The first thing that struck me about EMANUELLE IN BANGKOK was Nico Fidenco's music score, a whistling, happy, bumbling little ditty that would be right at home on a YouTube video compilation of Tourette's Guy clips. Or maybe a toothpaste commercial, its stuck in my head now and fortunately for my sanity, its not bad. I'd whistle it for you if I could, and can't help but wonder if that's Alessandro Alessandroni doing his trademark thing there. He's the guy whistling on the old spaghetti western soundtracks, proof once again that while often derivative the Italians managed to create some new forms. The movies may often be cheap & boring, but they almost always have great musical scores.I would paint this one into the same category. It looks pretty much like Joe D'amato took a sprawling vacation with some of his favorite stock players (Laura Gemser, her husband Gabrielle Tinti), a couple of Italian genre cinema leading males he maybe owed a favor to (Ivan Rassimov & my hero Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) and a few sexy Euro body babes with no problems with nudity, group groping and the occasional half naked lesbian make-out with Ms. Gemser (Ely Galleani, Debra Berger, Gaby Bourgois). He brought along a camera, maybe a mistress to hold the scripts while somebody made sure there was enough light, and went about their touristy ways while filming a scene or two here & there as they traveled about.Two scenes sort of spoil the fun, first another barbaric episode of Italian filmmakers using animal violence to fill some screen time, then an inexplicable sequence where Ms. Gemser is sexually assaulted by a mob of greaseballs who make a point to humiliate her while getting their jollies off. Inexplicable because afterward she seems quite at ease with herself and chats pleasantly with her attackers as if they had just met at a diner. Then again its all just a silly phallocentric fantasy really, about guys with unlimited means traveling exotic lands in the company of attractive women in their 20s whom they have random sex with, often playing erotic group games for grown ups & swapping partners, though the version I saw was strictly a softcore engagement. The most arousing display being a scene where the girls all get up, strip down to their panties and dance like a harem for an Arabian prince.Or something like that, to tell the truth I was hardly paying attention to the story and frankly couldn't care less. Like a spaghetti western you watch stuff like this for the individual moments rather than the cumulative effect, and most of it passed quite pleasantly with the occasional raised eyebrow. Like the scene were Emanuelle entertains a crowd in a private club by dripping hot candle wax all over her magnificent, nude body. For all we know and given the way Joe D'amato worked, the whole film might have been just an excuse to put that up on the screen. It may not pass as entertainment for some, but for those two minutes this movie was the only thing I was thinking about.4/10

This is the first "Black Emanuelle" film directed by Joe D'Amato and it actually resembles the first "Black Emanuelle" more than any of the more notorious and depraved films in series which D'Amato later directed. The movie doesn't have much of a plot, and more of it takes place in Casablanca than in Bangkok or the Orient, so both the English and Italian titles are pretty inaccurate. For the record, Emanuelle has sex with an archaeologist (played by Gemser's real-life husband Gabrielle Tinti), a female Thai masseuse, a male Thai bellboy, some swinging American Republicans (Ivan Rassimov and the lovely Ely Galeani), the entire (strangely all-European) contingent of the Thai king's bodyguards, a Thai customs official (after her passport is stolen), the Republican wife again in an airplane bathroom, the archaeologist and his new fiancée, the fiancée again along with a black dancer and an entire horde of horse-back-riding Arabs, and finally the lesbian daughter of the American consul in Casablanca (Debra Berger).Most of these sex scenes are all pretty truncated, which may frustrate the hairy-palmed viewers out there, but the movies probably would have been six hours long otherwise. There's also a lack of the depravity we've come to expect from D'Amato aside from an obviously unstaged snake/mongoose fight and the scene where Emanuelle is "gang-raped" by the king's bodyguards, which she either enjoys or doesn't mind too much since she later takes her lover's fiancée off to dance naked in an Arab tent and get gang-banged again. These scenes though are really no different than the African village scene or the (literal)train scene in the first "Black Emanuelle", and they take place mostly off-screen anyway.Still the girls are very pretty, the cinematography and natural scenery are appealing, the music ranges from execrable to enjoyably cheesy. And this is now paired with two (slightly) better "Black Emanuelle" movies in the new "Black Emanuelle's Box" DVD set, so check it out for yourself.

The exotic locale gave this a bit more to work with.The obvious titillation scenes seemed to be the main point here. (Loved the massage scene.) Then big Joe just found ways to connect them. That's what he did best.Gabriel Tinti, (Goddess Gemser's real life, and late, husband) makes an appearance as her paramour here. As he did in many of these films. He was a decent actor actually. I like seeing him as the straight man in her life.I liked seeing Ivan Rassimov as the prince. He really played a great authority type. It's strange that he and Gemser didn't star in more films together seeing as they did a lot of similar work.Call this a soft x film pretending to be a documentary.

In the summer of 1995, Showtime aired this movie almost every night, after "Red Shoe Diaries" and usually around 1 AM. I thought then this was the strangest soft-core thing I've ever seen. Over the years, I've seen far more bizarre, but this one still remains memorable to me after all these years.First off, the music. Bad '70s porno music meets Asian karaoke. Seriously. There are really only 2 songs here, and I don't know the names of them, so I'll give them names: "Like A Sailing Ship," which has a ship horn in its chorus ("TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT!"), and "I Wander Safe At Night," which is played most prominently during the big group drug/orgasm scene, perhaps the standout scene in this film: a bunch of people smoke pot (or some mind-altering drug), then get horny and get freaky. All to the strains of a bad guitar solo. This should be a requirement for all soft-core porn.Laura Gemser is pretty hot, she could easily still stand out even today. Come to think of it, all the women here are not bad-looking at all. If you can stand the fact that a lot of George W.'s last name is in full force here (personal grooming wasn't in in 1976, kids), you might like the ladies."Emanuelle in Bangkok," a standout film from my lonely teenager years. I don't even remember the plot, and I don't care. Seeing this now brings back memories of me with Cool Ranch Doritos and a bottle of Pepsi, keeping the volume low so my parents wouldn't hear it, settling back to Showtime's late-night lineup, which included this film and "Red Shoe Diaries." Those were the days...