The Nude Princess (1976)
aka Black Magic
aka La principessa nuda
Genre: Drama | Erotic
Country: Italy | Director: Cesare Canevari
Language: Italian | Subtitles: English (Optional, embedded in Mkv file)
Aspect ratio: Widescreen 1.85:1 | Length: 91mn
Dvdrip H264 Mkv – 1024×568 – 25fps – 1.66gb
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0134906/
The female ambassador (Ajita Wilson) of an impoverished but resource-rich Afican country (and the reputed mistress of its brutal dictator) comes to Italy on business. She is befriended by female industrial spy (Tina Aumont) and pursued by a boozy, scandal-sheet reporter (Luigi Pistilli) and a number of political and business world enemies out to discredit her with a sex scandal.
This movie, strangely enough, was (very) loosely based on real incident that happened around that time involving Ugandan dictator/erstwhile cannibal Idi Amin and an African supermodel. It’s an interesting movie in that it is relatively sophisticated (the key word there being “relatively”), but also very exploitative (the rather schizophrenic director was responsible for both the arty “Io, Emmanuelle” and several uber-sleazy Nazi camp sexploitation movies). The movie is an example of a kind of Italian version of 1970’s “blaxploitation”, which unlike American version was aimed mostly at white audiences and focused much more on sexy, naked black women than strutting, macho black men. It has some potentially offensive scenes including a black man being castrated during oral sex (albeit by a black woman) and a black woman who is being kept as a sex slave by a chubby white midget (although both of these scenes may have some kind of metaphoric significance that eluded me). Still, Tina Aumont is very sexy, as is Ajita Wilson (considering that she reputedly was once a man).
With the fictional Uganda backdrop this movie seems to be making some kind of serious commentary on the exploitation of the Third World, the way big business cozies up to brutal dictators, and the way media ignores all the important events in the world to focus on the salacious. Unfortunately, the movie itself is guilty of the latter, and the serious points it makes get kind of lost in the sleaze it wallows in. Nevertheless, the movie is at least somewhat interesting today because it’s very rare to see either a serious movie that is this sleazy or sleazy movie that is this serious.
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