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11 out of 15 people found the following review useful:
D'Amato does it again., 19 February 2002
Author: Moshing Hoods from Peterborough, UK.

One of the most interesting consequences of the brief period of "porno chic" in the early 70s was the resulting effect on the Italian exploitation industry. Never quick to miss an American cinematic "craze", a lot of film-makers found themselves curiously crossing genres and stuffing hardcore porn into other genres, as well as vice versa. The absolute master of this was the ubiquitous Joe D'Amato, and here he fuses porno with the zombie movie (which at the time was in the midst of enormous popularity in Italy).

THE EROTIC NIGHTS OF THE LIVING DEAD was shot back-to-back with the similar, but more sex-oriented, PORNO HOLOCAUST. In its full uncut form, the scenes of XXX are strangely innocent. There are a few explicit shots here and there, but no actual "penetration" (other than when one of the female characters hilariously opens a bottle of champagne with her genitalia!), plus many of the scenes seem to cut away at strange times. Whether this is due to an incomplete review print (a Midnight Video release, clearly made from two different prints spliced together) isn't clear. What is obvious is that as a sex movie, this fails horribly. Many of the "erotic" scenes also fall victim to Luigi Montefiori and Laura Gemser's obvious unwillingness to perform in hardcore sequences. Many of the sex scenes are made up of Montefiori watching a female character masturbate, before pretending to have sex with her- often without removing his trousers first!

The real benefit for Massacessi is that the sex allows him to pad out a horror movies that, in actuality, has only about 30 minutes of material. Almost all of the first hour revolves around sex, and the "horror" portion of the story really only kicks in after that. Massacessi was the first to admit that horror was not his forte (although after seeing this, it has to be said that porn clearly wasn't either!) and by structuring his film in this way, he can basically cover up his shortcomings whilst still producing a marketable zombie movie.

Still, as ever, this is strangely enjoyable. The final 30 minutes is actually quite atmospheric, and there is some nice gore in there. I hear that this movie is very difficult to get hold of in an uncut form (review print was in unsubtitled Italian), but as far as I can tell from my copy, it is certainly worth seeking out as the "cut" print looks absolutely anaemic in comparison...

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8 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
top notch trash as only joe can do, 18 August 2000
Author: sangue from san diego

i think a lot of people where let down by this flick, as most catalogs and genre books describe it as a gore soaked zombie porno. honestly, this film isn't that graphic. the sex is what i would call "hard soft-core" and there isn't much gore (though what gore there is is pretty cool.)

anywho, the story, from what i can tell concerns some kind of scientist/archetect/developer who travels to a strange island to do something or other, most likely something bad. once there, he angers the natives and a voodoo priest raises the dead which leads to a really creepy zombie attack-no really, it's right up there with fulci's zombie. as i said, there isn't much gore, but there is a neat scene where a doctor is examining a cadaver that was found floating in the bay, it sits up and takes a big bite out of the guys throat. then at the end there's a few bullet hits, some zombie carnage and star marks shannon gets his johnson bit of by laura gemser. the sex is fairly tame but there's a hilariously sleazy scene of a woman un-corking a champange bottle with her naughty bits. this film also has a great atmosphere and some excellent photography (also by Joe D'Amato) look out for some cool trick shots like when mark shannon throws a voddo idle on the ground and it changes instantly into a black cat that jumps up and attacks him. i had to watch that one again in slow motion i was so impressed! i would highly recommend this film for fans of bizarre cinema, and despite the lack of english, i think most will enjoy.

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4 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
no harm, but somewhat foul, 27 October 2005
3/10
Author: movieman_kev from United States

An American businessman wants to build a hotel on a remote island, so he has someone sail him and his girlfriend there to check it out. The zombie scenes seem tacked on as an afterthought, so as a horror film this doesn't really work that well. However due to the ridiculous dialog and the hardcore sex scenes the film MIGHT be worth it for drunken party type viewing, but even that is stretching it (pardon the pun) Feel free to skip this one, as it's only remote interesting as a curiosity. That being said the way champagne is uncorked in the film is ingenious.

