Dying Breed (2008)

Cheeky!

Let me tell you a little bit about Alexander Pearce. He was an Irish convict who was shipped off to a penal colony in Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania. He escaped, and when he was captured he claimed he had cannibalised his fellow escapees. They didn't believe him, but when he escaped for a second time he was recaptured with bits of his partner-in-crime in his pocket, even though he still had food with him. He was subsequently convicted of murder and cannibalism, and was hanged. It's good story with the makings of a good movie. Unfortunately that movie is the 2009 thriller Van Diemen's Land, and not the subject of this review, the 2008 backwood cannibal film Dying Breed.

As well as exploiting this historical nugget and every offensive stereotype about Tasmanians you can think of, the film also incorporates another famous Tasmanian icon, the Tasmanian tiger. Although thought to be extinct (the movie begins with some real-life footage of the last of it's kind in captivity) zoologist Nina (Mirrah Foulkes) believes she has found photographic proof that the thylocine still exists. These photographs come courtesy of her sister, who turned up dead shortly after her discovery. Unable to secure funding, Nina arranges an unofficial expedition with her boyfriend Matt (Leigh Whannel, one of the Saw guys), his best friend Jack (Nathan Phillips from Wolf Creek) and Jack's girlfriend Rebecca (Melanie Vallejo).

Their trip leads them to an isolated township populated by the "descendants" of Alexander Pearce (not sure how that would work exactly, the guy was in a penal colony) aka The Pieman. After some uncomfortable interactions wth the locals in the pub (I always like these kinds of scenes; walking into a pub full of creepy old weirdos is an awkward experience we can all relate to) and a sampling of their delicious meat pies, they set out on a wildly underprepared trip into the wilderness. Soon they find themselves stalked by a mysterious figure, cannibalism etc, etc.

There's a few interesting ideas here, but most of them don't really go anywhere. The Tasmanian Tiger, for instance, is just a MacGuffin to get them to into the wilderness, and the whole Alexander Pearce connection is little more than window dressing. I was hoping that the interesting location might have brought a few fresh new ideas to a subgenre that has been done in every possible permutation, but unfortunately most of the film seems to be going down a checklist of modern horror: they've got the creepy little girl who sings nursery rhymes, the over-edited, jump-scare nightmare sequences, even a little bit of torture porn. If you guessed that one of them pulls out their mobile phone at one point and pointedly declares that there is no cell phone coverage, give yourself a prize.

The film does have a few things working in it's favour though. Like many Australian genre films there is a lot of gorgeous cinematography, and the rainforest setting gives it a slightly different feel than your typical backwoods cannibal film. There was one part with a half-eaten body hanging from the tree that looked like something out of Cannibal Holocaust. Although it's not as gory as that film it does have it's moments, including an impressively nasty bit where somebody gets their nose bitten off. Not enough nose-bitings in films, I say. Plus I liked the bit where Rebecca follows a strange noise only to discover a woman euthanising a litter of unwanted puppies with a hammer. That's the kind of fucked-up-yet-believable behaviour I want from my Tasweigan nutbars.

Given the film's genre and casting, you can't help but draw comparison to Wolf Creek, which is unfortunate because in my opinion it doesn't really stack up. Wolf Creek was a film that I liked more than a lot of people, and one of the things I liked most about it was that the main characters were pretty believable and likeable. Unfortunately that's not so much the case here: Jack is such an unrepentant asshole and Matt is so spineless that you wind up hating them both. It does differentiate itself from Wolf Creek in that it's a little sillier and not quite as bleak and serious, but then it doesn't have much of a sense of fun about it either. It has a downer ending followed by a controversy-baiting title card similar to Wolf Creek's, which states: "Since Alexander Pearce escaped, over 250 people have disappeared in the Tasmanian wilderness. No remains have ever been found." Well, I guess that's technically true.

I've really liked some recent Australian horror films, like Rogue and Wolf Creek. They have great production values, intelligent exeuction and make the most of their interesting settings. I was hoping that this one would be similar, but although competently made it doesn't have enough to separate from it's Hollywood-produced brethren. I think it flopped pretty badly in the Australian cinemas, which is unfortunate but not entirely unexpected. Australians are pretty weird about home-grown b-movies, turning out in droves to see the latest terrible Saw sequel but being endlessly critical towards any local genre film, but then I can't really judge because I didn't see it in the cinema either.

