Joe D'Amato cranked out dozens of hardcore porn videos for the Butterfly Motion Pictures label, but this NEARLY-hardcore stinker is even worse than his XXX output.
It's a shame, because Big Joe cast a uniquely beautiful leading lady in the person of Giorgia Emerald, playing librarian Joan who's working in a southern province of China.
Preposterous storyline involves reincarnation which immediately reinforced my initial dismay: Why did Joe & crew set this story in China instead of a proper Indian setting for the kamasutra? Adding insult to injury, the cast (to my untrained eye) seems made up of Filipino or Thai performers, not Chinese.
Perhaps the worst aspect of this flop is Joe's re-use of some footage, styled as a flashback wherein a Princess and her lover jump to their death rather than be captured by guards, played over & over & over, obvious padding condoned under the rubric of "dream sequences".
The dead lover is supposedly centuries later the head of a kamasutra religious cult, which gets hold of Joan and tortures her sexually for the duration of the film.
It' very poorly shot and edited, sort of a destitute man's imitation of similar junk made (over & over again) by the likes of Jean Rollin and Jess Franco. If this were a round-robin elimination tournament to select the best of the worst, poor D'Amato would be gone, simply for poaching.
Only reason to suffer through this exceedingly boring opus is to feast one'e eyes on Emerald, a porn version of Jacqueline Bisset. How such a classy looking dame got shanghaied into this free trip to Bangkok or Manila is beyond me, but I had visions of a porn remake of THE DEEP as my mind wandered from the non-action on screen.
Supporting cast of Oriental performers does a poor job, with the various women hired to adore and finger "Princess" Emerald in the ritualistic lesbian scenes looking completely uninterested and incompetent. Forget about Joe -wasn't there an a.d. or an extras-wrangler on the set who could yell some encouragement to these lumps of flesh. It reminded me of the haven't-got-a-clue black island studs Joe non-directed in his XXX '70s movies.
