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11 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
It's an acquired taste, but not a bad thing..., 20 February 2003
Author: CFVimports from United States

These 70's "Black" Emanuelle films from Joe D'Amato are no blockbusters but they sure can be enjoyable cheesfests and certainly have a huge following. Many guys like these just for the eye candy of Laura Gemser (can you blame us?). I personally like them because they ARE cheesy. Cheesy can be fun. But some people are dissatisfied with cheesy 70's Euro films if they aren't Oscar material. These are an acquired taste. The best of them being EMANUELLE IN AMERICA (the uncut import version only not the old VidAmerica release) and EMANUELLE AND THE LAST CANNIBALS (for fans of sex/horror). And FYI these films are Italian, but most of the cast are in fact speaking English. I still can't understand why their voices were re-dubbed unless it was to cover up some of the actors heavy Italian accents.

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7 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
Emanuelle Around the World, 5 March 2006
8/10
Author: Dirtymoviedevotee (vermeulendries@yahoo.com) from Brugge, Belgium

This is perhaps the most enjoyable of e Aristide Massaccesi's EMANUELLE movies, relatively free of the sadistic excesses of more extreme installments such as EMANUELLE IN America and EMANUELLE AND THE LAST CANNIBALS. As in the previous episode, EMANUELLE AND THE WHITE SLAVE TRADE (a/k/a VIA DELLA PROSTITUZIONE and at least half a dozen other titles), our intrepid girl reporter (still played by statuesque Laura Gemser who hails from the isle of Java in the former Dutch Indies) is hot on the trail of an international white slavery ring.

Having said thanks to the lorry driver (US adult superstar Paul Thomas) who picked her up naked in San Francisco harbor in her customary fashion, she bumps into old friend and colleague Cora Norman (German nudie starlet and later middle-aged Queen Mum of Spaghetti Hardcore Karin Schubert) who has found a lead to the gang's whereabouts in Rome. Before she can go check this out however, Emanuelle's editor demands that she'd do an exposé on some trendy Indian guru (exploitation mainstay George Eastman a/k/a Luigi Montefiori) in sunny Bombay instead. This makes for the best (and funniest) part of the movie as bored housewives from all over the world flock to the temple to experience the guru's heavily hyped "prolonged orgasm" techniques. Naturally, the guy turns out to be a fraud as Emanuelle soon learns when she makes love to him and he turns out to be a touch, well, premature !

In Rome, Cora gets beaten up and raped as her investigations start to turn up a bit too much in the way of damaging information as Emanuelle allows herself to be picked up by a pair of local lover boys who deliver her to the lair of the evildoers. Luckily, she had just met some virginal puppy dog (played by Claudio Alliotti who would go on to star in Masuo Ikeda's extraordinary DEDICATO AL MARE EGEO) mere minutes before and asked him to follow her on his Vespa and inform the cops.

Hong Kong and wicked Chinamen are next on the agenda, including some spectacularly tasteless (but hilarious) business involving strapped down naked women with various animal species, fortunately with appropriate comeuppance for their tormentor, before we're off again to downtown Teheran for sheiks and harems.

Capturing their target at this last stop, Emanuelle and Cora learn that women's rights are still trampled on their N.Y. home turf as well when they're invited along with an assortment of senators and their entourage for the humiliation of Miss Ohio (hardcore porn actress Juliet Graham) at the hands of homeless bums.

Even though most of the film's gorgeous female cast gets roughed up at some point, Massaccesi manages to keep the tone surprisingly light, helped by the furious pace with which he rushes through the often nonsensical proceedings, making this the cinematic equivalent of the sleazy adult comics that were quite popular at the time, in their own way unassuming precursors to much of today's manga output. Sex is quite strong for soft core with fleeting hardcore footage spicing up the orgy scenes, none of it involving Gemser though who acts as haughtily impervious to the tawdry shenanigans as ever, adding an arbitrary touch of class in the process. Italian exploitation veteran Ivan Rassimov is pretty much wasted as diplomat and do-gooder Malcolm Robertson who falls in love with our flighty heroine but never manages to get into her pants (on those rare occasions she's actually wearing them !) due to conflicting schedules which tend to find them at opposing sides of the world.

Good cinematography by Massaccesi supplies surface gloss (they were ripping off a "très chic" French sex series, after all) and Nico Fidenco's infernally groovy soundtrack bumps 'n' grinds along with the cast. So let me leave you with the lyrics to the unforgettable (resistance is futile) theme song, all together now : "Let's take a picture of love !"

