PORNO HOLOCAUST

The cure for your good cheer

By BRIAN THOMAS     December 02, 2005

So maybe you've just spent the weekend with relatives who never talk about anything more risqué than sweater patterns. Or maybe you just got off a twelve hour shift at a daycare center that runs tapes of Barney the dinosaur nonstop. Or maybe you're just in the mood to see something adult, dirty and violent. It would seem that a movie called PORNO HOLOCAUST would be just the thing to counteract any amount of pleasantry and good cheer, especially since it's made by Joe D'Amato, the Italian sleazemaster who brought us EMMANUELLE AND THE LAST CANNIBALS and BEYOND THE DARKNESS.

In the wake of their tastelessly horrific hit THE GRIM REAPER (ANTHROPOPHAGUS), D'Amato and writer/star George Eastman tried to exploit the same island/monster concept with a pair of flicks shot pretty much simultaneously in the same locations with much the same cast. One was EROTIC NIGHTS OF THE LIVING DEAD, another sex and horror feature in which rutting couples are picked off by a gang of zombies. Or cannibals it doesn't seem to matter. This one follows the REAPER template a bit more closely. A team of scientists are sent by the French government to investigate some strange deaths that have been reported around an island that's been supposedly deserted since an atomic bomb test in 1958. Yeah, well we know better, right? If we know our horror flicks, there ought to be some monsters prowling the island ready to gobble up the cast from the extras on up, so let's get this party started!

Well, as it turns out, the movie is in no hurry to get to the HOLOCAUST, preferring to dwell on the PORNO instead. Captain O'Day (Mark Shannon) meets the lady scientists on the team and takes physicist Simone Darmon (Dirce Funari) to the beach for a tryst. Meanwhile, zoologist Countess Dorcin de St. Jacques (Annj Goren) gets busy with frustrated scientist's wife Annie (Lucia Ramirez). Next the Countess hires a pair of black gigolos to service her until she's raw in an easily excised scene. In fact, all the hardcore sex scenes seem to be designed for easy editing. Despite this, PORNO HOLOCAUST was apparently never trimmed down to an R rating for US distribution. Why? Could be because it's just too boring. Between the humping of the porn actors and some dull conversations, it takes all of forty minutes before anybody even gets on the boat.

We also meet a sneaky reporter played by D'Amato himself who suspects something's up with these people and follows them to the island in a rowboat. After some long periods of walking around, plus the (by now) expected sneaking off to bump uglies, some members of the cast bump into something even uglier: a tall mutant who somehow survived the radiation. This monster isn't really worth the build up it's just a big guy with a goofy melted nose appliance on his face and a few scars. His disposition is ugly as well. He drowns Annie's husband then chokes her to death with his colossal penis, all without even the courtesy of an introduction. He wrecks the boat and abducts Simone as well, but instead of raping and killing her, decides on the beauty & the beast angle, feeding her and delivering flowers in between hunting missions to bash in the faces of sailors.

Surprisingly, the survivors are pretty calm about their situation. Even the captain calmly chops up cocoanuts while his new girlfriend is in the clutches of an unknown horror. "We've really hit bottom here. Living like wild animals, trying to survive..." observes the countess while pouring herself a glass of wine. These two are so distraught that it takes them 30 seconds to get to the blow job. Eventually, somebody gets around to trying to rescue the damsel and seeing if the mutant likes getting harpooned as much as he likes doing the harpooning, but if you have any sense you may have given up on the movie by then. Surely you're not sticking around to see why a skinny reporter can row to the island in a boat but professional sailors can't seem to get home the same way?

The folks at Exploitation Digital, bless 'em, are unconcerned with the movie's quality and give it a decent transfer anyway. They also add on an 11-minute video interview with writer/actor George Eastman, who explains that working with D'Amato was first and foremost intended as a vacation for the cast and crew. He goes on to give his views on several other Italian directors he's worked with and puts the type of films he used to do in perspective for the modern audience.

Copyright © 2005 Brian Thomas, author of the massive book VideoHound's DRAGON: ASIAN ACTION & CULT FLICKS.
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