Eye Candy: more than you can shake a decaying limb at

My Grade: D

DVD Extras: 27 minutes of Alternate footage; Production stills & Laura Gemser stills gallery; X-rated Trailer; and trailers for "Zombi 2", "Emanuelle And The Last Cannibals", "Nightmares Come at Night", & "Slaughter Hotel"

Easter Egg: In the main menu, highlight scene access and press down to get to a hidden skull, click on it for the French opening credits

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4 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
How sexy are your zombies?, 21 May 2005
5/10
Author: ZombieKilla81 from Hawaii, USA

For a film to have 'erotic' in the title, the film should have erotic scenes. If a film has 'living dead' in the title, there should be some good gut munching. And finally, if a film has 'night of' in the title, the film should be shot at night. But then again, this is a Joe D'Amato flick.

Story: people go to investigate an island,come across some creepy natives, have lots of sex and get eaten.

There is plenty of nudity and hard-core sexual escapades on display (if you have the uncut version), but not a bit of it is erotic or arousing. Some male/female, female/female, pick your poison. Matters are further complicated by the obvious fact that some of the actors are not at all comfortable with bearing it all, taking the blandly shot scenes and making them all the more dull.

For a film like this, violence is the answer, or should have been. D'amato is unusually thin-skinned about laying on the gore. There are a couple of choice bits, but nothing spectacular. If it weren't bad enough that the zombies don't do a whole hell of a lot, it's worse that they take forever to finally start reeking havoc. I suppose the intention was to build suspense, but with a film like this what's the point.

So how well is it made then? For a film supposedly occurring mostly at night it is readily apparent that most all of the movie was shot during then day then given the day-for-night treatment. The dubbing is dubious and the limited effects some what suspect.

A mid-range rating for a bad movie that will undoubtedly find a niche audience; you know who you are.

5/10

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7 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
They're coming to screw you, Barbara!, 30 December 2005
5/10
Author: Coventry from the Draconian Swamp of Unholy Souls

In case you always wondered (or worried) whether or not you would get aroused by the sight of zombies having sexual intercourse...you still won't find out by watching this weirdo-flick. In spite of what the title suggests, "Erotic Nights of the Living Dead" does not feature copulating undead or strip-dancing corpses. This merely is a routine Italian zombie film, like "Zombi 2" or "Zombie Holocaust", with a handful of hardcore sex sequences thrown in during the first half hour. And as crazy as it may sound, it actually is a pretty decent zombie movie if you just ignore these totally redundant porno moments and focus on the beautiful island location and rather stylish gory make-up effects. There's the typically obnoxious businessman who buys a tropical island with a vicious reputation and intends to build a tourist resort there. Along with a macho sailer and a whore he picked up in some hotel, he goes to scout the place but stumbles upon an uncanny old man and his ghostly granddaughter that rule over the island. Laura Gemser, ravishing cult siren and regular D'Amato nymph, stars as the mysterious island girl but her role is rather limited and she doesn't really show much of her enchanting body. George Eastman clearly is in great shape again as the stud, but he still doesn't manage to script down one reasonably good dialogue. There are a couple of atmospheric zombie-attacks and explicit gore. You can't possibly expect more from a Joe D'Amato film, apart from sleazy oddities in the script maybe, like the girl who ingeniously uncorks a bottle of champagne by using her vagina only (!).

