Laura Gemser’s Emanuelle series started innocuously enough, but soon she was running into slavers, zombies, and Amazon cannibals. It’s the latter she contends with in Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali, aka Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, and she handles them and their voracious appetites for human meat the way she handles pretty much every obstacle in her movies—by getting naked. In truth, Gemser has nothing to fear from flesh eaters—she’s nothing but skin and bones. But of course her angular, stick-figure exoticism is her appeal.

You really have to appreciate how hard Gemser tries to breathe life into this one, gamely wading into fetid swamps, battling murderous anacondas, and letting ham-fisted Italian dudes paw her tender parts. Her co-stars Gabriele Tinti, Mónica Zanchi, Annamaria Clementi, and Nieves Navarro likewise give their all—including some innards, a uterus, and plenty of dignity—but the mixture of sex and gore is jarring, and the Mondo Cane style shock documentary realism is totally inappropriate. Oh, and we’ll add that the scene in which a chimpanzee smokes a cigarette—and French style, no less—is just wrong.

We gather that this was a pioneering effort by director Joe D’Amato at genre mash-up, but being neither scary nor erotic, we can only shrug at the final result. However, on the plus side of the ledger you get a groovy score from Nico Fidenco, some lush tropical scenery, and several unintentionally funny “cannibal cam” sequences. In the end, the film imparts one important lesson, which is that there’s never a bad time to get your hump on, even when homicidal cannibals are lurking in the undergrowth. Above you see the movie’s nice Italian poster, painted by Lamberto Forni. Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali premiered in Italy today in 1977.

We’re showing you this August 1966 Continental Film Review for one reason—Raquel Welch. She appears in both the front and back of the magazine, and the latter photo was made while she was in the Canary Islands filming One Million Years B.C. That photo session featuring a blonde, windblown Welch was incredibly fruitful, at least if we’re to judge by the many different places we’ve seen frames from the shoot, including here, here, here and especially here. There had not been a sex symbol quite like Welch before, and in 1966 she had reached the apex of her allure, where she’d stay for quite a while.

On the cover of the magazine are Christina Schollin and Jarl Kulle, pictured during a tender moment from the Swedish romantic comedy Änglar, finns dom? aka Love Mates. Inside you get features on the Berlin and San Sebastian film festivals, Sophia Loren, Nieves Navarro, Anita Ekberg, and more. CFR had launched in 1952, and now, fourteen years later, was one of Britain’s leading publications on foreign film. It was also a leading publication in showing nude actresses, and in fact by the 1970s was probably more noteworthy for its nudity than its journalism. The move probably undermined its credibility, but most magazines—whether fashion, film, or erotic—began showing more in the 1970s. CFR was simply following the trend, and reached its raciest level around 1973, as in the issue here. Fifteen scans below.