Spider Baby (1968)

Who wants a drumstick?

I only ever knew Jack Hill from his Pam Grier blaxploitation films like Coffy or Foxy Brown, but a lot of horror buffs are big fans of this one; Spider Baby, or The Maddest Story Ever Told. It was filmed in 1964 under the name Cannibal Orgy, but due to financial issues it sat on a shelf for several years until it was rushed out the door as the B-film in a double feature. It wasn't successful, but later found a cult following and now it's influence can be seen in any number of horror films, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Devil's Rejects or pretty much any film featuring crazy backwoods cannibals.

The film begins with Mantan Moreland, playing the same unfortunate racist caricature he always does, delivering a letter to the Merrye household. He stops to ask directions from some children, only for their mother to rush out and pull the kids away from him, saying "If there is a Merrye house we don't know anything about it!". Although she starts to do that before he even says anything, so maybe she's just a huge racist. Eventually he finds the house, seemingly abandoned, and as he's poking around he gets his head caught in a window frame. Elizabeth, a teenage girl brandishing a couple of butcher's knives, whispers "I caught a big fat bug in my spider web" and stings him to death, by which I mean she cuts his face up and then puts his severed ear in a box to feed to her pet tarantulas.

Elizabeth is a sufferer of Merrye Syndrome, an extremely rare genetic disorder that causes people to regress mentally until they become children and eventually cannibalistic savages. Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr.), the Merrye family's chauffeur, made a promise to the dying patriarch of the family that he would become the caretaker of his sole surviving heirs, Elizabeth, Virginia and Ralph. Elizabeth (Jill Banner) eats bugs and thinks she is a spider. Virginia (Beverly Washburn) is a squealing brat who is obsessed with punishing people who are "bad". Ralph (Sid Haig) is the most far gone of them all, a drooling simpleton who likes to hide in the dumbwaiter and kill cats for dinner. That's not even mentioning the older relatives they keep locked up in the basement. All they want is for people to leave them alone so they can live out their final days in peace.

That might make for a fascinating study of degenerative mental illness, but it wouldn't be a very entertaining movie, so sure enough some greedy cousins show up for their cut of the supposed Merrye fortune. These include the greedy, manipulative Emily (Carol Ohmart, from House on Haunted Hill), the Hilter-moustachioed, cigar-chomping lawyer Shlocker (Karl Schanzer), his assistant Ann (Mary Mitchel) and the aw-shucks nice-guy Peter (Quinn Redecker). After some cajoling Lon Chaney Jr. agrees to let them stay the night, and there's a great dinner scene with Sid Haig in a hilarious Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit as they dine on freshly roasted "rabbit", dubious-looking mushrooms, and weeds plucked from the gardens.

After Peter and Ann bond over horror films (including a groan-inducing wink to Chaney's role in The Wolf Man) they decide to get a drink in town, the rest turning in for the night. Emily does what anyone would do when staying the night in a spooky old house, stripping to her lacy underwear and doing a sexy dance in front of the mirror. Ralph, peeping on her from outside the window, chases her down and rapes her, but luckily she starts to like it after a while so it doesn't count. Meanwhile Shlocker snoops around the house, and when he discovers the cannibals living in a pit in the basement, Virginia decides that he is "bad" and must be punished. When Bruno realises what his children are up to he decides to steal some dynamite from the local construction site and make sure the Merrye bloodline goes out with a bang and not a whimper.

Spider Baby is difficult film to describe. It lovingly sides with outcasts and monsters, kind of like 1932's Freaks, but it doesn't try to soften them in the process. It's fun and it works as a goofy comedy (it's clear from quirky opening theme song, sung by Lon Chaney Jr. himself, that we're not meant to take it too seriously), but it's sinister and creepy throughout. The Merrye's childlike innocence and casual attitude towards rape and murder is the main source of dark humour, horror and even some pathos. They are essentially children in adults bodies, which makes it extra creepy when Virginia ties "Uncle Peter" up in her spider web and tries to seduce him.

