Italian filmmakers often didn’t know quite where they were going with their sex films. Carnalita, directed by familiar character actor Alfredo Rizzo, is a case in point. Partially a melodrama, partially a comedy and partially a thriller, its grab-bag nature betrays a considerable lack of confidence, and as a result it ends up as a wholly unfulfilling viewing experience. Some directors can do erotica; Rizzo, it has to be said, isn’t one of them.
Professor Luciani (Jacques Stany) is, quite frankly, a bit of a shit. While his wife lies comatose and on the point of death, he doesn’t hesitate to shag her reluctant nurse, Anna (Femi Benussi) in the room next door, even leaving the connecting doors open just to rub it in. Meanwhile, he’s no more pleasant in his work; the head of a group of financiers, he doesn’t hesitate to call in a loan from the venerable Count Valenti (Mario Pisu), who hasn’t done so much as even miss a payment. Perhaps his meanness is down to the fact that he’s distracted by his raunchy secretary, Marita, with whom he spends most of his time ‘developing business plans’ in his office.
The true nature of Luciani’s dastardliness soon becomes clear: he promptly purchases Valenti’s castle for himself, moves his wife and Anna in, and starts working on a scheme to buy up and develop the surrounding countryside. His scheming, however, is interrupted when he meets Roberta (Erna Schurer), a young woman he rescues from drowning while playing around on his yacht and takes a fancy to. Despite his best efforts, though, she seems unwilling to engage in an affair with him.
Anna, meanwhile, is becoming increasingly frustrated by being solely his mistress, especially when she catches him copping a feel of the housemaid’s breasts. She begins plotting herself, and comes up with the brilliant idea of doing away with Elisabeth’s by putting some poison in her medicine. Luciani, of course, is mortified… for a couple of minutes, anyway. Soon he’s back to his old tricks, and trying desperately to seduce Roberta, even to the point where he proposes marriage to her. Little is he to know, though, that the consequences of his crooked past are about to catch up with him in a big way.
As with The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance, this has the kind of lurid plot that makes it sound as though the film should be a lot of fun, but it isn’t. There are a couple of gratuitously tasteless scenes, for sure – Anna and Luciani shagging on Elisabetta’s bed while she’s lying in it unconscious, for instance – but as a whole it’s simply a boring, turgid mess. It has all the same faults as are to be found in Bloodsucker: a narrative with little in the way of drive, dreadful pacing, a strangely lacklustre feel, poor direction. The sex sequences are pushed further to the forefront here, and Benussi in particular spends a large percentage of her screentime in the nude, which is fair enough, I suppose, but hardly helps make it all any more exciting. In fact, this could quite easily have been a hardcore movie; it’s put together with about the same level of sophistication and skill and the rudimentary scripting would seem to be more suited to that particular approach.
Rizzo’s direction is again woeful, while even the cinematography and art direction can’t give it a veneer of quality. The English language version has the strange, understated, slightly hallucinogenic dialogue of a badly dubbed movie but, frankly speaking, that’s the least of its problems.
As for the cast, Femi Benussi is game, and certainly makes for one of the more appealing of starlets at the time. Erna Schurer was in several low-budget films during this period, although her attractions are beyond me; she’s a rather sharp faced girl with a somewhat scrawny physique (both her and Benussi also appeared in Strip Nude for Your Killer in 1975). Jacques Stany appeared in a good sixty films from 1961 on, mostly quite a way down the credits. In the mid seventies, though, her seems to have reinvented himself as a star and support actor in erotic films, such as Jack Guy’s Sensuous Slaves (77) and The Erotic Dreams of Cleopatra (85). Pupo De Luca, a comedy actor who appeared in dozens of Decameroticons, is possibly the most likable performer on display.
