JULIET & ROMEO sounds backwards, but Joe D'Amato's desultory porn version of Shakespeare indicates he would have flunked even a Cliff Notes exam on the play. It grabs three or four familiar motifs and uses them as an excuse for mechanical hump scenes.
Stefania Sartori stars as a plain-Jane Juliet, member of the Capulet family who falls for Romeo, a Montague. Unfortunately, overworked porn stud Mark Davis is miscast as Romeo, sort of the Euro version of casting somebody like Harry Reems or Jamie Gillis in the role.
Among the bases D'Amato touches are sword fights (very clumsily staged) resulting in deaths of Tybalt and Mercutio; sexual antics of Benvoglio (invented), the nurse helping Juliet stage her own fake death, and a silly switch on the tragic ending.
En route to the asinine "happy ending", D'Amato fills the movie with pointless sex scenes. Most of the humping is done by lovely Eva Dionisio and Shalimar/Cheyenne, cast as two Capulet maidens who constantly keep popping up in the narrative, just to get shtupped by Romeo or whoever is passing by. It's cumulatively similar to the inversion of Tom Stoppard on "Hamlet", turning it into "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" by focusing on two minor characters.
Terrible English dubbing ruins even the possibility of satire here, leaving the fans with generic XXX footage. For quality porn taken from Shakespeare, one should watch X HAMLET, an arousing and amusing Luca Damiano picture, which had D'Amato pop up in the role of Polonius.