Although Beverly Washburn almost steals the show as Virginia, the bizarre mixture of performances is really what holds the film together. The acting styles of the two sisters couldn't be more different; Banner hissing her lines in a sinister whisper and Washburn hamming it up with a childlike squeal; but somehow they work really well together. Sid Haig gives an intensely physical performance as Ralph, drooling and grunting and generally giving it his all. It's fair to say that Lon Chaney Jr. didn't have too many memorable roles in the 60s, but here he is surprisingly touching and gives maybe one of the best performances in his career. Dude was probably drunk off his ass the entire time. Schanzer is the only weak link as the slimy Schlocker, projecting a high camp that seems a bit out of place.

Technically the film looks better than it's $65K budget would suggest, and it features some stellar black-and-white photography, but there are script problems. Some segments, such as Schlocker sneaking around the house, go on for far too long and the wrap-around segments where Redecker directly addresses the audience are clumsily handled. Still, there are so many neat touches to the characters (I like the way Virginia completes a puzzle by stabbing the pieces with a knife) that it's easy to see the love and care that went into the film. The cast interviews on the DVD suggest they are surprised and baffled by the film's cult following, but for me it's pretty easy to see why it has so many fans.

Raw Force (1982)

Even a Nazi biker rape scene can be rendered
hilarious through the addition of heart-print boxers

A lot of people, myself especially, tend to romanticise the exploitation films of the late 70s/early 80s. Generally they were bait-and-switch routines that preyed on the public's unquenchable thirst for blood and tits. Even the best of them fail to live up to the promise of their often-awesome theatrical posters and, truth be told, the vast majority are just flat-out boring. Raw Force is one of those rare exploitation films that delivers, taking a kitchen-sink appoach that delivers a little bit of everything: zombie samurai, cannibal monks, kung fu masters and a whole lot of titties, all executed with a level of competence that frequently dips into lols-ville. Delicious.

The film revolves around a human-trafficking ring run by Mr. Speer, a man in a white suit with a Hitler moustache and terrible German accent (subtle). As the film opens he and his team of mercenaries are taking a load of Filipina prostitutes to the mysterious Warrior Island. There he is met by a group of cackling monks (wearing tattered robes straight out of Tombs of the Blind Dead) who exchange the girls for a couple of baskets of jade. Or rather one basket, the monks reduce the sum after they reject one of the girls for not having enough junk in the trunk. You may think they're a bit picky for celibate, island-dwelling monks, but it turns out that these lovely ladies aren't for fuckin', they're for eatin'. They believe that eating female flesh gives them the power to raise the dead, specifically the bodies of disgraced martial artists that have banished themselves to Warrior Island. Or something.

Cut to three moustachioed guys from the Burbank Karate Club taking a trip on an extremely shabby cruise line. Since the ship is packed with martial artists, all keen to visit Warrior Island, the cruise manager (an extremely annoying woman) decides to change their itinerary and make a brief stopover there. The ship's cook/kung fu master Chin balks at the idea, saying that the island is forbidden to everyone except "disgraced martial artists" and setting foot on it will incure the wrath of Buddha. Maybe the local tourist authority shouldn't hand out Warrior Island brochures then, even if they do appear to be mostly blank.

During a stopover the passengers take in some of the local sights (kickboxing, cheap markets), while a couple of Burbank Karate Clubbers split off from the main group and head to a brothel. Subsequently Speer and his men bust into the joint disguised as policemen, rounding up a bunch of girls to sell off to the cannibal monks. The two men escape as a gaggle of topless women stream out of the upstairs window and across the rooftops. Indeed there are a lot of topless women in this film, but the most egregious example is when several minutes of jiggle footage is haphazardly edited into a bar fight, such that the stripper nonchalantly dances away while the bar is trashed around her.

The film's love of tits and bizarre, anarchic spirit is most explified during an extended comedy sequence in the middle of the film. The individual bits aren't funny at all, but they are so random and ri-goddamn-diculous that they gradually build momentum until the movie is a freight train of awesome. The scene revolves around a birthday celebration for some random character who is never mentioned again, and takes place in a crappy wood-panelled room that looks like a family den circa 1977. The movie cuts between the following gags, usually involving unknown characters who only appear in this one scene:

• An older woman pimps out her friend to a guy only for him to start ranting about how modelling is the devil's work ("No Betty, the devil's no joke")
  
• A fat, balding bartender hits on a girl by smashing a block of ice with his head and then asking "Want to have dinner tonight, doll-baby?"
• A woman gets a birthday cake smooshed all over her boobs and has to take a shower.
• A tall woman and a short man try to have sex in a cramped bathroom.
• A woman paralytic state of drunkeness is casually sexually assaulted by a pervert.
• A clumsy martial artist knocks over a table where a family are in the middle of a spaghetti dinner.

