Another Weekend of Smut

Another weekend smut fest.  Actually, this time around it wasn't pure smut - a double bill comprising some action smut in the form of Angel of Destruction (1994) and arty smut in the form of Black Emmanulle, White Emmanuelle (1976).  I have to say that the former was the more entertaining of the two - a pretty decent fusion of violent martial arts thriller with lots of sex and nudity.  It's interesting to compare it to the vaguely similar Ginger (1971), which I watched the other week and the changes in attitudes toward the tough girl heroine in the twenty odd years that separate the two pictures.  Most notably, while Cheri Caffero's Ginger is presented as a strong, independent woman who can kick any man's ass, by the end of the film she has been forced to endure the humiliation of being beaten, tied up, raped and drugged by the main villain and has to be rescued by her male partner, Maria Ford in Angel of Destruction, while meeting her match with the villainous psycho at the film's climax, taking a beating, is able to triumph on her own account.  She also doesn't suffer Caffero's humiliations.  It seems that, by the nineties, sexploitation film makers had come to the conclusion that not only was there a female audience for these films, who undoubtedly wanted to see strong women capable of succeeding without male assistance on screen, but that male audiences could also accept such characters without feeling threatened.

Because that's the message that comes through from Ginger's treatment of its titular heroine - that while it is OK for women to be strong and independent up to a point, ultimately they still need a man to 'put them in their place' and ultimately rescue them.  Indeed, the relative ease with which Caffero - who has previously humiliated, castrated and shot her way through the subsidiary bad guys - is subdued by the top villain implies that it isn't so much that she is 'strong' than that her previous male opponents were 'weak' and that it just needed a 'real' man to 'sort her out'.  Clearly, this was also designed to feed into the rape and domination fantasies the makers assumed its male audiences indulged in.  Angel of Destruction, by contrast, seems to want to feed into a whole other category of male fantasies - namely those that involve being dominated by a kick-ass woman.  The fact is that Angel of Destruction is simply a better made film than Ginger.  Despite being a low budget action flick, it boasts some half decent production values, well choreographed and efficiently shot action scenes and lent an air of exoticism by its Hawaiian locations.  It integrates its smut well with the action - the central plot of Ford's undercover cop taking over from her murdered sister to protect a female singer specialising in S&M themed videos from a psycho stalker-cum-serial killer affords plenty of opportunities for nudity.  It achieves a pretty much perfect synthesis of action and smut when Ford is forced to fight off a horde of bad guys while topless.  It is far superior to a similar sequence in TNT Jackson, with better staging and more convincing martial arts moves.  Most of all, Maria Ford is a far better actress than Cheri Caffero.  While both appear, at least initially, to be the icy blonde type, by the end of Angel, Ford has developed her character into a likeable heroine you can root for, whereas Caffero remains cool and distant and, despite being forced to endure a terrible climactic ordeal, difficult to really like. 

I'm not claiming that Angel of Destruction is any kind of lost classic, but it is a highly enjoyable piece of exploitation which delivers on its promises of action and smut.  Certainly, it offered more in the way of instant audience gratification than Black Emmanulle, White Emmanuelle, whichis not only overly pretentious and talky, but isn't even a real 'Emmanuelle' film, being a retitling of Smooth Velvet, Raw Silk.  But it does have the 'other' Emmanuelle, Laura Gemser, (who played the role in a long series of unofficial Italian made sequels to the original trilogy), and the equally lovely Annie Belle.  It also features many bizarre scenarios involving Gemser's (here playing a submissive model) whacked out photographer husband's increasing bat shit crazy and sadistic photo shoots.  There's also a whole sub-plot involving a pseudo-religious guru which frequently tumbles over into the surreal as he hypnotises characters into doing all kinds of weird shit.  There's also a lot of al fresco sex - much of it involving Belle's sister, who appears to be some kind of nymphomaniac, shagging every man in sight in search of an elusive orgasm.  It's all very nicely staged and shot against Egyptian backdrops, but is overlong and moves far too slowly.  It doesn't help that there are too many characters, many of whom vanish from the plot for long stretches, as attention moves to someone else, leaving the whole thing feeling unfocused.  Perhaps it would have benefited from a couple of topless martial arts fights....