Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Roman Sampson One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Ginger Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

gridoon2018 At first I thought it would be a nice change-of-pace to see Laura Gemser in something other than a "Black Emanuelle" film, but "Black Cobra" is not really all THAT different from those: lots of nudity, little plot. It's actually pretty tame in terms of sex and violence; its only real claims to infamy are probably two scenes of real animal deaths (a snake being skinned alive and cooked, and a rat being crushed to death and swallowed by another snake). Speaking of snakes and rats, Laura Gemser definitely proves in this film that she's not squeamish, handling them with apparent ease! She's a bit too thin for my tastes here, but her face is magically beautiful. I always enjoy seeing Hong Kong as a film setting, but the story, what little there is, moves sluggishly and the motivation for the first murder is suspect to say the least (if it was jealousy, how could Tinti have known that the snake wouldn't kill the object of his affection instead? If it was just a joke gone wrong, then he's an idiot). Perhaps the biggest surprise in "Black Cobra" is that Jack Palance plays an (eccentric but) non-malicious character! *1/2 out of 4.

jaibo This slithering pit of serpents tells the story of a beautiful young female snake dancer, Eva, who falls in with two wealthy brothers whilst working in Hong Kong. The older brother, Judas, is an amateur herpetologist with his own collection of deadly vipers, adders and mambas; the younger, Jules, carries with him some resentment at having to work running the family business for five more years before he can get his hands on his inheritance. Judas adds Eva to his collection, setting her up with her own room, car and bank account, but things get complicated when Jules starts using his brother's snakes for his own deadly purposes.This early (1976) D'Amato thriller throws his usual jaundiced glance at the predicament of a woman in a man's world and, like the previous year's Emanuelle e Françoise le sorelline, it shows a woman going to extreme lengths to revenge herself on the man who does her and her female companions wrong. In the previous film, Emanuelle had wrought revenge on the man whose abuse drove her sister to suicide; here, Eva seeks redress when one of Jules' victims is her female lover; the revenge is lurid and horrific, as Jules is tricked into going to a remote island whereby a cobra is inserted into his anus and left so that it has no option than to eat its way out (this is apparently an old custom of the Island Eva was born on, called "putting the devil into a man to set him free"!). Yet Eva's revenge does her little good, and she ends up rejected by Judas and committing suicide like a modern day Cleopatra.D'Amato's film shows him stepping onto the path which was eventually to lead him down the route from softcore to hardcore porn and he loses few opportunities to show his actresses in various states of undress and erotic clinch. But he also ensures that his women are treated sympathetically – Eva's relationship with her girlfriend is seen as a refuge from a male world which is exploitative, abusive and tainted by the idea of ownership and patronage. Eva is given a considerable back-story, which details her being left and orphan, taught by a guardian to dance with snakes and being prostituted to men when she was still in her teens. She chooses Judas' patronage in order to escape the poisonous relationship she is having with a jealous Chinese businessman. The irony is that for all her attempts to escape from the world of male power, she can only help her girlfriend by her own patronage (using the money Judas has given her) and her revenge on Jules does nothing to free her from the cycle of violence which is as involving and inescapable as Ouroboros, the famous serpent which swallows its tail. In some ways, the film is a twisted contemporary spin on Biblical myth, with the traitor Judas at the top of the patriarchal tree and the temptress Eve the struggling victim of male power.Eva Nera isn't a perfect film; there are major plot-holes and there's rather too much erotic filler. D'Amato's cinematography is nevertheless immaculate; Gemser and Palance give their usual turns, which will delight their admirers, and the Hong Kong locations are well used. It does add weight to the idea that D'Amato was using his exploitation film-making put on screen valid visions of a female against a world of power, corruption and dominance in which the cards are stacked against her and in which, if she turns into a snake to fight the snakes, she is caught in a deadly, venomous trap.

superguapo2000 Eva Nera (AKA Black Cobra) is my favorite entry in Joe D'Amato's infamous "Black Emanuelle" series. Also known as "Emanuelle Goes Japanese", this film features no characters named Emanuelle, and doesn't take place in (or in any way allude to) the country of Japan. Other than these minor details, Eva Nera exhibits every other trait of a Black Emanuelle movie, including of course Laura Gemser as the main character, and the ever-present douche-bag Gabriele Tinti lurking somewhere in the cast. And though this movie lacks some of the overt acts of depravity that other Emanuelle flicks are known for, it offers three times that in the form of a more subtle weirdness.The movie begins with Eva's arrival in Hong Kong. Played by the beautifully boring Laura Gemser, Eva's character is essentially the same as Black Emanuelle: a frigid, vapid, nonchalantly nymphomaniacal bisexual nudist mannequin-like temptress. Unlike Emanuelle, who is a reporter, Eva is a snake dancer. Here we use the term "dancer" loosely to mean standing around naked and arrhythmically flailing your arms while holding a live snake.As you would expect from Joe D'Amato, the story that follows is totally nondescript and irrational, and mostly serves as a vehicle for him to express his most banal ideas of what constitutes eroticism. The remarkable thing is that, unlike other of his creations, like say Emanuelle and The Last Cannibals, here D'Amato tries to exercise restraint, which results in a bizarre, watered-down version of the typical D'Amato fetishes. Included are the mandatory nudism, lesbianism, morbidness, and the gawking fascination with all things foreign and Exotic that characterizes D'Amato's work, minus the ultra-violent sadism that he's also famous for. Along the way, D'Amato's camera still manages to objectify and diminish every single living and non-living thing it gazes upon, whether it be the bland characters, the city of Hong Kong, those oh-so-dangerous snakes, or deeper aspects of human experience such as love and death.None of this would stand out much were it not for two key elements that make Eva Nera exceptional: the haunting euro-soundtrack and the mind-blowingly strange performance by Jack Palance, whose character is so freakin' weird it defies description. Highly recommended.

Michael_Elliott Black Cobra (1976) * 1/2 (out of 4) Joe D'Amato directed film about a shy, lonely man (Jack Palance) living in Hong Kong where his only friends are his pet snakes. One night his brother takes him to a strip joint where he sees a beautiful woman (Laura Gemser) putting on a dance with a snake. He moves the woman in but soon someone starts killing off her lesbian friends. The killer doesn't know the woman is a Goddess to snakes. Like many other D'Amato/Gemser films, this one here basically leaves the plot behind in favor of the beautiful actress walking around in the nude and carrying out various lesbian scenes. Gemser is also fun to watch (when she's naked) but the story here is pretty dull and lifeless. Palance must have really been down on his luck at the time.