Ah, the memories. This is my second Laura Gemser Emanuelle film so far, for the site at least. I've also made the mistakes of watching Emanuelle in Bangkok and Emanuelle in America. The former was far superior to the latter, as it didn't feature a woman jerking off a horse. In case you don't know what the Emanuelle movies are, by the way, that sudden introduction is basically the series in a nutshell. The Emanuelle series is one of those European pornos--the ones you don't really want to watch, but inevitably will if you stay in the bad movie trade long enough. For all its faults, I do like Women's Prison Massacre (aka Emanuelle in Prison), but otherwise I approach Emanuelle films with the same apprehension I have with Amazon cannibal movies. Something unpleasant and probably illegal is going to happen, and I'm not going to want to look at it. But I did have to do research on Divine Emanuelle (aka Love Camp) for another writing project, and I was surprised with what I saw. All the Emanuelle movies are fucking weird, even outside of the unique perversions they set to film in their attempts to titillate, but Divine Emanuelle is notably so, being a weird cross between Women's Prison Massacre and An American Hippie in Israel. Right down to the obnoxious earworm theme song.
"Give up your soul to an everlasting love!" the movie opens. "Peace can be yours if you give yourself to love!" Emanuelle, alias the Divine One, is the head of a South American "love cult" made up of a clan of effeminate free-lovin' nudist hippies! Who may also be a UFO cult, as they warn that soon the the Earth will be blown into a million pieces! We learn quickly that the love they offer (or hook people with) is not entirely free, as the church requires donations before the divine forces allow certain services to be permitted. Similarly, it's clear that not all the servants of the Divine One are there of their own free will. It's an ugly situation all around. Dorian, the bleached-blond sub-leader of the cult, is given a new task, to prevent the dark vision Emanuelle foresees while bathing in milk: he must convince the daughter of a billionaire politician to join the cult, so they can get his money. Of course, this plot will return only incidentally, as we have to first watch people dance, sing, and fuck. Constantly. Because this is an Emanuelle movie there is naturally a tremendous deal of fucking in it. There are also variations on fucking, like playing Blind Man's Tits, which is my name is for the game they played where you grope blindfolded for boobs and have to figure out whose pair you're holding. The cult becomes more and more unsavory--it turns out that while it is a cult of love, you are not allowed to fall in love, because then you become monogamous and therefore worthless. Now, this is a South American cult, so inevitably the whole thing is going to end in mass suicide. So our question becomes...will love prevail?
Like Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS and other similar exploitation films, including most of the other Emanuelle movies, Divine Emanuelle is essentially a string of vignettes tied together around a central theme, which makes it feel random at times. It makes the plot feel jarring and intrusive when it returns, which perhaps serve to prove that plot doesn't even work in softcore porn. All the same, when the plot does appear, it's actually interesting--though it doesn't take much to make her reveal it, we learn a good way through the film that the Divine One doesn't believe her own words for a second, and is in this only for the money and easy sex (to say nothing of the endless praise lavished on her by her followers). The character of Dorian actually has a believable arc, as do a few others. It's not that the plot is bad, it's that it's infrequent, and it clashes violently with the relatively-brainless sleaze we see onscreen.
The production values are also bad, but this is a wonderful thing. Characters frequently speak without moving their mouths. Also, when the Divine One's strongman Tanga (Tanga!) is knocked into a pit, you can tell that said "pit" is only a couple feet deep--a fact confirmed moments later when the actor climbs out of the pit! They left that in; they only needed to trim a few frames. You'd think the editing would have been more careful. This movie runs for 100 minutes, but was originally 140. Christian Anders must've loved this thing, you'd think. But then I remember that some of the other Emanuelle movies are even longer. It's weird to consider that this particular brand of European exploitation usually features such long runtimes. Mondo movies go on for hours and hours, and Jess Franco never understood the concept of modest editing (but I will finish that super-long cut of Female Vampire someday!). Even Joe D'Amato has been known to make some whoppers, despite the fact that whoppers cost more money. This movie has the makings of a D'Amato or a Bruno Mattei all over it, though apparently Christian Anders made only one other movie beside this, a crime picture I may check out called Roots of Evil.
The similarities to D'Amato and Mattei extend to the dialogue as well, and I'm just going to assume that Laura Gemser is one of Claudio Fragasso's horcruxes, because every movie I've seen her in has the same weird clunky Claudioesque dialogue. Maybe it's just how the Italian or German or Spanish or French translates, but there's just that "Eurotrash" feel in so many of these movies, and it's just that Claudio Fragasso and Bruno Mattei let it out most noticeably
One thing that rang out much stronger to me on my second viewing was just how cynical the whole movie is. It presents the Divine One's cult as being time-displaced hippies, hippies who've come too late. It's weird to see such earnest hippie-ism in 1981. And it plays up that anachronism to the fullest, exposing the hippie dream of free love and child-like celebration as an illusory ego trip that led to the rise of figures like Charles Manson. For many of the hippies, free love meant "compulsory love," and many took the return to childhood promised by the hippie creed as an excuse to indulge in petty shallowness, and the world began to feel the consequences of this by the early '80s. Every day I learn how scary the '80s actually were, and how the '60s led into them. That's a gross oversimplification, but what I mean to say is that this movie is more knowing than it lets on.
If you like the sort of grimy, sleazy Eurotrash that's willing to splice Emanuelle, Jonestown, and hippies, this is essentially the archetypical experience. It even spares you scenes of animal violence, or people shooting ping-pong balls out of their assholes, so it's "clean" for this type of film. Fans of shitty nudist melodrama take note!
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