CANNIBAL

Playing like a starter to the main course of his seminal Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Cannibal is Deodato's first foray into the territory opened up by Umberto Lenzi's Deep River Savages (1972). Deodato was reportedly inspired to make Cannibal after reading a National Geographic story about a tribe of genuine cannibals living a stone-age existence in the Phillipines.
    Filmed in the mondo style in Malaysia, Cannibal enjoys excellent production values and one of the best-elaborated stories of the Italian third-world cannibal cycle. Deodato certainly makes the most of his flimsy premise: an expedition by an oil company to locate two missing prospectors uncovers a stone-age tribe of cannibals with the usual gory consequences. Cycle regular Ivan Rassimov appears as the hero, joined by that other stalwart of the cycle, former TV hostess Me Me Lay, as the lusty lady cannibal who rescues him.
    Surprisingly, the film got a theatrical release in the UK in the spring of 1979 (albeit cut by around four minutes). Rather less surprisingly, it remains banned on video.

Dir. Ruggero Deodato; Prod. Giorgio Carlo Rossi; Scr. Tito Carpi, Gianfranco Clerici, Renzo Genta, Giancarlo Rossi; Star. Massimo Foschi, Me Me Lay, Ivan Rassimov; With Judy Rosly, Suleiman Shamsi, Sheik Razak Shirkur

UK Vid. Derann Film Services, QRT 88 min, Beta, VHS & V2000
 
 
 
 

CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE  aka Apocalisse Domani (It.), Cannibals are in the Streets (US), Savage Apocalypse (US), The Slaughterers (US), Invasion of the Flesh Hunters (US) and others; New Fida Organisation/Jose Frade PC, Italy/Spain, 1980; 95 min

 
Cannibal Apocalypse was Antonio Margheriti’s first major horror since his popular gothics Flesh for Frankenstein (Il Monstro E in Tavola) (1973) and Blood for Dracula (Dracula Cerca Sangue) (1973). It is not, despite that suggestive title, his contribution to the third-world cannibal films popular in his native Italy at the time. It owes rather more to the seemingly endless morti viventi cycle that followed the Italian success of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1979) and Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesheaters (1979).
    The plot concerns three GIs (led by genre regular John Saxon)  who return from Vietnam where they have aquired a taste for human flesh. The three attempt to devour most of downtown Atlanta, spreading the cannibalistic contagion, before being trapped in the city’s sewers by a police squad with flamethrowers.
    The story, by Dardano Sacchetti (whose name appears in the script credits of nearly all the morti viventi films of the period) quickly forsakes the possibilities of that interesting premise and instead lapses into merely providing the kind of scenes audiences expected in the wake of Zombie Flesheaters. And, as a result of some savage cutting in most prints, even the graphic gore by Gino de Rossi (whose name appears in the effects credits of nearly all these pictures), isn’t in sufficient abundance to satisfy fans of his handiwork in Fulci’s film.

Dir. Anthony Dawson (Antonio Margheriti); Prod. Marizio Amati, Sandro Amati; Scr. Marizio Amati, Sandro Amati, Dardano Sacchetti, Jose Luis Martinez Molla; Star. John Saxon, Elisabeth Turner; With Cinzia Carolis, Cindy Hamilton, May Heatherley, Tony King, Ramiro Oliveiros, Giovanni Radice, Venantino Venantini

UK Vid. VPD, QRT 90 min (unrated), Beta & VHS; Intervision QRT 103 min (unrated), Beta & VHS
 
 
 

CANNIBAL FEROX  aka Make Them Die Slowly (US); Dania Film/Medusa/National Cinematographica, Italy, 1981; 93 min

