Joe D’Amato, (birth name: Aristide Massaccesi) (December 15, 1936 in Rome – January 23, 1999 in Rome) was a prolific Italian filmmaker who directed little less than 200 movies, usually at the same time acting as producer and cinematographer, and sometimes providing the script as well. While D’Amato contributed to many different genres (such as the spaghetti western, the war movie, the swashbuckler, the peplum, and the fantasy film), he mainly devoted himself to the exploration (and exploitation) of cinematic eroticism and voyeurism, both soft- and hardcore. Still, he probably gained greatest fame through a few notorious horror movies which he made early on in his career.
D’Amato was familiar to the environment of cinema through his father who worked as an electrician at Cinecittà. He began his career in 1961 as camera operator (often working under cinematographer Franco Villa). Then, starting with Pelle di Bandito in 1969, he regularly worked as director of photography for directors such as Demofilo Fidani (Dead Men Don’t Make Shadows, One Damned Day at Dawn…Django Meets Sartana!, A Barrel Full of Dollars), Alberto De Martino, Massimo Dallamano (What Have You Done to Solange?), Silvio Amadio, Mino Guerrini, and Michele Lupo (Ben and Charlie).
In 1972, D’Amato started directing his own movies whilst continuing to work as cinematographer for other directors. His first directorial efforts include the spaghetti westerns Scansati… a Trinità arriva Eldorado and A Bounty Killer in Trinity, the decamerotic movies Novelle licenziose di vergini vogliose and More Sexy Canterbury Tales (The Last Decameron), the erotic comedy Vow of Chastity (with Laura Gemser), the swashbuckler burlesque Pugni, Pirati e Karatè (starring Richard Harrison, the war movie Heroes in Hell (with Klaus Kinski), and the gothic giallo Death Smiles at a Murderer (starring Klaus Kinski and Ewa Aulin).
In the second half of the 1970s, D’Amato tried to capitalize on the worldwide commercial success of the French softcore movie series Emmanuelle. His first attempt, Emanuelle’s Revenge, a collaboration with Bruno Mattei, only referred to the French heroine in name. Next, Black Cobra Woman (Eva nera), starring Jack Palance and Laura Gemser, already incorporated several plot elements from the French series. Laura Gemser had previously impersonated the character of Black Emanuelle in a film by Bitto Albertini. Under the direction of D’Amato, Gemser continued the series with a total of five sequels which grew increasingly violent and included scenes of gang rape, zoophilia, cannibalism, and fake snuff film footage. (Some versions for the foreign market – especially in France – also contained hardcore sex scenes, which D’Amato claimed not to have directed himself.) Besides the Emanuelle movies, D’Amato also directed Ladies’ Doctor (1977), a sexy satire on the Italian health care system starring Renzo Montagnani, the mercenary movie Tough to Kill (1978), made two erotic mondo movies (Emanuelle and the Erotic Nights and Sexy Night Report) again in collaboration with Bruno Mattei, and the sequel Sexy Night Report N.2 on his own. At the end of the decade, D’Amato directed The Pleasure Shop on 7th Avenue (which follows the Last House on the Left-formula and contains in its uncut version, though essentially a softcore movie, a brief scene of fellatio) and Images in a Convent (a nunsploitation movie containing a hardcore gang rape scene).
In the early 1980s D’Amato made some of his best known gore films such as Antropophagus, Absurd (Horrible), and Buio Omega (Beyond the Darkness), for which he later gained cult status among horror film fans.
He then went into an early hardcore phase, starting out with a series of hard and soft porn movies shot around Santo Domingo in the [[Dominican Republic]. Some mix eroticism with horror movie themes like cannibalism (Papaya, Love Goddess of the Cannibals, softcore, with Sirpa Lane), zombies (Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, hard, with Laura Gemser), voodoo (Sex and Black Magic, a softcore movie starring Richard Harrison), and homicidal radioactive mutants (Porno Holocaust, hardcore). Less horrific are Black Sex (the first genuine Italian hardcore movie and at the same time a weird melange of ghost story and cancer drama), Hard Sensation (another variation on the Last House on the Left-model, also hardcore) and Paradiso Blu (a softcore Robinsonade starring Anna Bergman). Recurring stars of these movies were Mark Shannon, Lucia Ramirez, Dirce Funari, and Annj Goren.
