User Reviews

For the most part, this is one of those "white couple has a holiday in the sun and has sex with the black natives" kind of films which were fairly popular in the 1970s. There is also a voodoo element and a bit of cannibalism thrown in for good measure, but neither gels very well with the rest of the film. Thoroughly unremarkable.

Husband and wife Paul and Helen are on a working vacation on a tropical island.But since their relationship doesn't have that same sizzle it used to,Helen soon seeks erotic pleasure from a local female voodoo-practitioner named Haini.Very boring melodrama with no horror whatsoever apart from two brief cannibalism scenes.The film is loaded with sleazy sex and female masturbation,so I wasn't completely disappointed.It's actually the part of D'Amato's 'Carribean Series' with "Papaya dei Caraibi" and "Sesso Nero" being the other two movies. If you are new into Italian exploitation cinema you may give it a try.Finally Nieves Navarro looked way hotter in "Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals".5 out of 10.

Orgasmo nero (1980)

** (out of 4)

Paul (Richard Harrison) is doing research on a Caribbean island when his wife Helen (Nieves Navarro) comes to visit. The wife is sexually unsatisfied and she strikes up a friendship with the native girl Haini (Lucia Ramirez) and soon they start a sexual relationship. The wife ends up taking the native back to her home where all sorts of trouble begins to happen.

ORGASMO NERO was just one of many films that director Joe D'Amato made during this period, which mixed sex and horror. The most famous (or notorious) examples of this were PORNO HOLOCAUST and EROTIC NIGHTS OF THE LIVING DEAD but this film doesn't reach the same level as those two. If you're looking for horror elements then it's best you watch one of the previous mentioned films because ORGASMO NERO is more of a drama mixed with sex. The film is available in a 97-minute "soft" version as well as a hardcore version, which features Ramirez doing real sex scenes with Mark Shannon.

I watched the soft version (the hardcore scenes were an extra) and for the most part I found the film to be entertaining. I was really shocked at how caught up I got into the story because it's certainly nothing special. I mean, we've seen this type of love triangle several times before and after this. We've seen movies where women are sexually unsatisfied so they go searching for better sex. I think the reason the random story keeps your attention here is that D'Amato actually does a very good job at making it erotic. I've seen countless films from the director and I've usually attacked him for not making the films erotic but that's not the case here. There are several lesbian scenes that have a lot of steam to them and the same is true for a sequence where the husband has had enough and decides to break in on the wife and native.

I also liked the three leads, although none of them give an Oscar-worthy performance. I thought Ramirez was extremely good as the native who brings out all of this sexuality. She really doesn't have too much to say but I thought she was good at just playing quiet and sexual. Obviously she's mainly here for eye candy and she's certainly that. I thought Navarro was very good as well and especially at coming across as a bored wife. Needless to say, she was still looking extremely hot at this time and she oozes sexuality. Harrison somewhat sleepwalks through the role but I guess you could argue this makes the wives sexual frustration more believable.

The cinematography is good as you'd expect and there's also a nice music score to bring out the sex scenes. ORGASMO NERO still suffers from a problem that a lot of D'Amato's work does and that's the fact that it runs a bit too long and there are a couple stretches that get a tad bit boring. Still, fans of the director will still want to check this out since it's certainly a lot better than many of his films.

This is an example of small, kind of unofficial genre in 1970's Italian exploitation films, which might be called the "black sexploitation film" (not to be confused with American "blaxploitation" films). These films generally traded in exotic travel, lots of interracial sexual couplings, and (in their most potentially offensive aspect) the myth of "primitive" black sexuality. Director/cinematographer Joe D'Amato was one of the masters of this "genre", having been the driving force behind the "Black Emanuelle" series. D'Amato's most frequent actress in these softcore extravaganzas, Laura Gemser, actually looked a lot more Asian than "black", but these films also featured plenty of white European women like Karin Schubert, Ely Galeani, and the star of this film, Nieves Navarro, getting down and dirty with the dark-skinned "natives". This movie is most similar to D'Amato's "Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals" and "Papaya of the Caribbean", but while it has plenty of sex, for better or worse, it is nowhere near as violent as either of those movies.

An older woman (Nieves Navarro) visiting her writer husband (Richard Harrison),while he's staying on a tropical island, meets a young "native" girl (Lucia Ramirez). They have a lesbian affair, and she decides to take the girl back with her to "civilization". She isn't adequately alarmed when the girl, in a fit of jealousy, tries to take a machete to a guy she brings home from a bar. The girl also causes some tension between her and her husband (even though she already cheats on him with everything in pants), but as is often the case in these kind of movies this tension is eventually assuaged with a steamy three-way sex scene. But when the couple decide to move away and try to return the girl to her village, they learn too late that her fierce lesbian jealously has caused her to return to her "primitive" bloodlust.

The plot is obviously preposterous, and rather ham-handedly executed to boot. Ramirez is certainly more "black" than Laura Gemser (who really should have been in this), but she looks a lot more like the cosmopolitan, mixed-race fashion model she probably was in real life than any kind of of "primitive local". It's weird seeing expatriate actor Richard Harrison in a movie like this--he was usually in more respectable Italian genre films like spaghetti Westerns or crime thrillers (he claimed in an interview I read that he didn't know that this was actually a sex film!). Only Nieves Navarro seems at home in this genre. It is odd that someone who was once a fairly successful leading genre actress would become a softcore porn star in middle age. But she definitely still had a great body here in her early forties, and just because these sex-soaked roles were really beneath her talent doesn't mean she wasn't very good at them. I'd recommend this I guess to serious fans of D'Amato or Navarro, but they've both done a lot better stuff.