Papaya: Love Goddess of the Cannibals (1978)

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Talking to a family friend about UK DVD company Shameless,he mentioned to me a title from the company that he has been after for a good while.Searching round on Ebay UK,I was pleased to find a seller selling it at a very cheap price,which led to me getting ready to meet the Love Goddess.The plot:Learning that old friend Vincent is working on the construction of a nuclear reactor in the Caribbean,journalist Sara decides to pay him a visit.Meeting up for the first time in ages,Vincent tells Sara that despite some "issues" with the residents,that most of them are happy with the building of a nuclear reactor on their island.Getting hot under the collar for each other,Vincent and Sara head back to Vincent's apartment for a night of passion.Arriving at the apartment,Sara discovers to her horror how much the locals hate the work that Vincent is doing,thanks to a half-eaten dead body being left on his doorstep.View on the film:Before I get to the title,I have to mention that Shameless has given the movie a great presentation,with Shameless offering the Italian & English dubs,along with a clear picture that captures the Caribbean sun.Filmed on location,director Joe D'Amato takes advantage of the unique location with wide,hand-held tracking shots,which gaze at every dusty street corner of the city.Jumping on the Cannibal craze,D'Amato takes a surprisingly limited interest in the subject,with the sole dead body and the dissecting of pigs appearing like a desperate effort to loosely connect to the genre. Whilst he is not instead in flesh being eaten,D'Amato shows a clear welcomed interest in the exposure of flesh of both the men and the women,with D'Amato using super slo-mo to focus on the most lustful features of his cast.Eating the film up with a bonkers twist ending,the screenplay by Roberto Gandus & Renzo Maietto give the movie a light, breezy mood,with the warm location being matched by the flirting from Sara and Vincent.Bringing the sun out,the very sexy Sirpa Lane (who sadly died of AIDS at 47) gives a sweet,relaxed performance as Sara,who soon meets the cannibal love goddess.

So, how does pube fest Pappaya, Love Goddess of the Cannibals square up to Joe D'Amato's other pube fest, Emmanuale and the Last Cannibals then? Well, there's not much gut munching in this one, but plenty of carpet munching! I'm sorry. It's hard not to be crude after watching stuff like this. It's just that there's not much to Pappaya, Love Gouda and Cannibus at all except for people writhing about on top of each other. The story as it goes is that Sarah is a photographer on some Caribbean island who hooks up with Vincent, a guy who's there to build a nuclear reactor. For some reason the natives don't think this is a good idea and have put Pappaya on the case to sort things out.Now, Pappaya endears herself to the audience by seducing a guy in hut, rubbing papaya fruit on his tummy banana, then chomping his knob off before having two guys set the hut on fire. This crispy corpse now ends up in Vincent's pad (just before he was going to get it on with Sarah), and before you know it, Pappaya turns up and starts working her charms on the two white folk.They all end up at some ceremony where Dakkar (of the much better Zombie Flesh Eaters, Zombie Holocaust, and Ator: The Fighting Eagle) orders them to drink some freaky juice and then we see two dead pigs being gutted. Thanks for that Joe. At least they were dead to begin with.If you think the plot was slow to begin with, prepare yourself for the last half of the film which becomes an interminable barrage of sleaze (more writhing, jelly water mangoes, Vincent's sixty-five year old balls) where nothing happens at all. And then you get a kind of 'twist' ending.It's not a bad film per se (this is the guy who made Endgame and Anthropophagus Beast after all), but it's deadly slow and there's not much going on. I bet Sirpa Lane didn't even take any underwear when she went on location.

Even though Italy was never much of colonial power, Italian exploitation filmmakers of the 60's and 70's seemed to really be trying to make up for lost time in exploiting the Third World; from the Mondo films of the 1960's to the gut-churning cannibal films of the early 80's, you just couldn't keep these guys out of the jungle. Since this was also the period of the rise of the sex film, it was almost inevitable that there would be an Italian genre of "black sexploitation" or "Third World sexploitation' films. These films are kind of erotic travelogues where a white European tourist couple "go native", usually after being seduced by a native woman. They engage in ritualistic dancing, they eat raw meat, they have a lot of interracial and bisexual sex (which is apparently what Italian exploitation filmmakers thought people in the Third World did all day). The most famous of these films is "Black Emanuelle" with Laura Gemser, but the most famous filmmaker is Joe D'Amato who eventually took over the "Black Emanuelle" series and added such wonderfully descriptive titles as "Black Orgasm" and "Porno Holocaust".D'Amato had two things going for him. He was an excellent cinematographer, so his films always look far better than just about any other porno "product", softcore or hardcore. He also had an appalling lack of good taste. While there is some metaphoric connection between sex and cannibalism (i.e. "devouring one's lover"), there is literally nothing erotic about cannibalism (unless you're some weird bastard living in Wisconsin or a village in Germany). What D'Amato was trying to do was incorporate two kinds of illicit thrills that don't really go together that well. There are some hot sex scenes here, for instance, but it's hard to enjoy them after the very first one culminates VERY unpleasantly in a scene of cannibalism (well, maybe not technically cannibalism since she DOES spit it out). On the other hand though, people watching this as cannibal film will probably be bored stupid with all this gratuitous sex after the opening scene.The acting is pretty unremarkable. The exotic lead who seduces the European couple is pretty sexy I guess, but looks a lot more Latin than black. The white female is played by a Sirpa Lane who was in the famous Walerian Borzyx cult film "The Beast", and managed to turn in an atrocious performance even though she had no dialogue. She is not even really that attractive until she takes off her clothes (which she fortunately does very regularly). As for the guy, well the guy hardly matters in movies like this, does he? The plot involves the native woman, "Papaya", who as part of some kind of anti-colonial hostility is seducing and murdering every white man she meets. For some reason though when she meets this couple, she decides to take the woman on as a kind of apprentice. The ending is kind of, uh, interesting, but I won't give it away. This is OK I guess if you like this sort of thing.

I finally obtained a copy of this very obscure D'Amato film. After successfully tolerating both "Erotic Nights of The Living Dead" and "Porno Holocaust," I found it necessary to further push the limits of my tolerance with this, another D'Amato porno/horror galivanting-in-paradise film. First off, I don't speak German, and since this film only exists in a German dubbed print I had to get what I could out of the body language, of which there was quite a lot, albeit of the sexual kind. I couldn't help but snicker at myself about what I have become. Here I am watching a more than likely 8th generation bootleg in a language I don't even speak. Yet I am intent on seeing it and have no inclination to stop it. Have I gone insane? Has the awesome power of Italian Horror Sleaze turned me into one of its own zombies? Though this film is terrible, it possesses a charm that I can't resist. It is the same charm that has afforded me the will to watch about %50 of D'Amato's output. The beautiful Caribbean scenery, the sexy women, the pig slaughter, the leg-crossing oral castration that opens the film, all culminate into one rediculous, schizophrenic movie. I guess that is what most of D'Amato's horror/porn films are...schizophrenic. Worth watching if you are a hardcore D'Amato fan, otherwise don't buy into those video bootleg companies who try to promote it like its some crazy, gory, sex filled cannibal romp Because its not. There is plenty of softcore sex, some gore but not much. There is only one scene of cannibalism (not counting the castration scene). This film can be sometimes found under the title "Papaya: Love Goddess Of The Cannibals." From what I could tell, this film had more to do with Voodoo then cannibalism. Nonetheless, I liked the film, I love D'Amato and I don't apologize for indulging in this kind of sleaze. Cheers Joe! May you rest in peace!