I was first introduced to this and other 'Emmanuelle' films in the early days of Cinemax (or 'Skin-emax', as we used to call it) and other pay-cable channels that started featuring soft-core porn after midnight on the weekends. In the early 80s--when the government was cracking down on pornography and the market for direct-to-video softcore porn had yet to be plumbed--cable outlets like Cinemax had few options for 'dirty movies' that didn't cross the hardcore threshold other than the small brace of adult films passing themselves off as 'European art-house' cinema to American audiences during the mid-to-late 70s. Other examples include Lady Chatterley's Lover (also starring Kristel, in an adaptation that would surely have humiliated poor D. H. Lawrence), Felicity, and Melody in Love, but the Emmannuelle franchise opened the proverbial floodgates (the title character in 'Felicity'--another story about a young woman on an adventure of sexual self-discovery in the far east--is seen reading the novel on which 'Emmannuelle' is based while traveling by plane to Bangcok).

As has been amply examined, the 'Emmannuelle' films are burdened with ponderous, annoying pretentiousness, and the audience must sit through way too much boring down-time between sex scenes that tend to tease more than satisfy. In this sense, 'Emmanuelle 2' and its ilk aren't bad for 'getting in the mood,' but compared to even the soft-core porn of today, these films are quaint. But they are fascinating as period pieces, and they are very sensual and erotic when compared to the rather mechanical and listless banging together of surgically enhanced bodies that dominates the adult film market today. Sylvia Kristel is no actress (apparently, she was so bad that her dialogue was overdubbed by another actress in the first 'Emmannuelle' film), and she is not the most beautiful woman ever to get naked in front of a camera, but this is part of her appeal: she has the face and body of a real woman, and she seems genuinely turned on (in that vaguely-detached, dreamy European way) by what she's doing.

But what a nostalgia trip! Sylvia Kristel introduced so many horny young boys with pay cable to the joys of sex in foreign locales and strange places. The concept of two women making love to each other was completely unknown to me before I met Emmanuelle! I can't help but laugh thinking back to how much of my sexual education I owe to the Emmanuelle films and the other naughty Euro-trash skin-flicks Cinemax kept in heavy rotation throughout the 80s. Mom and Dad were way too uptight and repressed to fill me in--thank goodness cable television was there to explain everything.

The rambling philosophical ruminations on erotica that made up such a large part of the first movie (and frankly made no sense whatsoever) are absent here in favor of much more familiar explorations of strange sensual experiences (other women, men, groups, unusual settings, even acupuncture and massage) typical of a 70s erotic novel. Just Jaekin, director of the first movie, dismissed this film (along with the rest of the series) as unnecessarily tacked on junk, but the formula of the first movie is faithfully followed here and the results are quite watchable if not to be taken too seriously. Steamy Thailand creates an effectively exotic hothouse setting for the languorous writhing that takes up much of the movie's running time and everything looks very colorful and lush thanks to an excellent cinematographic eye for tropical images. The result is somewhat less entertaining than it sounds. It's a soft-core travelogue with the beautiful but rather dull to watch Sylvia Kristel front and center for most of the film. I have never been convinced that the woman could act, and though she looks great, she seems rather overburdened to carry a whole film for 100 minutes. Something about her performance is never completely convincing or in the moment. Nevertheless, the movie looks good, and has moments of true erotic power - something many others in this genre fail to attain - making it far from the worst choice a viewer might make when looking for an erotic adventure film.

The second Emmanuelle movie is set in Hong Kong instead of Thailand, it is less provocative than the first and looks rather like a travel company's advertising clip. The story seems to be a random collection of impressions, it doesn't really have a beginning or a conclusive end. This may sound a bit negative so far, but despite the lack of dramatic action, it still is a movie I love to watch again and again. It's the only movie Francis Giacobetti ever directed, so maybe he didn't have much experience with actors, but he sure knew how to make pictures look great. Part 2 may well have the best musical score (by Francis Lai). One of the three masseuses in the steaming hot bath scene is the stunning Laura Gemser who'd become "Black Emanuelle" for a whole bunch of pictures. I voted 7/8/6/4/6/7 for the six cinema films of the series.