The drunken merriment is interrupted by a bunch of Speer's mercenaries, who are dressed like a Village People cover band. Speer heard that the two guys at the brothel were on a cruise to Warrior Island, so he decides to kill everybody on the ship. One of our heroes gives a death-swirly to a Nazi biker in heart-print boxer shorts while Chin gets into a swordfight with a pirate in a midriff-baring vest and glam makeup. Eventually the pirates set the cruise ship on fire and Chin, the ship's Captain (played by Cameron Mitchell), the cruise-line owner and the Burbank Karate Club and a female SWAT officer named Cookie all escape onto a life-raft, I guess leaving the rest of the passengers to die.

They wash up on Warrior Island anyway, and after a gun-fight with a bazooka-toting Speer and his men they are captured by the cannibal monks. This is where the much-ballyhooed zombie warriors come into play, as the monks use their cannibal powers to raise up a bunch of samurai and ninja zombies. There's no real consistency, obviously; sometimes the samurai jump and flip about, other times they shamble along in slow motion (I don't mean they move slowly either, whenever the zombies are shown they use a cheesy slow motion filter effect). Anyway, they defeat the zombies, Speer gets eaten by pirahanas, and they fly away in his plane. The film ends with a title card: "To Be Continued..." Oh, I wish.

There's a lot to enjoy about this one. The kung fu fights and gun battles aren't fantastic but it's hard to get bored when there's hilariously awful dialog like "Go ahead Cookie, he doesn't have to know you're on the LA SWAT team". Also, tits. I enjoyed it a lot. I don't know why they gave it such a generic title, though. It would probably have been more successful they'd called it Burbank Karate Club vs The Zombie Samurai of Warrior Island. Maybe the theatre's marquee space was extremely limited.

Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977)

Emanuelle doing what she does best.

It's time to dive back into the sordid world of Italian cannibal films, this time a Joe D'Amato-helmed helping of sleaze with the gorgeous Laura Gemser playing the world's pre-eminent Emmanuelle knock-off; note the single 'm' in the name, a dead giveaway. I think I've talked about the Emmanuelle films already, but briefly they were a series of French erotic films that spawned an army of knock-offs, the most popular being D'Amato's Black Emanuelle series starring Laura Gemser. Since then pretty much every film starring Laura Gemser has been retitled and touted as a Black Emanuelle film, but smut obsessives should note that this film is a completely official entry in the series, making it a legitimate part of Emanuelle continuity.

By this stage in the series Emanuelle had fucked her way through Africa (Black Emanuelle), New York (Black Emanuelle 2), Bangkok (Emanuelle in Bangkok) and everywhere else (Emanuelle Around the World) so unless they were planning to go into space (the Emmanuelle space race was eventually won with the 1994 made-for-cable series Emmanuelle in Space) they were running out of locations to shoot their softcore porn. Therefore D'Amato had the bright idea of combining Emanuelle's usual brand of titillation with the jungle cannibal genre. I don't know why he thought it was a good idea, but D'Amato experimented a lot with combinations of gore and porn. Guy was kind of messed up.

Like most cannibal films, Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals begins in New York. Emanuelle is, as usual, an undercover reporter, this time getting the big scoop on a sadistic lesbian nurse working at a crooked mental institution. She poses as a patient and wanders around snapping photos with a camera concealed inside a baby doll. Just as you think it's going to turn into a women-in-prison film, the evil nurse rushes out of a patient's room with a bite-sized chunk missing from her boobs. Apparently she'd been molesting patients, and as Emanuelle remarks to editor later, "It seems she was asking for it. Her homosexual tendencies were well known." Pretty judgemental for someone whose main investigative technique involves sneaking into the titty-chomping patient's room at night and masturbating her into compliance. Emanuelle uses her hidden camera to snap a few photos of the woman's junk while she's there, because she's classy like that.

