LOVE GODDESS OF THE CANNIBALS

I THINK I'M TRAPPED IN THE LOOP OF SMUT HERE. CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Yet more filth. I know, it's my fault for adding it to the queue in the first place. And yet despite it being directed by the legendary useless Joe D'Amato (aka Aristide Massacessi, aka several dozen other false names) I enjoyed it a bit more than the sleaze offerings they've sent me recently. D'Amato generally seems to be a very slightly better filmmaker than Jess Franco, and similarly obsessed with ladies' parts. Thanks to some nice locations in the Dominican Republic and a lounge score by veteran Stelvio Cipriani, it's actually verging on the tolerable despite acres of flesh and much shaking of booty.

The Love Goddess of the Cannibals of the title is Papaya, a hotel maid and activist in the campaign to stop the building of a nuclear reactor. You don't have to wait long for the degeneracy to kick off: five minutes in and Papaya castrates one of the engineers with her teeth before two of her associates set fire to his beach shack. When Vincent, another reactor engineer arrives, he meets up with his vacationing reporter girlfriend Sarah and the two of them are led by the mysterious Papaya to something called The Round Stone: the centrepiece of an annual village festival that incorporates blood drinking, disembowelling pigs, human sacrifice and nude dancing. Yes: rather than the usual strategy of speeches, demonstrations, leaflets and propaganda, Papaya's somewhat unusual methods of social awareness, environmentalism and proletariat revolution involve bringing the reactor's engineers to a sacrifice and orgy, then seducing them and murdering them. And wandering around in the nude.

The movie wastes no opportunities to get either or both of its female leads out of their clothes, separately or together. There's some occasional male nudity as well, though the actual sex scenes are all strictly softcore. Given D'Amato's reputation for bad movies, the relentless tide of boobs and bums, and the ludicrously overlong scene in which Sarah and Vincent wander through the deserted shanty town (the sets look the same as the ones in the tasteless Ratman), it's surprising that the movie is only occasionally boring.

Despite one brief heart-eating at the sacrifice, there are no cannibals (unless you count the castration at the start), and Papaya is not a goddess, so the title is really a lie on two fronts. And let's be honest: it is rubbish. But it's not completely terrible rubbish. I'm just hoping that they now send me something in which the main characters keep their skimpies on at least.

**