Oh Cannon. You make an Emile Zola movie and it ends up being directed by Dan Wolman, who also made Up Your Anchor for Cannon and written by Marc Behm, who would write X-Ray for the studio. He also wrote the novel that Eye of the Beholder was made from, as well as The Beatles' Help!

And the result ends up being the type of movie that winds up on our site.

Katya Berger (who was in Absurd and is the daughter of William Berger; her half sister Debra is also in this and her resume is even more made up of movies that make our site, like Born for Hell, Emanuelle In Bangkok, The Inglorious Bastards and another Cannon film, Dangerously Close) starts as a girl who has no idea how to use her carnal abilities, yet is in a bordello, but by the end, she's destroying lives. Sleeping with bankers, dumping them for royalty, making counts act like human dogs, cucking them for their sons...what is this, a Joe D'Amato movie?

The thing is, if D'Amato had made this, it would have been way better. Sure, this looks classy, but it forgets that if it wants to be a classy literate film, it shouldn't have so much nudity. Then it can't put together that if it wants to be sleaze, it's way slow and never really gets to the madness that a Mattei, a Franco, a Tinto Brass would remember.

But hey! 1960s Profumo scandal figure Mandy Rice-Davies - who is also in Black Venus - and Annie Beale from House on the Edge of the Park and D'Amato's L'alcova are in this so it can't all be boring. Plus, it has Ennio Morricone making the music, so that's a positive, right? And then they spelled his name wrong!

Speaking of Franco, there's a scene with rich people hunting naked women, which is the kind of thing that he would make an entire movie about. More than once, if you want to get down to facts. This scene also has all sorts of inserts and male and female full frontal, which the main actors seem to be kind of like, "What are we doing?" as it happens.

And really, the sleaziest part of this - and you'd have to watch the credits to get it - is that both of the Berger sisters end up having movie sex in this, which feels totally D'Amato in nature. William Berger had to be a bit shocked, right? I mean, aren't you scandalized?

Armando Nannuzzi was the cinematographer on this movie and if his name sounds familiar, well, he's the guy who Stephen King blinded in one eye while making Silver Bullet.

It states 'comic, drama'. I couldn't find anything comical in there.

The setting is perfect, what one would expect from Zola. Acting by Katya Berger ... already difficult to judge. In itself it is naught; as Nana it does fit.

A captivating narration by Zola about the 'fickle women' (Shakespeare). In this sense this movie deserves full marks. It shows a rather emotionless ascent of a woman, rather an adolescent, to what her attraction can get her. In this sense, close to full marks.

On the other hand, if one perceives movie making as having a meaning beyond mere photographing, as analytic process, also displaying inner sentiments, doubts, motivators; this movie is a clear fail. Katya Berger as Nana just swirls around from scene to scene, until - sooner or later - her seemingly never reflected drive for more and more reaches its logic end.

All in all, definitely deserving better than the current 4,4.

Usually I don't review anything I haven't watched in its entirety, but it was 2 at night, half an hour still to go, and I was certain that I would not miss anything of value by going to sleep. (Was anything produced by Golan and Globus ever of value?) There are two major problems in this film. First is the plot: too many scenes are individual sketches that don't connect to anything. Not that this is a surprise in softcore porn... The second, and worse, problem is Katya Berger. She is supposed to bewitch every man in the film but I totally fail to see how. All I saw was a little girl with zero acting abilities, not even that pretty. OK, the green eyes are cute in close-up, but several other women in the film are far better-looking.

Nothing else is too convincing either. What seemed interesting at first was the presence of the legendary Georges Méliès as a character. There, too, is a dual problem: the two examples of his films do not look like genuine films of the era, and they have none of the inventiveness that was his trademark.