Two great trends of Italian rip-off exploitation come together in Severin Films' Blu-ray of EMANUELLE AND THE LAST CANNIBALS.

Globe-hopping photojournalist Emanuelle (Laura Gemser, MURDER OBSESSION) has settled into a job at New York's Evening Post and her current assignment is posing as a patient for an expose on the treatment of the mentally ill in a New York hospital. The story takes a bizarre turn when a nurse's breast is bitten off and eaten when she tries to molest a feral girl (Cindy Leadbetter, RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR) who was found at the edge of the Amazon jungle. When Emanuelle notices a strange tattoo above the girl's pubic region, it is identified by her paper's fact-checker as a tattoo belonging to an extinct cannibal tribe. Her editor hits upon the idea to sponsor an expedition to the Amazon to find "the last cannibal tribe" with the help of anthropologist Mark Lester (Gabriele Tinti, LISA AND THE DEVIL) who Emanuelle soon gets under to get over her most recent boyfriend when he tires of her putting work over their relationship. They connect with missionary Reverend Wilkes (Geoffrey Copleston, THE BLACK CAT) who offers up his virginal but hot-to-trot daughter Isabelle (Monika Zanchi, SISTER EMANUELLE) as a guide along with locals Manolo and Felipe. Also along for the trip is missionary Sister Angela (Annamaria Clementi, OPERATION ORIENT) who has just returned from Dublin and is eager to get back to the jungle mission. They arrive to learn from game hunter Donald McKenzie (Donald O'Brien, ZOMBI HOLOCAUST) and his wife Maggie (Susan Scott, DEATH WALKS AT MIDNIGHT) – who deals with her husband's impotence by having it off with guide Salvador (Percy Hogan, EMANUELLE BLACK AND WHITE) – that the mission was attacked by savages and everyone is dead. When their boats disappear the next day, they must band together to get back to civilization but tensions within the group prove fractious and the lurking cannibals start picking them off one by one.

The fourth of Joe D'Amato's "Black Emanuelle" cash-in series, itself an "unauthorized" spinoff of Bitto Albertini's BLACK EMANUELLE, EMANUELLE AND THE LAST CANNIBALS is not the first entry to combine softcore sex and stomach-churning gore, but the catalog of mutilations – nipple slicing, decapitations, death trap impalements, equal opportunity genital mutilation, and disembowelments – executed this time around by Fabrizio Sforza (THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN) along with a body horizontally bisected by an in-camera double exposure not unlike some of the effects D'Amato did as cinematographer (under his actual name Aristide Massacessi) for Alberto De Martino's THE ANTICHRIST, last long enough to make their point and fortunately there is little animal violence. Since the jungle scenes were shot in the same Italian park as other cannibal and fantasy films, the film's exotic backdrop is restricted to the location work in New York which includes Gemser and Tinti walking through Rockefeller Plaza, visiting the Museum of Natural History, and taking the Roosevelt Tram along with a daring bit of Emanuelle having a quicky with her boyfriend beneath the Brooklyn Bridge in the same place where the bum and his dog find a severed hand in the opening of NEW YORK RIPPER. While the gore and action sequences are as competently staged as the cannibal-adjacent likes of ZOMBI HOLOCAUST, the focus here is on the nudity and sex with softcore but enthusiastic coupling with Tinti and Gemser, Scott and Hogan, Zanchi rubbing herself to distraction, and O'Brien leering at some additional glimpsed nudity. While not as "fun" as the other Black Emanuelle entries, the film delivers most of the goods with gusto to the dependably funky accompaniment of series composer Nico Fidenco (PORNO HOLOCAUST) who weaves his theme song "Make Love on the Wing" (sung by Ulla Lindner) throughout the score in various orchestral and instrumental variations.

Given a scant 42nd Street release by Megastar Films as TRAP THEM AND KILL THEM, EMANUELLE AND THE LAST CANNIBALS gained most of its stateside audience from the Twilight Video release of the same name. The first DVD releases were overseas with a double-sided Dutch disc featuring a non-anamorphic letterboxed transfer in PAL on one side and NTSC on the other making its first appearance stateside a few years before Shriek Show put out their anamorphic DVD in which the image was distorted on some displays. The first Blu-ray appeared last year in the UK courtesy of 88 Films in a version that was uncut in terms of gore and nudity but was nearly a minute shorter than the uncut running time due to the loss of a few seconds here and there. Derived from a 2K scan of original 35mm elements, Severin's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen transfer runs the full 93:06, restoring some brief shots that were missing from DVD editions (the heavy staining on the tail end of one shot may explain why it was removed from some transfers). The image is slightly darker than the import with slightly punchier colors but the encoding wars with the heavy grain so that it actually does look in the underexposed portions of shot shots like the dread scanner noise but it does not cover the entirety of the image or appear in every shot. While the import had English credits in white and the yellow Italian credits as an extra, the Severin presentation features the Italian opening and end credits. English and Italian mono tracks are presented in DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 and the optional English subtitles translate the Italian track and include plenty of offscreen dialogue not on the English track. Since the Spanish dialogue on the English track was all dubbed into Italian, the subtitles provide translation for those bits as well.

Severin has provided a nice array of new extras produced by Freak-O-Rama and Nocturno in Italy. In "The World of Nico Fidenco" (27:04), the composer reveals that he studied to be a director before getting into music, and how his chart-topping song for THE SILVER SPOON SET lead to the American arm of RCA flying him to America where he met Henry Mancini who gave him the permission to cover "Moon River" and giving him the advice that every film should have a theme song or two that are used as often as possible to be memorable to the viewer. He then discusses his friendship with D'Amato and his impressions of Gemser as well as his shock to learn of her husband Tinti's death when he ran into her a few years after the Black Emanuelle collaborations. In "A Nun Among Cannibals" (22:53), actress Clementi recalls living with her gay agent who she trusted to get her assignments, her "morbid fascination" with her death scene in the film until she had to wear animal entrails and uncomfortable prosthetics, her impressions of D'Amato and his casting her again in THE PORNO SHOP ON 7TH AVENUE, as well as her "schizophrenic" attitude towards doing nude scenes. "Dr. O'Brien MD" (18:46) is an older camcorded discussion with the actor which sheds some interesting light on the career of an actor who most Italian genre fans may have thought of as less a character actor than an interesting face. He discusses his acting training, brief work as a failed photojournalist before returning to acting on the stage in France, working under Marcel Carne (THE CHILDREN OF PARADISE) who he regarded as genius but liked less as a person than someone like D'Amato, his work on John Frankenheimer's THE TRAIN, and his work with D'Amato and Lucio Fulci. He does seem reticent to discuss himself and focuses a lot on anecdotes and complements for his co-stars, although he does get some laughs from the offscreen interviewer when he describes his exorcist in D'Amato's IMAGES IN A CONVENT as the only character who does not get laid in the film.