 
Considered something of a holy grail among gore-starved UK video nasty collectors, Cannibal Ferox is a sickening, depraved and mean-spirited film. Furthermore, as nothing more than a shallow synthesis of conventions and expectations developed in its precursors in the cycle, the film would have been more accurately titled ‘Cannibal Xerox’.
    Advertising itself as banned in over thirty countries, Cannibal Ferox was thankfully the last of the hardcore cannibal excursions, directed by the man who with his Deep River Savages (1972) was responsible for the cycle, Umberto Lenzi. The film was aquired for American distribution by Aquarius who re-titled it  Make Them Die Slowly and prefaced showings with this ominous opening statement:
        “The following feature is one of the most violent films ever made. There are at least two dozen scenes of barbaric torture and sadistic cruelty graphically shown. If the presentation of this disgusting and repulsive subject matter upsets you, please do not view this film.”
    The story deals with three American college students embarking upon an expedition to a South American jungle to research a paper based upon the thesis that cannibalism doesn’t exist and is nothing more than a racist myth created by Europeans revelling in the idea of caucasians being dispatched by third-world savages (a myth not undeliberately perpetuated by all the films of this reprehensible cycle). In the jungle the party encounters two American emerald prospectors. One of them — a loathesome drug-addict — tortures the members of a native tribe (ostensibly to find out the location of the gems), driving them to enact a bloody revenge.
    Rather offensively, Lenzi’s film attempts to defend itself against accusations of racism by having the effrontery to declare that the ferocity of these primitive tribes is merely a reaction to the cruelty perpetrated by the invading whites. Such a claim is, of course, rank hypocrisy: the white cruelty is either merely described verbally or briefly sketched in in flashback, whereas the “reaction” of the tribesmen provides the sole raison d’être of the film, and is dealt with in sickening detail.
    Examples include a woman hung up by meathooks through her breasts, eyeballs gouged out with a knife, and a body opened from neck to groin and its intestines removed and eaten. In addition to losing an eye, Italian horror’s perennial victim, John Morghen, has his arm amputated, his penis lopped off and devoured, and — in a scene in which one is irresistibly reminded of a boiled egg — the top of his head sliced open so that his brains can be scooped out and eaten. Even more objectionable is Cannibal Ferox’s propensity to show the genuine slaughter of live animals because it is a cheap way to enhance the visual authenticity of the film.
    Unable to be considered anything other than morally indefensible, the film has nevertheless achieved a certain position in the horror pantheon. A few jaded seen-it-all-before splatter fans, capable of distancing themselves from the film’s unrelieved misanthropy by an instant appreciation of the ham-fisted direction, incongruous disco soundtrack and entirely gratuitous nudity, cannot fail to enjoy John Morgen’s scene-stealing villainy, Zora Kerova’s topless appeal and Gino de Rossi’s astonishing gore sequences. These viewers — the kind who are disproportionately amused by spotting former porn star Robert Bolla playing a New York cop who acts like he’s wandered on to the set of the wrong film — are best represented by cult grindhouse critic Joe Bob Briggs who, with tongue — as usual — firmly in cheek, summarised Cannibal Ferox perfectly in the Dallas Times Herald:
“When Umberto did that scene ... where the cannibals tie the American drug-dealer to the stake and gouge out his eyeball with a machete and hack off his privates, I have to say, I really felt something. It was like National Geographic or something.
“We’re talking world drive-in record material here: a ninety-eight on the vomit meter. Fourteen dead bodies. Eight breasts. Squished bird eating. Caterpillar eating. Cannibal torture. Leech sucking. Stupid white people torture. Pig torture. Blow dart fu. Eyeball rolls. Arm rolls. Gazebos roll. Half a head rolls. Two gratuitous furry animal murders. Great slime-eating tribe of extras. (Hope you guys got the full twenty cents a day for your work.) Turtle hacking. Hooks through the — no, I can’t say it — I have too much respect for women. Drive-In Academy Award nomination for Umberto Lenzi, for escaping from the asylum long enough to write lines like ‘What a waste of vacation!’ and ‘No, don’t eat that. It might be Rudy!’
“Four stars. Joe Bob says scream like hell till your neighborhood drive-in lets you check this sucker out.”

A digitally remastered laser disc has recently become available.

Dir. Umberto Lenzi; Prod. Antonio Crescenzi; Scr. Umberto Lenzi; Star. John Morghen (Giovanni Lombardo Radice), Lorraine de Selle; With John Bartha, Richard Bolla, Meg Fleming, Robert Kerman, Zora Kerova, Walter Lloyd, Bryan Redford.

