This film is a lie. Emanuelle does not go around the whole world! There are no scenes in Australia. But good god, every other continent is represented here. We often think of these Emanuelle movies as being low-budget affairs, but they must have spent a pretty penny flying the cast and crew all over the world for this one. Let’s see how quickly I can explain the plot in terms of where this movie was shot.
Emanuelle, plucked naked from the Pacific (hey, that’s where we left her off in Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade? You mean, there’s actually a logical progression from one Emanuelle movie to another?), ends up in San Francisco. She travels to New York to meet her editor, who sends her to India to interview a suspicious Guru. In India she meets the Guru, who teaches his young worshippers how to achieve the perfect orgasm. A girl at the ashram becomes fascinated with Emanuelle, and she takes her to Rome, where she reveals that she used to work for a white slavery ring. Emanuelle travels to Hong Kong to infiltrate the ring, only to discover that it’s run by rich Iranis in Tehran, who promise to stop being bad, and thus she returns to New York.
Oh, so they left out Africa too. Sheesh! It’s a bit dizzying. I can’t tell if it was fun to shoot these movies, or a pain in the ass. How can you have sex when you don’t even know what time zone it is? And it feels like they’re showing off. Conversations start in one city and end in another.
That brings up another problem. This movie is as talky as the original Emmanuelle. Gemser meets the chivalric Dr. Malcolm Robertson (Ivan Rassimov) in San Francisco, and they hit it off immediately. “Do you intend to dedicate your whole life to traveling, taking photographs, uncovering scandals?” he asks her. Yes, she says. She flies with him to New York. “Have you loved a lot of men?” he asks. “No, but I’ve had a lot of them,” she proudly answers. “I’m free. Men and women are equal. It’s society that obligates us to be different.” She meets him later in Iran where they attempt to pencil each other into their schedules.
Will you two please have sex already? And guess what? They never do! All that time wasted talking and flying, they could’ve been getting it on. The lack of sex on display here is made all the worse by the existence of a very interesting (and disturbing in parts) hardcore version of this film. Gemser of course doesn’t participate in it, but pretty much everyone else does. Severin used to sell it, but I don’t see it listed on their website at present. If you can find it, I’d recommend it over this version. (Click here to buy an alternate version with hardcore inserts from Ryko Distribution.)
As usual, the sex that is on display here is generally violent. Emanuelle’s journalistic colleague Cora Norman (Karen Schubert) is raped when she investigates too close to the slavery ring. The short segment in Hong Kong involves women tied up and tortured with snakes and dogs. In New York, a woman who is supposedly Miss Ohio is forced to have sex with homeless men while a group of jaded U.S. senators watch in enjoyment. The Italian name of this movie translates as Emanuelle – Why Violence Against Women? Supposedly D’Amato is making a point here about the institutionalization of misogyny and sexual violence, but it all seems very disingenuous when the movie itself seems to revel in it, and doesn’t offer up alternatives such as healthy, non-violent relationships between men and women.
They do attempt to lighten it up with some humor. When Emanuelle goes to India, she seduces the Guru, who turns out to be a fraud. Emanuelle is so desirable that he comes too quickly. “It wasn’t bad, but I think you’d do well to stick to theory,” she says as she basically pats him on the head. When she gets to Iran, she has a threesome with an emir and one of his wives. “Now I know what they mean about you Arabs having great energy resources,” she jokes.
Har-har, Emanuelle. What’s next? Stop by Massachusetts and make a joke about Bostonians being “minutemen?”
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Yaeh baby Egypt good