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).
movie reviews