When she's back at the office she discovers that the photos also show a tribal tattoo "above her pubic region" (they say this about five times), the symbol of a supposedly extinct cannibal tribe, so she heads to the Museum of Natural History to meet with a cannibal expert named Professor Lestor (Gabriele Tinti) and hopefully arrange an expedition to the Amazon. Over dinner he promises to take her back to his place to show her a complete documentation on cannibalism, adding that he has "some very interesting films on the subject". Sure, buddy, I've heard that one before. Sure enough, after romancing her with some home movies of genital mutilation and ritual cannibalism the two of them hop into bed together.

Emanuelle isn't the type to get tied down to some tweedy academic, even if he is played by Gemser's real-life husband. As she herself says "I am a free woman and I will act as such", which basically means that she will fuck anything, anytime, anywhere. She also has a boyfriend apparently, but I guess he's not that important to her since he only appears in one scene. She tells him about her dangerous Amazonian expedition and he reacts as if she were going to a three-day conference in the next town over. She says goodbye by boning him in broad daylight under a filthy boardwalk but almost immediately afterwards she's sitting in a taxi daydreaming about screwing the Professor in a hotel room. I guess it's a fine line between a liberated woman and nymphomaniac.

After arriving in the Amazon they meet up with the Professor's local contact, a fat guy who provides them with some native guides and a nun named Sister Angela who will lead them to a remote jungle mission. Apparently the priest who runs the mission will have the lowdown on any local cannibal tribes. Also coming along is the fat guy's beautiful daughter Isabella. It's her job to scream, get caught in traps and generally act like a complete ninny. Her saving grace is that she finds an excuse to strip off every ten minutes, most notably in a scene where Emanuelle and Isabella bathe eachother in the river and are rudely interrupted by a monkey that smokes all their Marlboros.

As they head downriver Emanuelle sees some stock footage of some crocodiles and exclaims "Look alligators!" I guess she's a reporter, not a zoologist, but her lack of jungle experience leads to her getting all tangled up in a ten foot python. Luckily she's rescued by a hunter, Donald Mackenzie (Donald O'Brien, Zombie Holocaust) and boy does he like hunting. As he says to Emanuelle, "Hunting. Hunting is my life. I've sacrificed a lot for my cravings... for hunting." Donald is so obsessed with the hunt that he neglects his hot wife Maggie (Nieves Navarro), who is forced to finger herself while watching one of their servants, Salvadore (Percy Hogan), polish his rifle. In fact she's so smitten with him that she leads him into the jungle to give his rifle a spit-polishing of her own. When Donald confronts her she angrily calls him "an imponent", but later he gets into a fistfight with the Professor for fondling Isabella's ass while she is sleeping, since apparently everyone in the jungle sleeps without any pants on.

Despite Donald's hunting skills he fails to notice a group of cannibals approaching their camp with their Evil Dead Cannibal Vision, and the natives steal their boats and eviscerate one of their servants. They are forced to gather up their supplies and march on, contending with the usual jungle dangers including quicksand, poisonous snakes and bamboo traps. After Sister Margaret gets captured, nipple-sliced and disembowelled, Donald and Maggie separate from the group and reveal their true motives; they are looking for a crashed plane containing several bags of uncut diamonds. This has no bearing on anything else in the film, but the diamonds distract them long enough for the cannibals to spear Donald and kidnap Maggie.

Eventually the group find their way to the cannibals' camp, where the entire village is circling around Maggie, who is trapped in a bamboo cage in the middle of a clearing. After snapping a few photos Emanuelle remarks "There! That cage! Maggie!", demonstrating the observational skills that made her one of New York's top investigative journalists. As far as I can tell, their rescue mission involves sending three people into a village full of armed cannibals, so it goes tits up almost immediately. Salvadore is killed, Donald and Isabella are captured and Emanuelle and the Professor are forced to look on from a distance as Maggie is disembowelled, Donald is somehow bisected by a piece of rope and Isabella is drugged and gangraped in preparation for a sacrifice to the River Goddess.