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2 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
Horror Porn....Zombie Erotica.....what the hell?, 24 December 2007
4/10
Author: TheatreX from Louisville, KY

No, there are no zombies having sex in this film, the zombies just do what zombies normally do...wander slowly and aimlessly and munch on human flesh. It's the living that have all the sex in this movie & boy is there lots....way too much for my taste & all pretty graphic, nothing left to the imagination. Hardly what I'd call erotic. Seems that there's a rich American developer that wants to build a hotel on a remote island, and he hires a guy with a boat to take him and his recent acquisition (Laura Gemser) to this place. The island is supposedly deserted but it seems that an old man lives there with his granddaughter, who may or may not be among the living herself. Of course the zombies get riled and walk, and munch. The best parts of this are filmed on the island, before that it's almost all extremely long sex scenes which get rather boring. There is a bright spot though in what appears to be a young Filipino woman who performs a strip-tease in an empty nightclub for our ship's captain, and she opens a bottle of champagne using her enormous...uh...talent. A very sleazy movie & of perhaps minor interest to horror fans. 4 out of 10.

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3 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
People Cat, 4 November 2004
Author: tedg (tedg@FilmsFolded.com) from Virginia Beach

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Spoilers herein.

I'm interested in genre mixing. Its a common thing, especially with various humor components. The gore branch of horror and the porn branch of the sex film try to be mixed here. I say gore rather than zombies because though zombies appear, the form is not that of a zombie flick.

The gore and porn parts are okay I guess, except in the porn department these really are much nicer looking women than usual. This comment is on the 121 minute version which seems to be more complete than other 'uncut' versions. It seemed pretty explicit to me except for anything involving the native girl.

The mood, especially with the score, is effective. But the pacing is a killer.

Here's the real problem: the sex stuff and the horror parts of the plot have nothing to do with each other. Very few films mix the erotic and frightening. The only one I can recall is Kinski's 'Cat People.'

And why in a porn flick are the zombies all modestly covered?

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

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5 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
Porno horror, D'Amato style, 4 September 1999
Author: Pierre-Alexandre Buisson (robottears@hotmail.com) from Montreal, Quebec, Canada

The sleaze contained in this movie is far from being enough to match a real porno feature, but is sufficent to make the viewer smile. Since the only existing print is in italian, I didn't get the whole story, but I sure laughed to death when I first saw the guy with the huge penis.

D'Amato is very daring to mix porno and horror like this. It could have frightened or disgusted porno lovers, and it could have shocked horror fans, but since I am both I really enjoyed the movie.

At first, I didn't believe the "monster" would rape his "victims" for real, but the "appendice" is real, and he even chokes a girl to death with it ! Definitly a movie you have to see if you like trashy horror. The moments where George Eastman appears are just hilarious. And what can I say about the music ? Find it, and enjoy it.

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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Forgotten cult classics #2, 7 July 2001
Author: Daywalker from Germany

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Contains story + **spoiler**

An American millionaire wants to build a hotel on a paradisiac Caribbean island. An old man who lives there with his beautiful daughter gets an army of zombies onto his neck...

The film starts with a camera angle on George Eastman´s insane eyes, accompanied by the great score of Pluto Kennedy. The rest is peculiar mixture between soft porn and zombie horror, that only one man could have made possible: Joe D´Amato, the undisputed master of Euro-trash. Now everybody should know what that means: the people in this flick f**k around at the first opportunity and with George Eastman and Laura Gemser two of the most popular Italian exploitation actors were casted. However, "Erotic Nights of the living dead" has truly its great moments! Especially the last 1/2 hour when the dead are rising is excellent, although this movie is quite similar to Lucio Fulci´s "Zombi 2". Nevertheless director Joe D´Amato created a spooky atmosphere in combination to the idyll of the Caribbean island. Highly recommended to all those people who are looking for a perfect mixture between horror and sex...

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Hardcore, softcore, gore and melancholy voyeurism, 14 June 2009
7/10
Author: fuzon from London, England

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

After pushing the envelope and erasing the borders between horror, softcore and hardcore porn flicks in his Black Emanuelle movies, Joe D'Amato went the whole hog here and made a film which could be, at times, classified as all of these things. It ends up being quite a mish-mash, but by the end, as the images of coitus and demise have passed before our eyes in a two hour parade, the film seems most like a kind of motion picture memento mori, reminding us of the inexorable link between the little and big deaths.

