Provocation

In between his innumerable hardcore porn assignments in 1995, Joe D'Amato took time out to film this abysmal soft-core quickie, which plays like an amateur, would-be hack imitation of Tinto Brass. D'Amato was to ripoff Tinto explicitly in an unauthorized remake of his classic "Paprika", but this attempt to cash in on the erotic auteur's subject matter is embarrassing.

Tinto's masterpiece "Miranda", which made Serena Grandi an iconic Italian star for the ages, is evidently the inspiration for this nonsense. It features just five players, all stereotypical characters in a mix & match humpfest (softly, of course) that heads nowhere.

Carlo is the dunderheaded proprietor of a rural tavern, whose pretty/plain wife Amelia is cool to his horny advances. Sure they hump, but she doesn't enjoy it, tries hard to avoid it, and is even tearful during one passive bed clinch.

Their cousin, a pretty redhead named Marilinda, comes to stay with them and work as a waitress. Also related in this pseudo-incest picture is a retarded young man Gianni, whose Peeping Tom habits from a crawlspace vantage point are repetitively shown by D'Amato, down to using and reusing over & over a close-up loop of the boy's steps ascending the stairs -clueing in the viewer that some voyeurism is afoot again.

Fifth character is a construction man Mr. Orlando, who gets the hots, naturally, for both ladies. Sex scenes mixing the five of them two by two are mechanical and soft-R, with "woman masturbating before her mirror" footage thrown in to complete the fake-erotic content.

Later reels are so badly directed I was surprised, even after watching nearly 100 of D'Amato's movies and videos. Continuity is shot to hell in a key scene where Carlo is informed by Gianni that his wife is in the barn having sex with Mr. Orlando. The husband grabs a rifle and rushes there, with the seemingly endless (poor editing) sex scene ongoing, yet arrives way too late to catch them. Instead of the expected climax and violence we are led to expect, instead we see the married couple yelling at each other, and she's packed her bags and run off with Mr. Orlando.

None of this makes any sense on screen, but what follows plays as if the production ran out of money and key interstitial scenes were blue pencilled from the shooting script. (Or more likely, now that the sex quotient of the show had been fulfilled, the filmmakers or perhaps future re-editors simply wanted to wrap up the package.)

We see the young Mirenad in a wedding dress while Carlo is getting drunk, muttering about his new bride. The retard gets to hump her but just as they are starting to go at it, the movie suddenly ends. We are left with a serial cuckold and certainly a wasted hour and a half of viewing time.

Cast is unexceptional, both from acting and sex simulating vantage points. And despite the old car and '30s era costuming, D'Amato fails to approach in any way the talent that good old Tinto has displayed and been rewarded for, if not by critics certainly by substantial Italian audiences going to his movies.

If you are not into D'Amato like me its too simple for any liking but I remember most of his flicks and compare, and think, and wonder and think again, and wish I have his imagination. Yes, the movie is simple but realistic, chicks hot and willing and I can say any nonsense but the bottom line is most of his flicks have something that tells me--lets see it again and enjoy. His horror flicks are terrible but managed to get Blu-ray release but everything I like I have to buy on VHS with colors off or in some foreign language with Chinese subtitles. His New Orleans set is more for mainstream audience and I went to Dominican Republic to breathe same air as him and his hotties.