There's a strange incongruity in seeing the two words Emmanuelle and Soho together in the same title: the former elicits dreams of silk sheets, exotic locations and dusky beauty; the latter visions of slapped-up two-penny tarts, sleazy deals and dirty macs. There's much more of the latter in this poorly scripted, cheaply filmed and execrably acted late entry into the British sexploitation genre, originally conceived as a vehicle for Mary Millington and finally shovelled onto the screen a couple of years after her death.
Emmanuelle in this offering is a London cockney nude model living in a house-share with an Asian bird (with thick Yorkshire accent) and a weedy bisexual photographer. The main body of the plot involves the photographer being cheated out of the due proceeds of the softcore porn shoots he's doing with Emmanuelle and then getting his revenge against the seedy agent who is ripping him off. The lame plotting has the Asian girl getting a job as a nude dancer in a naff musical, the cast of which are invited to a party at which the agent is filmed bonking his secretary, leaving him able to be blackmailed into making our photographer his partner. There's a strange voice-over monologue at the end from the Asian girl, pouring scorn on the masculinity of the photographer and outing him as a gay rent boy, a revelation which comes so far out of nowhere that one suspects it was put in as a deliberate insult to the actor playing the role! Most of the men in the cast are, strangely, as camp as knickers.
But really, who cares about the plot - the makers obviously didn't. The nude musical and the swinging party leave a lot of scope to include scenes of naked birds walking around with their knockers and bums showing; the party is the film's set-piece, with a number of cut-aways to action in side-rooms: an ugly hairy herbert having a threesome with a couple of old trollops and two girls getting Sapphic in a hot tub (and there's a deleted scene of another threesome at the party, involving two girls and a cute French guy, which is miraculously for a British film actually pretty hot, but of course that's the one that ended up out of the final cut).
The agent is played by the film's co-writer, the egregious bit part spiv John M East, a true Archie Rice of the British sexploitation genre, who litters the dialogue with pathetic quips, awful puns, poor double entendres and unfunny "jokes". There's a bit more pizazz to the film-making than in producer David Sullivan's previous film Queen of the Blues, and the whole thing is so cheap and nasty that it's quite a gripping short watch (it moves along at a decent enough lick).
At the very least, you can't say that the pornographers who made it were after aggrandising themselves - Soho is portrayed as a sordid little world full of two-bit chancers, back-stabbing cheats and low business chicanery. As such, it reveals a pretty horrible corner of Capitalism and the sleaze-balls who inhabit it which has perhaps more genuine honesty than a more respectable film or TV programme of the era might dare show.
Emmanuelle in this offering is a London cockney nude model living in a house-share with an Asian bird (with thick Yorkshire accent) and a weedy bisexual photographer. The main body of the plot involves the photographer being cheated out of the due proceeds of the softcore porn shoots he's doing with Emmanuelle and then getting his revenge against the seedy agent who is ripping him off. The lame plotting has the Asian girl getting a job as a nude dancer in a naff musical, the cast of which are invited to a party at which the agent is filmed bonking his secretary, leaving him able to be blackmailed into making our photographer his partner. There's a strange voice-over monologue at the end from the Asian girl, pouring scorn on the masculinity of the photographer and outing him as a gay rent boy, a revelation which comes so far out of nowhere that one suspects it was put in as a deliberate insult to the actor playing the role! Most of the men in the cast are, strangely, as camp as knickers.
But really, who cares about the plot - the makers obviously didn't. The nude musical and the swinging party leave a lot of scope to include scenes of naked birds walking around with their knockers and bums showing; the party is the film's set-piece, with a number of cut-aways to action in side-rooms: an ugly hairy herbert having a threesome with a couple of old trollops and two girls getting Sapphic in a hot tub (and there's a deleted scene of another threesome at the party, involving two girls and a cute French guy, which is miraculously for a British film actually pretty hot, but of course that's the one that ended up out of the final cut).
The agent is played by the film's co-writer, the egregious bit part spiv John M East, a true Archie Rice of the British sexploitation genre, who litters the dialogue with pathetic quips, awful puns, poor double entendres and unfunny "jokes". There's a bit more pizazz to the film-making than in producer David Sullivan's previous film Queen of the Blues, and the whole thing is so cheap and nasty that it's quite a gripping short watch (it moves along at a decent enough lick).
At the very least, you can't say that the pornographers who made it were after aggrandising themselves - Soho is portrayed as a sordid little world full of two-bit chancers, back-stabbing cheats and low business chicanery. As such, it reveals a pretty horrible corner of Capitalism and the sleaze-balls who inhabit it which has perhaps more genuine honesty than a more respectable film or TV programme of the era might dare show.