Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade — Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade( Blu Ray)

Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade is a late 1970’s slice of cheesy & often rather silly euro sleaze. It features highly camp softcore, amusingly and badly dubbed dialogue, secret cigarette lighter cameras, kung-fu fighting crossdressers, lots of leering female flesh, and the odd splash of violence and blood. Here from Full Moon Features is a region free Blu ray release of the film- it’s sadly a rather bare-bones affair, though we do get a nice clear ‘n’ crisp HD print of the film.

Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade (aka La via della prostituzione, Black Emanuelle in Afrika, Emanuelle and the Girls of Madame Claude) is an Italian production from 1978. It was directed by euro sleaze ‘n’ camp horror Meister Joe D’Amato; it was the third Emanuell film he made- and one of five films he helmed in the year 1978. And while the acting is often  barely competent and some of the camera works/ filmmaking is more than a little dodge- the films a breezy and eventful ride- with some seedier/ darker undertones

The film kicks off in Nairobi where plucky ‘n’ perverse black American journalist Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) is trying to get an interview with shifty businessman Giorgio Rivetti (Venantino Venantini), as well as spending time with her blond and equally randy friend Susan Towers (Ely Galleani). They try to get a meeting with Rivetti- but are shooed away by an African servant with an old white man dubbed voice. So, they decide to pretend to be air stewardess to get chatting to just flown in a prince, who is due to do a deal with Rivetti. The four going on a safari, a hot air balloon ride, and dance pogo with natives- as all smile and amusingly interact while bright and buoyant afro-funk disco plays. While spending time in the country she observes a man seemingly buying a wheelchair-bound woman.  
 
Fairly soon Emanuelle is back in the big apple, telling her newspaper boss about what she has seen. So she decides to dig and find out who the man is, and it turns out (by luck) he has an apartment in the city. He’s Francis Harley(Gabriele Tinti) another shifty businessman- who she finds out is involved in the white slave trade- we get her spying on particularly sleazy and a little bit creepy ‘sales room’ in one of the cities hotels, where women strip and paraded around the room to rich, sweaty, and old men leering and bidding on them. Emanuelle decides to go undercover again, getting a job via Harley in an upmarket country house whore house near San Diego- which is run by furry pussy stroking Madame Claude(Gota Gobert) and her crossdressing assistant Stefan(Nicola D'Eramo). It turns out in the backrooms of the house, they are introducing their young white female slaves to dirty rich Oldman.
 
Indonesia born Gemser is severable enough as the plucky ‘n’ randy Emanuelle, with her camera in a flip-top cigarette lighter investigating, and numerous softcore encounters. Also worth a mention is the duo of crossdressing D'Eramo and hamming it up whore house owner Gobert- with in the last quarter of the film D'Eramo doing Kung-fu fight dressed in a skirt and wigged up in a bowling alley 
 
As the film unfolds, we get one fairly short-if-highly campy softcore encounter after another- memorable of these been garage inspection pit twosome, intercutting between two twosomes and pogoing natives, and a partially icky and slight unsettling encounter finding Gemser with an elderly man, as Gobert pussy Strokes on the other side of a one-way mirror. The young slave thing is largely implied, though no the less rather unsavoury. The whole film shifts along at a pace- though really kicks into high gear in its last quarter- with the already mentioned bowling alley kung-fu, a fleeting if unpleasant gang rape, bowling pin face battering, and an attempted lobotomy. 
 
Moving onto this region blu ray disc( it’s also available as a region free DVD too), and it's a bare-bones affair, with just the film itself and a euro sleaze trailer reel. The HD print looks good and crisp, with vibrate colours- on some of the sex scenes there seem some cutting, though this claims to be uncut- and if that’s the case I’m guessing there must have also been a hardcore version of the picture.
 
Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade is certainly an eventful and entertaining D'Amato film - with some nicely grimy and troubling undercurrents, mixed in with the camp, cheese and flesh. If you're into euro sleaze, I’d say this is something you’ll be wanting to take a look at. I wanted to give this a two and a half mark, but as we don’t do halves, I’ve gone for a strong two.