I watch 'em so you don't have to...

How do you pitch something like this?

"Okay, I wrote this script I want you to make. There's this guy who captains a boat. He gets hired by this sleazy guy who wants to buy an abandoned island. But when they go to the island, there's a guy and his granddaughter there. The sleazy guy threatens the guy on the island, and then zombies show up. And there's porn. Lots of it."

Erotic Nights Of The Living Dead(1980), is a piece of work for sure. It's directed, if the word may be applied, by legendary Italo-horror hack Joe D'Amato, and it stars George Eastman and Laura Gemser, both well-known figures in cult horror.

This film has:

- Gratuitous nudity every five minutes. A lpt of it is of the fairly hardcore porn variety, as there are some head scratching thing in this movie. For example, there's a sequence (that derails the movie, by the way) where George Eastman is alone in a strip club while a woman does her act, then involves a champagne bottle.(You can figure out where it's going. You're big people.)

- An obvious delineation between the legitimate actors(Gemser and Eastman) and the porn actors. Eastman's sex scenes are of the Skinemax variety(he never actually takes his pants off in any of them), and Gemser's two big scenes are similar. The sleazy guy, however, has what amounts to around 15 minutes of hardcore porn scenes(though he doesn't appear to be much of a cocksman; the longer of the two scenes ends with maybe 45 seconds of humping before the unimpressive finish).

- A very disjointed plotline. My brief description of the plot above is an attempt to make the movie make sense in a straight fashion.

- The movie is also unsure of what it wants to be. The zombies, such as they are, are almostan afterthought, and there's no real horror to the film(unlike say, Fulci's Zombie, which does have a certain sense of dread to it.) There are a few half-hearted attempts, such as two seperate cat scares, and a zombie does munch on a stupid coroner, but this is a curiously zombie-light movie for something with the words "Living Dead" in the title.

- A ridiculous "end is the beginning" ending. The film opens with an obviously crazy Eastman giggling maniacally in an asylum with some stereotypically "crazy" movie people. Then we follow a girl as she's stalked through the asylum by another nut. Instead of murder, however, she meets George, and they start bumping hysterically while the other guy watches. Then we cut to non-crazy George, sailing his ship. 90-odd minutes later, we figure out that George and the female lead have both been driven to priapism and nymphomania respectively in the "shock" ending.

- There is a McGuffin of sorts, fetish figures that we're supposed to assume ward off zombies. However, it's never really explained, and at one point, one of them transforms into a cat when the bad guy throws it down. (But then the cat apparently is also Laura Gemser, and so.. well, I don't know.) It apparently is also the cause of George's priapism, because he loses the one that the old man gives him and inadvertently brings forth the zombie horde(Can 12 zombies be called a horde?). When George picks up the other one(the one which had turned into the cat), it works to vanquish the zombies, but also apparently makes George and the female lead crazy.
If you're confused, don't worry. I was too(and I took notes).

Shriek Show has seen fit for some reason to put out a Special Edition, if it can be called that. It features some alternate footage from the non-hardcore version (called Sunny Afternoons of the Living Dead(!?!) as well as a mind boggling trailer. Watching the trailer, you'd think they'd cobbled two different movies together.(In a way, they have, I suppose.)

Overall, highest recommendation to avoid, unless you're a masochist. This may be the most zombie-free zombie movie ever(they're on screen maybe 10-15 minutes tops), and it's 100 minutes that feels like 4 hours.