Indonesian beauty Laura Gemser (Black Cobra Woman) stars as the oft-naked Emanuelle, Queen of the Desert. Except she doesn’t really play Emmanuelle as she has many a time, but rather a generic hussy going by the exotic name of Sheila. I understand the title switcheroo, as Sheila, Queen of the Desert sounds about as marketable as, say, Marcy, Ace Groundskeeper.
As the film’s story begins, Emanuelle Sheila is washing her breasts at a river when she’s approached by a scruffy guerilla soldier named Victor, who asks, “Have you ever screwed a guy you just met?”
She says, “Yes,” so he promptly jumps atop her. But she says if he wants “free pussy,” he has to work for it, so off she runs into the mountains. Victor angrily gives chase, eventually threatening to kill her with his knife if she doesn’t put out. Being crafty, she distracts him with her body so that Victor loses his footing and accidentally stabs himself in the gut as he rolls down the mountain to his death.
And that, ladies and gentleman, is how you get to be Queen of the Desert.
Soon, his buddies discover his blue-balled body and go looking for his murderer, although they’re already lost and don’t realize that the woman who’s just offered to be their guide is also responsible for his doom. Before long, she’s using her feminine wiles to get them to turn on one another.
What begins as sleazy fun then becomes a sleazy depressant, with rape, murder and gratuitous fruit-eating. The only thing more ludicrous than its claim that it was based on a novel is that … well, no, that covers it, really. —Rod Lott