UK Vid. VPD, QRT 86 min (unrated), Beta, VHS & V2000
 
 
 

CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST  FD Cinematigraphica, Italy, 1979; 95 min (varies widely)

The emblematic title of the third-world cannibal film cycle, Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust joined Driller Killer (1979), I Spit on Your Grave (1980) and SS Experiment Camp (1976) as one of the first four films to receive an outright UK ban prior to the Video Recordings Act at the height of the video nasties furore.
    The main body of the narrative depicts a team of exploitative Mondo-style documentary filmmakers searching for evidence of cannibalism in a South American jungle. They find a tribe of primitive natives who they torment, rape and torture with the usual repercussions. A framing device has the film they shot before their slaughter by the natives (who, exactly as in Umberto Lenzi’s soulless rip-off Cannibal Ferox, resort to cannibalism simply as a reaction to the cruelty of their white oppressors) being viewed by the top brass at an American TV station. The film ends with the disgusted executives filing out of the viewing room, one muttering “I wonder who the real cannibals are”.
    An intelligently rabid attack on the Mondo school of film-making, Cannibal Holocaust is a film rarely seen in its full unexpurgated form (bootlegged imports aside, the most widely seen version in the UK is the short-lived release on the Go Video label which at a QRT of 88 minutes was not a complete print). Even the hardest of die-hard gorefreaks have been known to blanch at scenes like a foetus ripped out of a woman’s womb and buried, a young woman impaled on a stake which enters through her vagina and exits through her mouth, and a nauseating catalogue of genuine cruelty to animals. (Even assistant director Lamberto Bava was sickened by the latter — he reportedly wandered into the jungle for a cigarette break during the filming of these sequences; the actors who remain on screen can barely hide their real revulsion.)
    An important film, Cannibal Holcaust is championed and vilified in equal measure because of its unparalleled ability to disturb its audience. This is due to a powerful combination of Deodato’s remarkable proficiency as a director and a script which is far better than the subgenre requires. Without doubt, the best of its type, the film has been variously described by critics as “the quintessential cannibal film”, “Deodato’s masterpiece” and “the auto-critique of the genre”.
    It should be noted that the film was capable of offending authorities in Deodato’s native Italy to such an extent that the film was banned there as well as in many other countries. Unable to satisfy critics that his convincing scenes of mutilation were simply staged, all Italian prints of Cannibal Holocaust were supposedly destoyed after a lengthy and unprecedented obscenity trial. Deodato managed to have the ruling overturned however and the film was back on Italian screens in 1983.
    Few films have been responsible for so much self-disgust among genre aficionados. A potent argument for censorship, Deodato’s film unintentionally forces its audience to question its tolerance for truly horrific — as opposed to simply horror — cinema.

Dir. Ruggero Deodato; Prod. Franco Palaggi; Scr. Gianfranco Clerici, With Luca Barbareschi, Francesca Ciardi, Robert Kerman, Perry Pirkamen

UK Vid. Go Video, QRT 88 min (unrated), Beta, VHS & V2000
 
 
 

CANNIBAL MAN  aka Apartment on the 13th Floor (US), La Semana del Asesino (Sp.);  Truchado Films, Spain, 1972; 120 min

 
Inglesia’s most famous horror outing is not, as the title suggests, another entry in the third-world cannibal cycle (there’s no cannibalism in it), but an early (and gory) psycho-killer picture filmed in Spain.
    Pre-figuring The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1973), Cannibal Man deals with a young abbatoir worker who embarks on a bloody killing spree and ends up living in fetid claustrophobia surrounded by bodies. On Monday a taxi driver is killed in a fit of pique. When his murder is discovered the next day by the young man’s girlfriend she is strangled and becomes victim number two. On Wednesday, the girlfriend’s brother finds his sister’s corpse and promptly becomes victim number three, to be followed on Thursday by his girlfriend who has her throat cut as victim number four. On Friday the girlfriend’s father gets a meatcleaver in the face. There is a brief respite from the slaughter when nothing happens on Saturday, but on Sunday a prostitute becomes the final victim. This Shakespearean tableau of corpses starts attracting flies, prompting our hero to attempt to dispose of the malodorous collection in a mincing machine. In an unintentionally hilarious twist ending a young homosexual, who has witnessed the murders from his window across the street, calls the killer to offer to help to bury the bodies. Understandably exhausted at this point, he cannot summon up the energy to murder this new witness (who, despite the carnage, appears to have fallen in love with him) and instead hands himself over to the police.
    A silly film.