The film begins in a madhouse, with D'Amato regular George Eastman (who, intriguingly, wrote this film) staring back out of the screen at us through a wired fence. We then follow a pretty young inmate as she searches out Eastman in the bowels of the institution, finding him and engaging in passionate, unbridled (softcore) sex. A shambolic, drooling maniac has also followed them, and he keeps at a distance, touching himself and lolling his tongue as he peaks at their pleasures. We could almost take this as a meta-cinematic representation of D'Amato's cinema – we the audience are the drooling lunatic voyeurs watching our own fellow madmen portrayed in flagrante on D'Amato's cinematic canvas.

The plot itself now begins, as Eastman is revealed as the island-hopping skipper on a small schooner somewhere in the Caribbean, operating a sea-bound taxi service for wealthy visitors. He humours the rich men whilst lusting after their booty-prize women. Meanwhile, we follow Mark Shannon's property developer Wilson as he sources information on a local island, hoping to build a luxury resort there, and in the meantime ogle and frolic with the local whores. His frolicking set the hardcore action of the film in motion, as the whores explicitly fellate him in the shower and he enacts cunnilingus with them on his hotel bed. After cutting between Eastman and Shannon for a while, the two come together when the skipper agrees to take the developer (and a gold-digger he has picked up) to the island ripe for developing. But we've heard sinister things about this place, the so-called Cat Island: it is home to a hoard of zombies headed by a cat (!), the locals are terrified of it and some of them keep jujus to ward the evil off. We've also glimpsed some zombies bringing instant death to those they encounter with a swift chomp to the throat… Before leaving, skipper goes to a local bar where a girl he is involved with strips and does an act which involves masturbating with a champagne bottle and then popping it with her vagina. This is a long, slow, melancholy scene – scored with wistful music – in which the skipper, alone in the bar, watches the act with interest, amusement, impressed but still with a nagging feeling of loneliness. In D'Amato's universe, the viewer is alone, shown exotic and erotic sights but removed, alienated, atomised and ultimately sad.

The skipper and his two passengers sail to Cat Island and there encounter an old black man with an egg-shaped disfigurement on his forehead and his luscious granddaughter, played with an exquisite lack of affect by Laura Gemser. They warn the visitors against messing with things but Wilson insults them, offers them money and generally causes offence. Gradually, the dead rise and interrupt the various erotic scenes which ensure, killing Wilson and aggressively establishing their ownership of the island. Gemser is a kind of succubus, making love to the visitors whilst the dead rise in the background. The old man gives the skipper a juju which has some effectiveness in warding off the dead but which is lost in the final melee, leaving the skipper vulnerable. He does escape with the gold-digger but they have both been driven mad by the experience, ending up making manic love which puts them right where we first saw them, in the lunatic asylum. Their lovemaking and the drooling idiot's view of this is interrupted by the guards. Skipper and girl are dragged back to their cells (they are convicted of Wilson's death and cannibalisation) and the loon is told that he should stop playing with himself and grow up. The audience are thus instructed to put their own private parts away and the film ends.

Erotic (or Sexy, as the credits have it) Nights of the Living Dead doesn't altogether work – it is over-long, languorous and under-developed in terms of plot. Yet its mix of hardcore porn, extreme gore and softcore frolicking make it a compelling example of D'Amato's refusal to stay put in any one genre. In throwing - almost willy-nilly - meat shots, coy fondling, bloody death and monsters at us whilst constantly reminding us of his male characters' ultimately sad position as voyeurs, sometimes conscious and lonely, sometimes drooling and out-of-control, and by suggesting that sex in the face of colonial exploitation and strident displays of wealth, he does go someway to offering a compelling vision of late 20th century Western man on the rocks of alienated enjoyment, whose erotic nights are indeed those of the living dead.

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