Wow! Such a good movie.

Too many fans seem to be blown away

SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

A group of scientists head off to a tropical island to study the effects of atomic testing years earlier. The island isn't entirely deserted however -- a large solitary creature, mutated by the radiation, is waiting for them.That plot does not really explain this film. All I can say is that this film is nothing more than poor attempts at porn, with a bit of plot thrown in. You can watch the clock and literally not go more than five minutes between sex scenes. Which is great if you want to see sex scenes, but awful if you actually care about the story. It's not much of one, and in some people's opinion, not much of a porn either (though I wasn't really going to worry about that).Italian horror critic Jim Harper says director Joe D'Amato "screws it up pretty badly... the film is a mess." He sees it as a mix that destroys both elements at the same time: "This is unlikely to please fans of either horror or hardcore." Another noted horror critic, Jay Slater, agrees and does not mince words with this one, which he calls "a dismal failure". The "movie is a failure because it alienated both audiences" of sex and gore. The film "is so incompetently directed, scripted and acted that the finished movie borders on tedium and unintentional hysteria." It "is devoid of a lively plot, delirious set-pieces or funky sex." If this isn't bad enough, "the cast are uniformly sexually unattractive." What good can be said of this one? I think the film has a certain unintended humor, simply because it is unique. There have been newer attempts at horror porn, such as Doug Sakmann's "Re-Penetrator" and "XXXorcist", but those set out to be somewhat funny, whereas D'Amato actually thought he was being serious. Does the humor make it worth owning? Probably not. But you'd sure get a lot of interested people when they scour your shelf and see this one.

D'Amato's hardcore/horror hybrid doesn't really live up to its extraordinary title and intriguing premise, wherein various vapid contemporary types are attacked by a monster on an Atoll previously used for nuclear experiments, but for the most part the film is so slow, the action so dreary and the cast so clearly repulsed to be having to have sex with each other that the film becomes a chore to watch.This is a pity, because the film sets up a promising idea. A group of scientists are taken to the Atoll by a naval officer in a small vessel. The scientists – three women and two men – are an intriguing cross section of sexual types, suffering to various degrees from nymphomania, co-dependency and frigidity; there's even an intriguing foray into the world of female sex tourism, where one of the women stops off at a brothel to get serviced by two hunky Caribbean studs for hire. The creature himself – a mangled native Islander with a horribly scarred face and an unfeasibly long pizzle – bears some affinities with the old Creature from the Black Lagoon and is the kind of nuclear nightmare that has hovered over postmodern man since the cold war commenced, despite those of us in the West having retreated into hedonism and relativistic science.Porno Holocaust certainly is a film which shows the post-sexual revolution Westerners coming across their mirror image in a nuclear monster, yet the torpidity with which it unfolds really lets down the fierceness of the idea. There is a promising interplay of action shots with POV shots, which suggest that the monster (who looks/stalks on as horror monsters from their POV position tend to do) is akin to the voyeur in the audience getting off on the sex between the "beautiful people." The sight of the monster forcing a gorgeous young woman to suck his over-sized member certainly throws the target audience's ugly fantasies in their face. But D'Amato has developed similar ideas better in other films, and Porno Holocaust is a potentially fierce idea let down by the execution (even D'Amato's usual cinematographic skills let him down with much dreary camera-work).

This is exactly what I'd expect from trying to cross a hardcore sex movie and a horror film--a crappy horror film but a better-than-average sex flick. The plot, as it were, is heavily borrowed from D'Amato's own notorious cannibal film "Anthrophagus". A group of idiotic European tourists land on an idyllic island and are stalked a shambling monster. But D'Amato breaks up the tedium here with a lot of hardcore sex scenes. And when THAT gets tedious (which it quickly does) the monster shows up and kills off most of the cast. But, of course, a D'Amato film simply CANNOT be tedium-free so he makes the whole thing a frickin' ridiculous 110 minutes long! Some people objected to the fact that the ridiculously well-endowed "monster" is dark-skinned, but then so is half the cast. Others were offended that the giant monster dispatches most of the women with his, uh, giant monster, but frankly these scenes are pretty hard to take seriously and I doubt the biggest perverts in the world will be turned on by them. The female cast is only marginally more attractive than the monster, but I found it interesting that the prettiest girl (relatively speaking) didn't participate in any of the hardcore scenes but was willing to do the most controversial scene where she is choked to death during fellatio by the monster's obviously fake appendage (Laura Gemser did a similar thing in the companion piece to this "Erotic Nights of the Living Dead" although she was the aggressor there ). This raises the interesting question of what is more "degrading"--dark but obviously simulated fantasies like this or the exploitation of real-life private sex acts? Well, you can't stop men (or women) from fantasizing whether you ban movies or not, and fantasies, however warped, don't give real-life people real-life AIDS.I also liked that this movie was shot on film on and on island location, which regardless of its incompetence, makes it preferable to today's hardcore "product" shot on video in some producer's condo in the Valley. And as homely as some of the cast are, there's not a silicone breast in sight. In short, this movie is no more offensive, and slightly less boring, than any hardcore porno movie.

I've heard a lot about Porno Holocaust and its twin film Erotic Nights Of The Living Dead. Both films are interchangeable and were filmed at the same time on the same location with the same actors changing clothes for each film (and taking them off). If you are expecting the D'Amato genius displayed in films like Buio Omega or Death Smiles on Murder, you won't find it here. Nonetheless this film has a charm that exploitation fans will not be able to resist. Where else will you see hardcore sex mixed with a zombie/monster and his enormous penis that strangles and chokes women to death? Only from D'Amato. There is some amount of gore in which many of the men are bludgeoned to death. The film is set on a beautiful tropical island. As far as I know there is no subtitled version, so if you don't speak Italian you wont know what is going on...but who cares right? In all honesty, Gore fans will probably fast forward through the hardcore sex. And if anyone is actually watching this for the sex only, will for sure be offended instantly. I can just imagine modern day porn fans tracing back through D'Amato's output and coming across this atrocity! Out of the two I find Erotic Nights Of The Living Dead far superior. But, don't bother watching either if they are cut. Porno Holocaust is extremely low budget as expected. Even the monster looks no where as good as George Eastman's character in Anthropophagus. The film is worth watching for laughs and to complete your D'Amato film quest.