Porno Holocaust (1981)

Very Cool!!!

Just perfect...

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

About the only thing this Joe D'Amato-directed sleaze fest has going for it is an authentic Caribbean setting, given that it was filmed in the Dominican Republic. Otherwise it's a film entirely devoid of merit, a grubby work of pornography masquerading as a sex/horror film. The story is about a group of characters who arrive on a desert island and discover that a radioactive mutant with a penchant for raping women to death is on the prowl.Admittedly the premise sounds, well, controversial, and this could have been another ANTHROPOPHAGUS THE BEAST had the emphasis been on the horror. But it isn't. The horror elements of the film are almost entirely non-existent and only turn up in the last half an hour, although there are a few P.O.V. heavy breathing scenes in the first hour as an unseen presence watches the proceedings.Instead this is all about the sex, and D'Amato stages possibly some of the most repellent sex scenes ever. The actors and actresses are all sweaty and dirty-looking and the porno moments are about as boring as you could imagine. PORNO HOLOCAUST is the kind of film that would put people off sex, not arouse them in any way. The cast members include the hard-working Mark Shannon and big George Eastman, who also wrote what little plot and dialogue there is. D'Amato seems to be preoccupied with other stuff while directing this, leaving it a plodding and gruelling watch due to its sheer ineptitude.

A group of scientists head off to a tropical island to study the effects of atomic testing years earlier. The island isn't entirely deserted however -- a large solitary creature, mutated by the radiation, is waiting for them.That plot does not really explain this film. All I can say is that this film is nothing more than poor attempts at porn, with a bit of plot thrown in. You can watch the clock and literally not go more than five minutes between sex scenes. Which is great if you want to see sex scenes, but awful if you actually care about the story. It's not much of one, and in some people's opinion, not much of a porn either (though I wasn't really going to worry about that).Italian horror critic Jim Harper says director Joe D'Amato "screws it up pretty badly... the film is a mess." He sees it as a mix that destroys both elements at the same time: "This is unlikely to please fans of either horror or hardcore." Another noted horror critic, Jay Slater, agrees and does not mince words with this one, which he calls "a dismal failure". The "movie is a failure because it alienated both audiences" of sex and gore. The film "is so incompetently directed, scripted and acted that the finished movie borders on tedium and unintentional hysteria." It "is devoid of a lively plot, delirious set-pieces or funky sex." If this isn't bad enough, "the cast are uniformly sexually unattractive." What good can be said of this one? I think the film has a certain unintended humor, simply because it is unique. There have been newer attempts at horror porn, such as Doug Sakmann's "Re-Penetrator" and "XXXorcist", but those set out to be somewhat funny, whereas D'Amato actually thought he was being serious. Does the humor make it worth owning? Probably not. But you'd sure get a lot of interested people when they scour your shelf and see this one.

I have spent many years studying all the great directors, like Kurosawa, Lean, Fulci, Lenzi, Deodato, Peckinpah, Kubrick and admire them greatly. My favourite film is Once upon a time in America.I have only recently become a fan of D'Amato, and while he was no horror master, his films were extreme whether it be soft core, hardcore or extreme.Porno Holocaust is now one of my favourite films, the way its shot is brilliant and the music is catchy.Joe D'Amato, wasn't a horror master, he's no Fulci or Bava, but however he was a master of erotica, no other director could shoot erotic films like him, he also never tried making any films outside of these genre's either.Long live Joe D'Aamto-Master of Porn and Erotica!

Joe D'Amato might have made some other notable movies in his very long and very prolific career- prolific, of course, by turns of making VERY cheap Z-grade movies in Italy's big exploitation boom of the late 70s early 70s- but Porno Holocaust isn't one of them, or at least shouldn't be. Granted, I should not expect much from a movie with such a title, but I thought considering the back of the box's description that it might have some fun horror scenes with the "horny, mutant, cannibal zombie". Turns out the zombie doesn't appear until more than halfway into the movie, and at every turn we get instead a tawdry sex scene as hardcore as one can imagine. Which is fine. But it's not very enjoyable, except in the most "what the f*** is this BS" kind of way. There's laughable dialog involving lobsters costing more from mail-order Japan than in Paris, hot, slim women play biologists and zoologists who have particular sexual hang-ups (letting the door be unlocked to be raped, and a bi-polar kind of enjoyment out of getting gang-banged).It all leads up to the island, where the "main attraction" is a guy who early on just spends an absolutely pathetic (forget ludicrous) amount of time just staring at the newcomers to the radioactive wasteland of the shot-on-Caribbean island, and once revealed has a face like one of the guards in Jabba's palace and has a sweet potato for a main genital. But much dumber than anything before it is the "relationship" that develops between the monster and a dark-skinned lady who has an inordinate amount of time to escape, but just sits there, blank-faced, as the monster brings gifts and for what must be a racially-motivated exploitation move on the part of the filmmakers the monster ONLY rapes and kills the white women, and not her. And it ends, of course, with a "happy" ending. I use quotes, of course, out of a kind of shock that this could have any kind of legitimate ending at all.Bottom line, this is NOT what you might expect, as possibly being a bloody horror movie with plenty of tacky but cool looking Italian monster-zombies devouring human flesh. If anything what violence is in the film is done on a shoe-string; a log hit to the face is immediately cut to the bloody aftermath, which is like the aftermath of a tomato hitting someone. So really, the last part of the title is meant more for market sake. Yet even as a porno movie it has little to go on except as a reason for the cast and crew to get a paid vacation to the Caribbean (as an interview with George Eastman suggests, this was just one of a few quickies made while on the island). Its got penny-bought schlocky camera-work and similar actors, filled with genitalia about 3/4 of the whole time and with wretched lip-syncing and music like Nino Rota forced at gun-point to make something snappy in a bordello, and it's STILL a piece of celluloid dung all the same; all of this could be an immense guilty pleasure, but it isn't.