– XXX is Celluloid Dimension’s latest weekly column featuring the hottest and naughtiest side of cinema. –
Directed by Joe D’Amato
Written by Roberto Gandus
Starring:
- Melissa Chimenti as Papaya
- Sirpa Lane as Sara
- Maurice Poli as Vincent
- Dakar as the Ceremony Leader
Rating: 
All it takes is 10 minutes into the exotic shocker by sleaze maestro Joe D’Amato to imbibe a whole slew of Euro-exploitation filmmaking idiosyncrasies and anticipate the bonkers path its pseudo-cannibal storytelling will take leading up to its sensational tour de force of horny people performing the unavoidable, lots of fucking and masturbation, murder included.
D’Amato may be a tactless and unsubtle director when it boils down to pointless sexploitation but unlike many other trashy pornographers he actually knows what he wants and goes for it and it only takes him less than 10 minutes to set up a trite storyline of environmentalist pretensions featuring the sultry Melissa Chimenti rubbing a papaya on a brawny guy’s penis, emasculation via oral sex, cockfighting, a perpetually undressed Sirpa Lane and sun-drenched vistas of Santo Domingo’s gorgeous shores. I mean, it’s just a regular day for the ultra-sleazy standards of Italian genre moviemaking. But there’s a certain nonconformity here, and it doesn’t strictly adhere to the rules. You eagerly await the infamous trappings of the typical Italian anthropophagous fare but instead you get a mysterious ethnocultural travelogue thriller that empathizes with the indigenous populations brutalized by major corporations that take over their homelands for industrialist ends. It’s a subtle gesture of ethnocentric indictment of a genre that is innately ethnocentric. Joe D’Amato’s approach may have sincere and solemn meanings at its core, but the whole man vs. nature dialectic intersects with all the inescapable yet extraneous carnality you’d normally expect from a tawdry European flick of this ilk and undermines the socio-cultural gravity of the overall plot.
Maurice Poli plays an engineer supervising the construction of a nuclear power plant on the Caribbean Island and Sirpa Lane plays a journalist who just happens to be vacationing there at the moment when a native resistance group on the island determines to thwart the engineer’s highly polluting project. Both are enticed by temptress Papaya (Melissa Chimenti), who lures them into experiencing ritualistic aphrodisiacs until they are in the most vulnerable sexual mood. They get laid, engage in tribal striptease, contemplate pigs being eviscerated and partake in plenty of exhibitionism. Obviously, none of this is actual cultural tradition, it’s just the coolness of Italian genre moviemaking at its purest. It’s a mishmash of exploitation eccentricities that looks appealing as long as D’Amato’s edgy erotica in harmony with Stelvio Cipriani’s groovy swinging score serve as a touristic porno picture of the lovely Caribbean scenery; it’s compelling also because the perceptive framing of the exotic surroundings offers a gracious space within the plot to breed suspense and mystique.
Even though the thrills are more orgasmic than anything dramatic -and despite the fact that the outcome is more cornball than impactful- Papaya as an Italian genre piece is truly refreshing; marketed as a cannibal movie but purposefully deviating from that to address other scabrous matters that such films sometimes ignore, it’s a thoroughly entertaining and gutsy departure from the norm. As swiftly as it initiates the depraved follies it winds up hitting the most unexpectedly sweet notes, pornographic but sweet nonetheless; it caps off the lurid bits with a sapphic romp, which is no surprise, after all, the man behind the camera is an Emanuelle director so…