't manage to script down one reasonably good dialogue. There are a couple of atmospheric zombie-attacks and explicit gore. You can't possibly expect more from a Joe D'Amato film, apart from sleazy oddities in the script maybe, like the girl who ingeniously uncorks a bottle of champagne by using her vagina only (!).