Back in Italy, D’Amato mostly worked together with Claudio Bernabei on a number of obscure low-budget hardcore productions with titles like Super Hard Core, La voglia, Blue Erotic Climax, Le porno investigatrici, Stretta e Bagnata, Bocca Golosa, and Love in Hong Kong, for most of which they used the directorial pseudonym Alexandre Borsky. On his own, D’Amato directed the so-called Imperial Trilogy, starting with Caligula: The Untold Story (the sequel to Tinto Brass’ Caligula) and concluding with the obscure low-budget follow-ups Messalina orgasmo imperiale and Una vergine per l’impero romano. Recurring stars of this period were Pauline Teutscher, Laura Levi, Mark Shannon (again), and Paolo Gramignano.
Around this time, D’Amato also started working as a producer, which eventually led to the founding of his own film company. From 1982 to 1994, Filmirage – as it was called – financed a total of 42 escapist non-hardcore genre entries: slashers, horror, and post-apocalyptic movies directed by Umberto Lenzi (La Casa 3 – Ghosthouse, Nightmare Beach, Hitcher in the Dark), Claudio Fragasso (La Casa 5, Troll 2), Lucio Fulci (his last movie: Door into Silence), Michele Soavi (directorial debut: Stage Fright), and Luigi Montefiori (2020 Texas Gladiators), as well as a number of horror, fantasy, and softcore erotic movies directed by D’Amato himself, most notably three of the four Ator movies, the postapocalyptic film Endgame, the Dirty Dancing rip-off Dancing Is My Life (starring Valentine Demy), and the trilogy revolving around the fictional author Sarah Asproon (Eleven Days, Eleven Nights, Top Model, and Web of Desire, starring Jessica Moore and Kristine Rose).
In 1994, when Italian cinema was at a low point commercially, D’Amato returned to hardcore filmmaking. For his first handful of low-budget productions (mostly starring Luana Borgia), he again used the pseudonym Alexandre Borsky – before teaming up with Luca Damiano to co-direct, mostly uncredited, a number of higher-budgeted costume porn movies such as Aladdin X, Marco Polo, and Hamlet X.
Then, from 1995 until his death in early 1999, he mostly directed and produced movies on his own again, founding the production companies Butterfly Motion Pictures and Capital Film (with seat in Los Angeles). He transformed into hardcore pornography such divers subject matter as the tragedies of William Shakespeare (Juliet & Romeo, Othello 2000, Anthony and Cleopatra), Greco-Roman mythology (Ulysses, Samson and Hercules in the Land of the Amazons, Olympus – Refuge of the Gods), Roman emperors (Caligula – The Devious Emperor, Nero, Messalina), the 1920s and 1930s in the U.S. (Gangland Bangers, Some Like It Hard, Rudy – The Valentino Story), the W.I.P. genre (Operation Sex, The Joy Club, Midnight Obsession), the western (Outlaws, Calamity Jane), and Swashbucklers (Selen the Girl from Treasure Island, Raiders, Lady in the Iron Mask). He also devised porn versions of successful movies, such as Anal Instinct (Basic Instinct), Dangerous (Damage), Eternal Desire (Highlander), Anal Paprika (Paprika), Robin Hood: Thief of Wives (Robin Hood: Men in Tights), and Anal Perversions of Lolita (Lolita).
D’Amato was one of the few porn directors who in the late 1990s continued to shoot on 35mm film (and not on video). In the last five years of his life, he directed almost 100 hardcore movies for the European video market. During this time, he also sought ways to finance non-hardcore movies with money earned from directing hardcore pornography, of which he grew tired at times. They were to be four: the erotic movies Provocation (1995) and Top Girl (1996), the erotic thriller The Hyena (1997), and the pirate adventure movie Predators of the Antilles (1998) starring Anita Rinaldi.
Shortly after completing the hardcore feature Showgirl, Joe D’Amato died of heart failure at his villa in Rome in early 1999.
He had one son, Daniele Massaccesi, who started out by helping his father in the camera department and later moved to the United States where he entered into a lucrative career as a cameraman, working on such films as Cold Mountain, Hannibal, and Kingdom of Heaven. —wikipedia
