Eleven Days, Eleven Nights is an obvious Italian attempt to cash in on the success of the 1986 Hollywood hit 9½ Weeks. With Joe D’Amato directing you expect plenty of sleaze but that’s not quite what you get.

The setting is New Orleans (the movie is clearly aimed at the American market).

The premise is that Sarah Asproon (Jessica Moore) is writing a book about her first hundred lovers but poor Sarah has only managed to collect ninety-nine so far. She fixes that problem quickly and efficiently by seducing a total stranger on a ferryboat. The total stranger is young architect Michael (Joshua McDonald) and he thinks all his Christmases have come at once.

Sarah heads off happily to her publisher to tell her she has now hit her target of 100 but her publisher isn’t satisfied. Her publisher thinks that the hundredth lover should be a bit more memorable than an anonymous coupling on a ferry. She suggests that Sarah should find Michael and at least have a brief fling with him. Sarah does so and offers Michael eleven nights of sexual fun and games before his marriage.

Michael thinks it’s a great idea. He’s getting married to a sweet girl named Helen in eleven days’ time and the idea of spending those eleven nights having hot steamy sex with Sarah really appeals to him.

What Michael doesn’t know is that Sarah is a bit kinky. Michael has never done anything kinky before and he’s a bit bewildered. He’s in over his head.

To say Sarah is kinky is an oversimplification. She likes playing games. She likes playing sex games. Sarah’s games always seem to involve humiliating Michael but although he is freaked out by her he can’t keep away from her. She’s just so hot.

His fiancée Helen starts to get the feeling that he’s lost interest in her. Which he has. Nice girl Helen can’t really compete with sexy bad girl Sarah. Helen is perhaps a bit too sweet. She doesn’t drive him crazy with desire the way Sarah does.

Sarah’s games are a little bit cruel but not overly so and she assumes that since this is his last fling before marriage Michael probably won’t mind if things get a bit wild. And Sarah is totally honest with him right from the start. She’s offering him eleven nights of hot no-strings-attached sex. It’s not as if she’s promising him love and commitment and home-baked cookies.

Michael isn’t cut out for this sort of thing. He thinks he is but he isn’t. He’s a guy who should just marry a girl-next-door type like Helen and settle into cosy domesticity. He starts to get all mopey and miserable.

It’s hard to like Michael. He’s pathetic, and he’s a hypocrite. The fact that Joshua McDonald is a very poor actor doesn’t help.

Michael is not just a creep, he’s incredibly dumb. He really thinks he can spend every night having wild sex with Miss Kinky Boots and that Helen won’t realise what’s happening. In fact of course there’s not a woman in the world who wouldn’t be able to figure out what’s going on. When the man she’s about to marry suddenly isn’t interested in touching her it’s a pretty fair bet he’s found another woman.

Sarah is more sympathetic because she’s honest and if Michael can’t handle the situation it’s not like she’s forcing him to keep coming back for more.

Jessica Moore (whose real name is Luciana Ottaviani) gives a pretty solid performance. She is certainly sexy and uninhibited.

Look out for Laura Gemser in a minor role as Sarah’s publisher.

It’s 9½ Weeks but with the woman calling the shots.

How you react to this film (and to the ending) depends entirely on how you react to Michael and Sarah. It depends on whether you buy the idea that Michael is an innocent victim who has been led astray by a femme fatale. Personally I don’t buy that idea at all. Sarah has been totally honest with him and she has tried to keep her side of the bargain.

And it depends a lot on whether you regard Sarah as a femme fatale. I don’t really see her that way. She loves playing erotic games but she really has no intention of hurting anyone. Maybe she’s naïve in thinking that nobody will get hurt, but she is not a woman who actually enjoys hurting people. And while she likes to play around with dominance-submission games she’s not a genuine dominatrix. She’s just being playful. The fact that people do end up getting hurt is in some ways accidental. Sex is always a potentially dangerous game and there’s no way to be certain you can avoid emotional entanglements.

There’s plenty of nudity and sex and while it’s softcore it’s fairly explicit softcore, and there are kinky sex games, but this movie really doesn’t feel all that sleazy. It gives the impression that D’Amato was trying to do what Emmanuelle had done back in the 70s – make a sex movie aimed to a large extent at women and couples. There had been some American movies in the 80s that had aimed for mainstream success with steamy eroticism. Whether that market really was still viable is perhaps debatable. 9½ Weeks had done poorly on initial release but had made a mint through video rentals and since Eleven Days, Eleven Nights was presumably aimed mainly at the video market it was probably reasonable to assume that that market did still exist. The idea that women enjoy sex movies if they’re done in a classy way is pretty sound. And Eleven Days, Eleven Nights was commercially very successful.

Eleven Days, Eleven Nights is a lot more entertaining than 9½ Weeks. Highly recommended if classy well-made erotica is your thing.

The 88 Films Blu-Ray offers a very good transfer and an audio commentary by Troy Howarth.