This languid, sloppily shot Joe D'Amato hardcore shocker is a poem of sex and death, set to a soundtrack of 70s cocktail jazz and disco. Mark Shannon plays one Mark Lester, a middle-class American with a rich, sterile wife who learns (it what must be a first and last time twist in porn cinema) that he has some kind of cancer of the genitalia and needs to have them completely removed if he is to live. He makes a deal with his doctor that he can have 15 days grace before surgery makes him a eunuch and heads off to a Caribbean on which he formerly lived and where he left the love of his life to die. The film is a kind of Last Holiday of the penis
.
Like any hardcore film, the story is string on which to hang the sex sequences but it is hard to imagine what man would want to get off on a film in which the hero has the threat of complete castration hanging over him. The women are very beautiful yet the sex scenes themselves have a dead quality, as if the characters were performing under the weight of an incredible sadness; Nico Fidenco's melancholy scoring helps create this mood.
Lester is a less than admirable human being. Not only did he betray the woman who loved him, he's clearly made his wife feel pretty inadequate about her sterility and made it plain to her that he married for money; he humiliates a European friend still living on the Island with a local, ex-prostitute wife by insisting that she have sex with him before he donates to their local school project; he murders an overweight Caribbean prostitute whilst cursing her as a slut (which is rich coming from such a sleep around as him). His friend is little better, and only tells Lester's wife where the dying man is after she has performed fellatio on him. Still, Lester seems to know that he is an unredeemed sinner, as he gets drunk, screws around, slips in and out of sexual fantasies and doubles up in pain from his carcinogenic bits.
Definitely a product of a Catholic, Christian culture, D'Amato's Sesso Nero (literally "Black Sex") is a slow, depressing, conflicted and strangely compelling film. The denouement, where the dead girl and her family (through a mix of voodoo and deception) get their revenge on the man who wronged her, is both sudden and shocking. With its explicit self-emasculation, it rivals I Spit on Your Grave as a cinematic moment to make any man in the audience wince. As blood seeps from his self-inflicted wound into the sea, the protagonist dies a lonely, damned death in the arms of a memory, haunted by his sins.
Like any hardcore film, the story is string on which to hang the sex sequences but it is hard to imagine what man would want to get off on a film in which the hero has the threat of complete castration hanging over him. The women are very beautiful yet the sex scenes themselves have a dead quality, as if the characters were performing under the weight of an incredible sadness; Nico Fidenco's melancholy scoring helps create this mood.
Lester is a less than admirable human being. Not only did he betray the woman who loved him, he's clearly made his wife feel pretty inadequate about her sterility and made it plain to her that he married for money; he humiliates a European friend still living on the Island with a local, ex-prostitute wife by insisting that she have sex with him before he donates to their local school project; he murders an overweight Caribbean prostitute whilst cursing her as a slut (which is rich coming from such a sleep around as him). His friend is little better, and only tells Lester's wife where the dying man is after she has performed fellatio on him. Still, Lester seems to know that he is an unredeemed sinner, as he gets drunk, screws around, slips in and out of sexual fantasies and doubles up in pain from his carcinogenic bits.
Definitely a product of a Catholic, Christian culture, D'Amato's Sesso Nero (literally "Black Sex") is a slow, depressing, conflicted and strangely compelling film. The denouement, where the dead girl and her family (through a mix of voodoo and deception) get their revenge on the man who wronged her, is both sudden and shocking. With its explicit self-emasculation, it rivals I Spit on Your Grave as a cinematic moment to make any man in the audience wince. As blood seeps from his self-inflicted wound into the sea, the protagonist dies a lonely, damned death in the arms of a memory, haunted by his sins.