“Does fucking a Countess disgust you?”

Hilariously stoopid (and by stoopid, of course, I mean great) hardcore Italian horror about a team of very horny scientists who investigate reports of a monstrous man-thing committing murders on a remote Caribbean island that was a former nuclear test site. After taking time out repeatedly to fuck each other and select members of the local population, the scientists (did I mention that they were very horny?) discover the creature, a tall, rag-clad black dude with a scarred face and a gigantic cock, with which he dispatches most of the female members of the team (the men are killed by the more conventional means of blunt objects, drowning and strangling). Too busy fucking to notice that their numbers are dwindling rapidly, the team is eventually whittled down to the well-mustachioed Captain Hardy (Italian porn stud Manlio Cersosimo/Mark Shannon) and hot nuclear physics researcher Annie (Lucia Ramirez, also in D’Amato’s Orgasmo Nero), who must figure out a way to get off the island with their lives. Once they stop fucking, that is.

Essentially described by writer/co-star George (Anthropophagus) Eastman in an interview on the disc as something that he and director/cinematographer Joe D’Amato cooked up to pass the time during a long Caribbean vacation (which also yielded Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, starring much of the same cast – it’s also available from Kitty Media), Porno Holocaust is as awkward a mutant as its well-hung monster; the sex is hardcore and the participants capable, but D’Amato shoots the sex with all the disinterest of a vacationer capturing seagulls picking at a stray hamburger wrapper on the beach (D’Amato’s ability to shoot porn would improve significantly over the next decade or so, and by the time of his death in 1999, he was consistently turning out high-quality Eurosmut). Likewise, the suspense is limited to a few POV shots of the monster lurking in the island foliage, and the gore is messy slop splashed onto the faces of a few unlucky performers. In a nutshell, it’s a freakshow, so if you’re looking for high grade yank material or no-holds-barred Italian horror on par with D’Amato’s Beyond the Darkness, you ain’t finding it here. But sleaze beasts with a taste for the ridiculous will find plenty to snort beer through their noses over here, and hey, who doesn’t need that from time to time?

Kitty Media (which appears to be the outlet for Media Blasters’ sexually extreme titles) has put together an exceptionally classy package for this mutt of a movie, with an anamorphic widescreen presentation, the original Italian language track with English subtitles, a brief gallery of lobby cards, the original trailer, and spots for KM releases, including Erotic Nights and Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals. The subtitled interview with Eastman (which I believe has appeared in part on other MB DVDs) should be interesting to Eurocult fans, as the prolific actor/writer touches on his collaborations with many directors, including Mario Bava and Michele Soavi, and talks fondly about working with D’Amato, who by all accounts, was a bucket of fun to work with. We should all be so lucky.
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- Paul Gaita