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| Images courtesy of 88 Films |
Back in 2019 before British based boutique label 88 Films
began making a stateside splash with a number of Blu-ray and 4K UHD disc
releases of films that you’d never think you’d see branded with the Ultra High
Definition moniker, the company released exploitation auteur Joe D’Amato’s 1987
Italian erotica epic Eleven Days, Eleven Nights. A softcore porn film produced, directed and
shot by D’Amato from a story and screenplay co-authored by Troll 2 director
Claudio Fragasso, the dry-humping bare butt and breasted Filmirage production is
a hand-me-down Adrian Lyne erotic thriller with hints of Tinto Brass’ scopophilia
lens compounded with startingly strong yet free-spirited female characters with
agency. For some reason, the horror
director behind Death Smiles on a Murderer, Antropophagus and
later Porno Holocaust found his greatest commercial success with this
1987 skin flick.
Still unreleased on disc in the U.S., boutique label 88
Films have taken it upon themselves to restore and rerelease the director’s 1991
sequel film Eleven Days, Eleven Nights 2 on a deluxe limited 4K UHD disc
release. Bypassing the first film on
home video here save for customers with all-region disc players, it’s the kind
of picture that I guess doesn’t require you to have seen the first one to
follow it (if you can follow whatever narrative is going on here). Like those who propelled the first film into
profitability, we’re not here for the storyline so much as we want to see those
voluptuous women disrobe one another in between sex scenes where characters
plainly are dry humping not even touching one another. Mostly however the film is a cavalcade of 80s
Italian kitsch and garishness with a number of dark revelations that are treated
with almost carefree abandon.
The story I think involves a young executor named Sarah
(Kristine Rose) on the cusp of executing her ex-lover’s will, must settle on
one heir from a well-to-do Louisiana estate to inherit within eleven days. Along the way, sleeping around from person to
person, a number of secrets begin emerging including an ill-timed date rape sequence
involving an elderly teacher drugging and having his way with one of his young
students. Besides that, a chunk of it
involves cuckolding including a scene where she takes a suitor into a strip
club with her and proceeds to join the other dancers onstage and interpersonal
well-dressed estate management machinations.
While dripping in sleazy style and carrying over recurring themes in the
director’s multicolored art-porn canon, here Eleven Days, Eleven Nights 2 is
kind of a middling slog. Kristine Rose
does a pretty good job and would later show up in bit parts like Batman
Returns and Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies but having seen the wild reckless
abandonment of, say, Tinto Brass’ Frivolous Lola, neither the film nor
the protagonist of Eleven Days, Eleven Nights 2 do much to mix erotica
with pointed provocation.
88 Films while skipping the first film in the US and going
with the lesser sequel film for the full blown 4K UHD disc replete with a
slipcover and collector’s booklet, the technical merits of this restoration and
rerelease are indeed sound. The 2.0 mono
track is clean and audible and the cinematography remains crisp and
handsome. For what it is worth, the film
is rather well made and composed in 1.66:1 widescreen. Still, having waded through enough Tinto Brass
by now, not all of them worked but some did indeed have a bit of a kick to
them. Here, its just kind of flat and
uninteresting despite being in the vein of Brass or even Jack Hill in terms of
depicting independent thinking female characters who aren’t ashamed of their
sexuality as they navigate a male-dominated world. In theory there’s a pretty good softcore sex
dramedy here but as for myself I was mostly indifferent to the
proceedings. To each their own.
--Andrew Kotwicki