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8 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
Emanuelle In America Lite, 31 January 2003
Author: dogcow from United States

Certaintly not as sleazy as Emanuelle In America, but not as lightweight ad Emanulle In Bangkok. Similar to Emanuelle in America we have Emanuelle traversing the globe discovering sex scandals. The set peices range from fairly innocent romp in the back of a moving truck to rape and beastality (implied not explicit). Of course it all remains fairly softcore. D'Amato handles the cinematography masterfully, its easy to see why he's so at home in adult films. Hes a master at creating suspenceful erotic sex scenes. Watch for ol Joe himself in a quick cameo near the end of the film (hes the man being arrested at the very end).

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7 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
Emanuelle frees sex slaves, 14 April 1999
Author: Katy-13

Emanuelle is now a newspaper reporter who travels around the world in search of a story about "violence to women". It starts off in San Francisco, where she meets a guru leader of a religious sex cult. We see the inside of a large church-like rotunda covered with colorful, "Indian" tapestries. The members of the cult are arranged in pairs, seated on pillows, all over the floor. It's sort of unclear, but it seems that this is one of the places where sex slaves are collected. Then suddenly, Emanuelle is off to Rome where she uncovers another sex slave operation, then Hong Kong, the Middle East, and finally New York. There are really five mini-plots associated with each of these places. It's almost episodic. In comparison with "Black Emanuelle", the movie seems less focused on the characters and more interested in illustrating the plot. It can be less engaging because of this. Still, it's probably one of the better in the series (much better than "Black E, White E/aka Emanuelle in Egypt") and full of cheap, exploitive thrills!

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5 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Sleaze me up, Emmy!, 5 March 2006
6/10
Author: Coventry from the Draconian Swamp of Unholy Souls

The third (I think) installment in the Italian Emanuelle series starring the unearthly beautiful Laura Gemser, and simultaneously the final one that is somewhat classy and stylish. After this entry, the franchise became the prototype of total sleaze & obscenity with sex-insatiable Emanuelle invading women prisons and even a tribe of Amazonian cannibals. "The Degradation of Emanuelle" even ranks among Joe D'Amato's best films, since the screenplay is adequately written for a change and the erotic scenes are tasteful and tempting. After a brief encounter with the man of her life – a congressman for the United Nations – sleaze reporter Emanuelle wants to alter her writing style and battle the oppression of women all around the world. This noble mission brings her from India, where she unmasks a fake guru who supposedly re-invented the female orgasm, to Rome, where there's a whole network of girls that get kidnapped and deported to the Middle East as white sex slaves. But her biggest challenge lies in the United States, where eminent senators can still rape innocent girls without being punished for it. As a social allegory on Human Rights, this is a very meaningless effort but it remains a pretty decent exploitation film all together. The decors and costumes are beautiful and every large hole in the plot is neatly filled up with footage of Laura Gemser's stunningly ravishing body. Just like in all the other Black Emanuelle films, the absolute finest aspect is Nico Fidenco's brilliant music. The intro song "Picture of Love" should have won an Oscar! Ha!

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4 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
More sleaze to please from the King of Smut Joe D'Amato., 25 March 2006
7/10
Author: HumanoidOfFlesh from Chyby, Poland

Emanuelle travels the world once again on a crusading mission to report on the abuse and degradation of women at the hands of male-dominated organizations.At her first stop in India she meets up with George Eastman who plays a guru who has discovered the secret of prolonged sexual pleasure. While at the temple she also meets gorgeous Brigitte Petronio and it's not too long before both are having hot lesbian intercourse.While at her next stop in Rome she meets Karin Schubert who gives her a lead about a white-slavery ring...Joe D'Amato's "The Degradation of Emanuelle" is not as sleazy and shocking as infamous "Emanuelle in America",however there is enough sex and violence to bring the smile on the face of any self-respecting smut peddler.The erotic scenes are mostly soft core,but there is a bit of hard core sex added for a good measure.The film is nicely photographed and immensely enjoyable.Give it a look.

