Despite the title this has absolutely nothing to do with either the French "Emmanuelle" series with Sylvia Kristel or the "Black Emanuelle" series with Laura Gemser directed by Joe D'Amato. This is another Italian rip-off of the American film "Mandingo". Since it's a low-budget Italian knock-off of a movie that was ALREADY indefensibly trashy, it goes without saying that it's not good. But the more useful thing to do perhaps is compare it to the OTHER main Italian-made "Mandingo" rip-off, which was imaginatively titled "Mandinga".
The "American South" portrayed in this movie is marginally more convincing than the one in "Mandinga" (I didn't see nearly as many palm trees in the background), and the "black" characters SOMEWHAT resemble actual African Americans. The Italians were actually quite good at interracial sex epics (they practically had a whole 1970's subgenre dedicated to it represented by some of the work of Joe D'Amato, the giallo "Tropic of Cancer" and even going all the way back to 1970 with Pier Vivarelli film "Il Dio serpiente"). However, they definitely weren't so good at historical drama, or at portraying the American South. And their "black" actors (like Laura Gemser, for instance) often didn't even look convincingly black, let alone like African American.
The lead here is Malisa Longo. Like Maria Rosario Riuzzi, who played the title character in "Mandinga", Longo was basically just a nice piece of tail. However, you could say the same thing about even the famous cult actresses of the era like Babara Bouchet, Rosalba Neri, or Edwige Fenech. Longo is not on the level of those actresses, but she was a decent second-tier actress kind of in the class of Femi Benussi, Gloria Guida, Lili Karati, or Mariangela Giordano. She is definitely better the Riuzzi is in "Mandinga", and she is occasionally quite effective as a wicked "Southern" plantation lady who takes off all her clothes and bathes in a stream in order to cruelly entice her "black" male slaves.
Of course, if you just don't want to see a Italian rip-off of "Mandingo", you should avoid this. For better or worse, it doesn't really compare to the American model (which was filmed in the real American South with real African American actors). But it's a definite (if marginal) improvement over "Mandinga".