Dir. Eloy de la Inglesia; Prod. Joe Truchado; Scr. Eloy de la Inglesia; Star. Vincent Parra; With Charlie Bravo, Emma Cohen, Rafael Hernandez, Lola Herrera, Vicky Lagos, Ismael Merlo, Eusebio Poncela, Valentin Tornos

UK Vid. Intervision, QRT 98 min (unrated), Beta, VHS & V2000; CBS, QRT 98 min (unrated), Beta, VHS & V2000
 
 
 
 

CANNIBALS

Up to Franco's usual standard — which isn't saying much — the first of the French/Spanish cannibal trilogy is certainly better than the woeful third entry (Julio Perez Taberno's Cannibal Terror, 1980), if not quite as interesting as his own follow-up, The Devil Hunter (1980).
    The parents of a little girl fall prey to a tribe of cannibals while cruising down the Amazon; she ends up in a river, washed up downstream, where she is adopted by the cannibals and revered as a goddess. Some years later the girl's father (Zombie Flesheaters' Al Cliver) — who lost an arm to the savages — sets out to track her down and finds himself once again face-to-face with the tribe.
    Produced by mondo scam-meister Franco Prosperi, the film is surprisingly restrained in the gore department and — for Franco — exceptionally prudish in its approach to nudity.

Dir. Jesus Franco; Prod. Franco Prosperi; Scr. A.L. Mariaux; Star. Al Cliver (Pier Luigi Conti), Sabrina Siani; With Jesus Franco, Lina Romay
 
 
 
 

CANNIBAL TERROR

The third in the execrable French/Spanish 'trilogy' started by Jess Franco's Cannibals (1979) and continued in The Devil Hunter (1980), this irredeemable quickie was made back to back with Cannibals by fellow hispanic hack Julio Perez Taberno, using the same sets and even recycling some of its footage.
    It's an uneventful (and largely gore-less) tale concerning an inept kidnapping gang on the run from the long arm of the law who unwisely decide to hide out in the jungle. They quickly fall prey to a bunch of unconvincing cannibal extras and, well, if you've seen one...

Dir. Allan W. Steeve (Julio Perez Taberno); Prod. Marius LaSoeur; Star. Gerard LeMaire, Oliver Mathot, Silvia Solar

UK Vid. Mountain Video, QRT 93 min, Beta & VHS
 
 
 
 

CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD

Fulci's gothic follow up to Zombie Flesheaters (1979), City of the Living Dead confirmed him as Italy's primo horror director in the early eighties.
    Filmed on location in the USA, the film details the opening of the gates of Hell in a Lovecraftian small town when a priest commits suicide. Before long the usual battle with the living dead is taking place, culminating in an exciting final act in a crypt where our heroes close the gates by dispatching the risen priest with a huge crucifix through the abdomen.
    Apart from Fulci's most famous scene — the powerdrill death of spaghetti whipping-boy John Morghen (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) — the highlight of the picture is a tense sequence in which Christopher George tries to free buried alive Catriona MacColl by repeatedly swinging a pickaxe through the coffin perilously close to her head! Stage Fright director Michele Soavi makes an early acting appearance as the boyfriend of a girl who involuntarily vomits her own intestines.
    Althought the film lacks the verve of Zombie Flesheaters and the élan of The Beyond, City of the Living Dead remains one of Fulci's most atmospheric films, evoking a tremendously brooding sense of small town isolation and decay.
    The excellent score by Fabio Frizzi has recently been re-released on CD.

Dir. Lucio Fulci; Prod. Giovanni Masini; Scr. Dardano Sachetti, Lucio Fulci; Star. Catriona MacColl, Christopher George; With Daniela Doria, Antonella Interlenghi,Fabrizio Jovine, Carlo de Mejo, Luca Paismer, Giovanni Lombardo Radice, Michele Soavi

UK Vid. Intervision, QRT 87 min (unrated), Beta & VHS; Interlite, QRT 87 min (unrated), Beta & VHS; Pacesetter, QRT 87 min (unrated), Beta & VHS; Elephant, QRT 84 min (cut 2'21", BBFC:18), VHS only; Network Distribution, QRT 85 min (cut 1'29", BBFC:18), VHS only