Born Dec 15 1936,
died Jan 23 1999.
Joe D'Amato, real name Aristide Massaccesi, was The Quintessential Exploitation Film Maker.
He made every genre type film possible; Western, Vampire, Convent, Horny Nun, Gore, Sword & Sandals, Nazi/Fascist, Women In Prison, Cannibal, Post-Apocalypse. And then all of it again, done as soft or hardcore pornography. Anything currently popular he would try to make a low budget often over-the-top version of. He freely admitted that he wasn't a good director and that his main reason for making films was money.
George Eastman, real name Luigi Montefiore, was a D'Amato regular in the 70's and 80's.
Before that he acted in many of the classic Italian Westerns, co-starring with Terence Hill in 'Viva Django' (1968) and starring in 'Django Kills Silently' (1968) and 'Hate Your Neighbour' (1969).
In D'Amato's 'Emanuelle e Francoise' (1976, aka 'Blood Vengeance') he is first tortured by Rosemarie Lindt, then returns the favour.
He played the cannibal psycho in D'Amatos 'Anthropophagous the beast' aka 'The Grim Reaper, etc, and it's sequel 'Absurd', aka 'The Grim Reaper 2', etc.
He starred in 'Porno Holocaust' and played the bad guy warrior turned good guy freedom fighter in the post-apocalyptic 'Endgame'.
As it's great title suggests, 'Porno Holocaust' mixes horror with hard core pornography.
A scientific expedition goes to a mystery island where they have sex. They are then attacked by a mutant with an over sized cock. The monster kills the men and rapes the women.
The same year, 1979, he also made the very simular Gore/Porno-on- a-mystery-island movie 'The Erotic Nights of the Living Dead', starring Laura Gemser.
In 1972 he directed his first film, the western 'Un Bounty Killer à Trinita'. Later that year he did the horror-thriller 'Death Smiles On A Murderer' starring Klaus Kinski as the mad doctor turned re-animator. The idea of a man's love for a (sometimes decomposing) body of a beatiful woman, here played by Ewa Aulin of 'Candy' fame, was one he would return to many times. In the Ed Gein/'Psycho' type story 'Buried Alive' (1979) he used a real corpse for some of the taxidermist/autopsy footage. In 1985 film 'The Pleasure' the man's lust is re-directed towards the woman's lookalike daughter.
He continued to work as a cinematographer through out the 70's as well as write, produce and direct many films, of which the Black Emanuelles are best known.
In 1980 he wrote and directed the gore classic 'Anthropophagous The Beast'. This was The film to have seen among horror fans in the early 80's. The fact that it was banned and you had to watch a 10th generation copy of it just added to the excitement.
Starring George Eastman as a disfigured cannibal monster on a Greek island who kills a number of tourists. As it's title tagline says: 'It's not fear that tears you apart...it's him!', the film is full of gruesome gore. A pregnant woman is killed by having her fetus ripped out and eaten. The end scene is truly a one-of-a-kind, with the psycho ripping his own guts out and eating them! There's a bi-story of a priest hunting him, too.
In the 1982 sequel 'Absurd' the monster is more of a zombie/slasher than a cannibal. This one is set on the mainland and has less gore scenes and more poorly acted filler scenes, including some tedious ''it was a scientific experiment'' explainations and cops and the priest going back and forth between places, but the band saw, power drill and kitchen owen scenes are all D'Amato at his best/worst.
In 1981 he did a very unofficial sequel to Tinto Brass' 'Caligula'; 'Caligula II: The Untold Story', that starred David Brandon. Best remembered for the scene in which some traitors getting spears slowly shoved up their asses in long close-up shots after betraying Caligula. In the 90's he continued to rip off Brass films, making his own 'Caligula' and 'Paprika', even down to using the exact same titles.
In 1985 he had an international box office hit with his '9½ Weeks' rip-off '11 Days, 11 Nights'. He made two sequels and the success of the film started a small wave of soft core porn.
Most of his films are long (actually they're not that long, they only feel that way), boring and poorly acted with a few short scenes of some sort of extreme violence. Almost all with plenty of full frontal nudity. Many of them are really sick, with no redeeming qualities what-so-ever.
In the 90's he started having some success with his new glossy, high budget hard core adult films. I've only bothered to watch a few clips here and there from them, but they are all lacking the brutality of his earlier work and some even got good reviews! Almost all of them have an exotic setting, either historically or geographically, but the acting is sometimes reduced to just wearing the costumes. The teaser/story parts are photographed and framed beautifully by the man himself, but the fact that he had no real interest in making the films shines through and the standard in-and-out sex isn't that erotic. He often said that he thought the people acting in these films were idiots and just before his fatal heart attack in 1999 he had started plans for a return to his extreme gore days of the early 80's.
The huge international success of Just Jaekin's french 1974 soft porn chic movie 'Emmanuelle', starring Sylvia Kristel, spawned numerous sequels and imitations. In 1975 Adalberto Albertini did the first 'Black Emanuelle' (note different spelling of Emmanuelle, as if that would make any difference in a court). True to form D'Amato ripped off the rip-off and made a series of Black Emanuelle movies, all starring Laura Gemser. In the hands of Joe D'Amato anything chic with journalist Emanuelle went out the window. In 'Emanuelle And The Last Cannibals', 1977, she organises a jungle expedition in which all her team members are eaten by cannibals (naturally after having had some on-screen sex) and in 'Emanuelle And The White Slave Trade' she's dragged away for a lobotomy.
Gemser retired from the screen in the mid 80's, but she remained active in the filmbusiness working as a costume maker, including D'Amatos 90's porn. She also had a small cameo part in his 1990 'Room Of Words'.
Gang-rape is followed by mutilation of the victims. Some scenes are nothing but endless parades of torching, branding and beating of women, with all sorts of painful penetrations on top of that.
Unlike say '8 mm', this film not only deals with people beimg turned on by rape, death and torture, it presents this kind of footage in an erotic way, helped very much by the soundtrack of a woman moaning in the standard porn mode of extasy. What makes this one of the most disturbing films I've ever seen is that it suggests that the viewer should also be turned on by this kind of stuff. A movie almost impossible to enjoy and therefore of some importance.
There's a number of versions of the film available. Some have the violence edited out, some have the porn censored. Never one to let taste or story stand in the way of shock value D'Amato also included some disgusting woman/animal sex in some versions of this and other films.
Next page: A list of films directed and/or produced by Joe D'Amato.