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2 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
Why violence against women?--it sells a lot of tickets apparently, 29 July 2007
Author: lazarillo

This movie recently appeared in the "Black Emanuelle's Box Set" with two other movies, one of which was significantly better ("Sister Emanuelle") and the other slightly worse ("Emanuelle in Bangkok"). Emanuelle (Laura Gemser)is a once again a "world-famous photojournalist" who is much more intrepid than intelligent (when we first see her she is saving air fare to San Francisco by having sex with a long-haul furniture trucker--I don't know why she didn't just have sex with a pilot). She is sent to India by her publisher where she discredits a local sex guru--by having sex with him, of course. Encouraged by an old friend (Karin Schubert) and a young girl (Briget Petronnio) who she meets (and has lesbian sex with) in India, she decides to investigate a white slavery ring, naturally by getting HERSELF kidnapped, along with a couple naive white girls, in Rome with only a shy, virginal guy she briefly flirted with as back-up.

Obviously, this film is not very realistic. International sex slave rings do not generally trade in pretty middle-class white girls snatched right off the street while touring Rome. This movie would be pretty offensive if it WAS realistic though since it is obviously far more interested in exploiting this subject than exposing it. It is not quite as transgressive or disturbing as other films in the series like "Emanuelle in America", but there are way too many scenes of women being slapped around and/or raped. Still even these scenes look more like rough consensual sex than anything since the women never seem to physically or mentally traumatized by it, but remain as pretty and chirpy as ever afterward.

The female leads are all very attractive. Petronnio would later suffer far worse abuse in Ruggiero Deodata' "House at the Edge of the Park" while Schubert probably suffered worse in real-life after becoming a hardcore actress. Laura Gemser, as usual, manages to float effortlessly above whatever sleaze she is cast in. At times this movie seems almost feminist in a strange way, much more so than the similar American "Ginger" series with Cheri Caffaro, largely because of the innate classiness of Gemser that makes her "degradation"-proof even to the likes of Joe D'Amato. As for the movie itself, it's not good and I don't want to morally defend it, but it isn't really more than a, for lack of a better word, "naked" version of the old Hollywood ploy of exploiting lurid subject matter while pretending to condemn it.

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3 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
Emanuelle never gets rape counseling, 8 July 2007
Author: Scott from Modesto from the Berkeley Marina

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Weird how Emanuelle can get raped so many times and yet it never stops her being promiscuous and these rapes are never mentioned again. Hell, she gets raped and the next morning her gal pal hands her something to drink as she's sitting in the cop car with a blanket wrapped around her and everything's supposed to be alright. She's quite resilient if you ask me. I mean, if I got raped all the time I'd probably stop leaving the house. But that's her lot in life, she's the Mary Tyler Moore of rape--always bright and cheerful.

The best scene in Emanuelle around the World is when the twisted little Asian man sexually molests a girl with a snake and has his German shepherd rape another one as she's tied to barbells. Then Emanuelle's friend busts in with a gun and threatens to let the dog finish in the man. Too bad they don't actually show you that bit.

Speaking of Asians raping women with dogs, I have recently come into possession of some illegal Japanese materials that should be of interest to everyone that loves seeing gals raped with dogs. Check out some of Karma's dog videos and ManiaX's Dog Game series. That's some hardcore stuff right there.

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
Black Emanuelle is the N**ger of the World, 5 April 2009
9/10
Author: fuzon from London, England

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Emanuelle Around the World seems to be a direct sequel to D'Amato and Gemser's most notorious collaboration, Emanuelle in America, with Emanuelle returning from the paradise island she escaped to at the end of that film and going on, believe it or not, an even more extraordinary adventure. The film begins with her making love on a Louis VVI bed, but this luxurious piece of furniture is in the back of a removals van in which Emanuelle is hitching a lift from the hunky driver. There's something curiously postmodern about the image of the antique being transported in a large van across contemporary America, and the scene sets in motion a series of dizzying and equally postmodern conundrums in the shape of the many adventures of our photo-journalist heroine. The trucker deposits Emanuelle at a luxury hotel in San Francisco, and in the lobby we meet a different black Emanuelle than we have seen before – she's impatient and rude to the concierge, and we wonder why our normally sanguine and affect-less heroine is on such a short fuse. She meets a fellow journalist, the feminist Cora Norman, and finds out that her friend is onto a story about female exploitation. A sexual encounter with a UN envoy persuades Emanuelle that her work ought to have a more political edge, and her experiences during her next job – exposing a phony love guru in India – push her into activism, but not before she has re-established herself as part of the consumer West by doing a pile of shopping.

