While Lucio Fulci heaped on the gore for the 1980s Italian zombie craze, Joe D'Amato pumped out another hardcore hybrid EROTIC NIGHTS OF THE LIVING DEAD, on Blu-ray from Code Red.

American architect John Wilson (Mark Shannon, THE PORNO KILLERS) comes to Santo Domingo to survey an island for a resort hotel project only to find that the local government is eager to foist a twenty-year lease on him since the locals superstitions have it that Cat Island is inhabited by the living dead lead by a black cat. The local fishermen have been dealing with lone zombies making their way to the mainland for years with voodoo rituals, but skipper Larry (George Eastman, IRONMASTER) still does not believe in the legends when he brains a worm-eaten assailant rising out of the waters beside his boat; as such, he thinks nothing of ferrying Wilson and Fiona (Dirce Funari, MIDNIGHT BLUE), a piece of arm candy recently dumped by her sheik sugar daddy, to the island when everyone else refuses. Their visit is foretold by Luna (Laura Gemser, EMANUELLE IN AMERICA) who, along with her grandfather, are apparently the sole "living" inhabitants of the island. When they rebuff Wilson's plans for developing the island – including bulldozing the cemetery – and promises of prosperity, he believes they are behind a strange series of events during their stay on the island. Luna seduces all three of travelers, leaving them vulnerable to attack from the island's other undead inhabitants.

One of a handful of Santo Domingo-lensed flicks lensed by Joe D'Amato that also included the hardcore SESSO NERO, PORNO ESOTIC LOVE – actually a re-edit of the Hong Kong-lensed BLACK COBRA with new hardcore footage – HARD SENSATION, and PORNO HOLOCAUST and the softcore ORGASMO NERO, EROTIC NIGHTS OF THE LIVING DEAD actually has some creepy bits amidst the bumping and grinding, but the emphasis on the latter means that it takes about forty-five minutes before the trio venture out to Cat Island. Before that, Wilson gets it on with two prostitutes, meets cute with Fiona while calling after the "dumb whores" who fled at his invitation to Cat Island, while Larry flirts with the wife of a client (Lucia Ramirez, PARADISO BLU) who demonstrates a novel method of opening a bottle of champagne. The island scenes are quite atmospheric with the shambling zombies – their look in keeping with the hooded zombies of other island-set Italian zombie flicks like AFTER DEATH so it is presumably based on some sort of local burial garb – lurking in the shadows and watching the couples get it on until the last half-hour in which Shannon and Eastman get to fend off several with machete and shotgun before the former gets the unkindest cut of all. The actual climax drags on for about ten minutes before a wraparound ending that explains the film's prologue. Eastman and Gemser demur from the hardcore activity and the latter is largely superfluous. Although D'Amato was a fan of horror films, his cinematography – under his real name Aristide Massaccesi – is as workmanlike as on his other horror projects like ANTHROPOPHAGUS and BEYOND THE DARKNESS (his debut DEATH SMILES ON A MURDERER excepted), but the bombastic synth scoring of "Pluto Kennedy" (actually Marcello Giombini) does a better job of infusing the film with tension that the staging and editing.

Unreleased theatrically or on video in the United States even on adult labels, the film first became accessible via a Japanese DVD but it was the ~100 minute softcore version in English with additional optical censoring of genitalia in a blurry fullscreen print. Laser Paradise then put out a DVD with German audio only but its ~103 minute running time was not indicative of the softcore version but the hardcore version in a ragged and incomplete cut of terrible quality. These were followed by domestic editions of both the softcore and hardcore versions in the US from Shriek Show offering the first decent transfers, but these have been long out of print and expensive. Code Red's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen limited Blu-ray of the hardcore version is complete at 112 minutes. While it is the best the film has looked, that is not saying much. The film has always looked a little faded in the bright shots and murky in the dark ones, but the high definition transfer reveals that the former is the fault of a zoom lens that is excessively flarey on the wide end. The day for night tinting of the night shots, particularly the climax, is better judged but the original cinematography only allows for so much. This really is a "warts and all" transfer with plenty of faint scratches, some marks, and one really ugly frame tear in which half the image disappears for a frame or two, but anyone who wanted to see Shannon's balls in high definition will not be disappointed. The sole audio option is the English dub in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono a number of familiar dubbing voices that would not expect to hear in a hardcore film, including Carolyn de Fonseca who dubbed Olga in SUSPIRIA and the mother in BURIAL GROUND among others.