The sequence with the guru is a remarkable set piece. Filmed in a Hindu temple, the avatar of love instructs his disciples in delayed orgasm building towards spiritual enlightenment, as D'Amato films various God's eye views of the revellers interrupted and upwards genuflections at the guru by more down-to-earth sceptical shots. Emanuelle, surprisingly for a woman who has always preached free love, sees how nonspiritual the guru's message really is – surely he'd spend more time helping the poor and less time improving the love-lives of vain wealthy Westerners if he really had a hot line to god? This disillusion with hedonism sends Emanuelle to Rome, where she teams up with Cora to expose a gang who have been kidnapping and trafficking women as sex slaves to the Middle East. Emanuelle goes undercover and we see two young men pick her and two other young women up, sell them to an older man at a restaurant who in turn sells them at a higher price to another man. Pasolini couldn't have given us a more striking illustration of human beings reduced to things, commodities. At the halfway house, as they wait to be sent outside of Europe, the women are raped by a hideous man whose face is terribly scarred, making him look like a demon. In the meantime, Cora is being raped by a gang of hoods as punishment for her investigations and a young man who is on Emanuelle's side finds where our heroine is being held and phones the police. This is striking because, for the first time in a D"Amato Black Emanuelle film we see a sequence which does not involve Emanuelle, as if to say that once activism and collective responsibility has come into play, the protagonist centred dramaturgy won't do.

Even more strikingly, the rescue of Emanuelle and the girls happens between scenes. We cut straight from the demon's pillage to Emanuelle emerging from the police station with her young ally. They then go to a boat his father owns and end up hiding and bonking in a closet, but there's something curiously inappropriate at this return to generic soft-core adventures after the sexual violence we've been witness to. The cramped condition of the lovemaking seems to mirror D'Amato's need to break free from the conventions of the genre.

We need to take the original Italian title – Emanuelle: Why Violence Against Women – at face value. D"Amato seems to be wilfully subverting the sexploitation genre as a way of asking a question about the treatment of women, a problem that he (like John Lennon in his famous song Woman is the N**ger of the World) sees as global. The film cuts from the US to India to Italy to China to the Middle East in the blink of an eye, and the point seems to be that the same patriarchal attitude treats women as chattels and sexual slaves no matter where on earth you go. Along the way, monsters and villainy (including enforced bestiality) more at home in the pages of de Sade than in harmless erotica are encountered.

Finally, we return to the US where a Senator sets up a beauty pageant queen to be raped by some down-and-outs for the entertainment of various rich slime-balls. Things get out of hand, the wealthy disappear and Emanuelle is degraded by being forced to fellate a bum. Women are mere objects to be used for the amusement of the rich or thrown as pornographic entertainment to the powerless. We as an audience are left with a very foul taste in our mouths. D"Amato has refused to give his audience what they expect from a soft-core frolic – is an artist painting a picture of exploitation rather than a mere exploitation filmmaker? Or an extraordinary and complex mixture of both…

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
Two Versions, 26 February 2008
Author: Michael_Elliott from Louisville, KY

Emanuelle Around the World (1977) Soft version

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Joe D'Amato and Laura Gemser made this flick right over the notorious Emanuelle in America and really took a step back content wise. In the film Emanuelle travels around the world learning different sexual things while sleeping with as many people as possible. The company that released this film released a soft version and a XXX version. This is the soft version and it certainly is soft; meaning, there's very little nudity, which is somewhat shocking considering the subject matter. Not to mention the fact that the previous film went as far as to show a woman stroking a horse!!! I've heard the XXX version of this features some pretty wild stuff but I'll get to it later. Back to this version, it's pretty dull from start to finish, although there's a really bizarre moment with George Eastman (Rabid Dogs, Erotic Nights of the Living Dead) playing a character dressed up as Jesus. He bangs Emanuelle only to have her tell him that he came too quickly. I guess D'Amato isn't a fan of Jesus? The sex scenes aren't erotic, which is the main downfall here.

Emanuelle Around the World (1977) XXX version

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Alternate version of Joe D'Amato's Emanuelle film isn't any better or worse than the soft version I watched a few weeks ago. In the previous review I mentioned that the film's sexual content was rather low even for a softcore film but here's a more extreme version, which features three different scenes. The two orgy sequences are shown with some hardcore scenes here, which isn't anything new. The next added footage serves for the more shocking nature, which was explored in the previous film Emanuelle in America. There's a scene where two girls are sexually tortured with a snake and a German shepard. In the softcore version this was just hinted at but here we get to see a lot more action, which should turn anyone's stomach.

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