Although they just sit there and look on impassively for a while, eventually Emanuelle formulates a plan to rescue Isabella. Like every other plan she has ever had, it involves stripping bare-ass naked. Painting herself up with the tribe's symbol, she manages to pass herself off as a River Goddess long enough to snatch Isabella and swim back to the boat. I can't really fault the natives for mistaking a naked, glistening Laura Gemser to be the result of divine intervention. As the trio paddle away, Emanuelle has a big old sob about how everyone has died in her pursuit of the big scoop. Maybe the next time you'll have a plan beyond wandering aimlessly around the cannibal-infested jungle like a bunch of boobs.

I know it's nothing knew for a D'Amato film to be poorly made, but this is a pretty slipshod effort. This film doesn't even attempt to make sense, continuity is all over the place and it switches between day and night several times in the same scene. Dubbing is awful even by the standards of Italian schlock, full of awkward pauses like "We know that you are quite... an authority on the subject... and that you carried out... some expeditions among the most ferocious tribes... of the Amazon." Emanuelle's editor changes accents and even voice actors several times within the same scene. It's not D'Amato's most incompetent film by any means, but that's faint praise.

I guess this film works okay as a delivery vehicle for softcore smut, but as a cannibal film it's a failure. The gore (by Italian special effects maestro Fabrizio DeAngelis) is confined to the final twenty minutes of the film and until you get to that you'll have to suffer through half a dozen softcore sex scenes, all scored by a piece of disco cheese that croons "I'm your queen, you're my king" over and over until you wish you were dead. On the plus side, no animals were harmed in this film, unless the cigarette-smoking chimp contracted lung cancer. It's not a great cannibal film but to be fair it came out pretty early in the cycle. If nothing else D'Amato must be acknowledged for being on the cutting edge of grubby Italian sleaze.

Massacre in Dinosaur Valley (1985)

A Vietnam vet deals with a bloodsucking parasite
(he also burns some leeches)

This film was directed by Michele Massimo Tarantini, here credited under his Anglocised pseudonym Michael E. Lemick, and although it's also known as Cannibal Ferox 2, it has little to do with the grisly cannibal cycle of the 70s and 80s. Sure, it has cannibals in it, but it's more of a fun jungle adventure flick and more interested in entertaining you rather than rubbing your nose in human misery. More Indiana Jones, less Cannibal Holocaust. That's not to say it isn't full of gore, sex, misogyny and outright stupidity, but at least you won't be put in the awkward position of explaining to your friends why you are watching animals being mutilated in gratuitous close-up.

The film begins with a paleontology professor and his hot daughter rolling into a small Brazillian town in search of something called the "Valley of the Dinosaurs". As they take in a cockfight in the hotel bar, a French pilot agrees to make a brief stopover there, despite the fact that it's forbidden, cursed and swarming with cannibals. Overhearing their conversation is Kevin Hall, a freelance paleontologist played by the great Michael Sopkiw (2019: After the Fall of New York, Blastfighter). He manages to snag a seat on the flight by chatting up the professor (who is so impressed at his paleontological knowledge that he overlooks the fact that he snuck into their hotel room and peeked at his daughter's goods while she was in the shower) and buying the pilot a case of booze.

Unfortunately the pilot must have opened a few bottles early, because as they are flying over Dinosaur Valley he starts ranting about a curse and the plane crashes for no discernable reason. As a crappy model plane is dragged into some shrubs by visible wires, the passengers, which also include a photographer and his two hot models, plus a Vietnam vet and his shrewish wife, thrash about like they are on the bridge of the Enterprise. The pilot, the professor and a fashion model eat it the crash, but luckily the model had already showed her tatas a couple of times and had an explicit sex scene so at least she fulfilled her obligations to the viewing public before shuffling off her mortal coil.

The Vietnam vet immediately takes charge of the group, convinced that his three tours in 'Nam have adequately prepared him for a face-off with some lousy cannibals. He manages to deal with some giant leeches (which apparently also double as a nutritious snack), but wen the photographer gets his leg eaten to the bone by pirahnas he goes Travis Bickle and runs him through with his machete so he won't give away their position. Kevin isn't happy out this (the vet's wife's outfit presents more of an eye-searing target than the photographer ever could) and gets into a fistfight. Despite the fact that Kevin carries around a shotgun and a bandolier full of shells at all times, he gets his ass beat and tossed over a waterfall.

Kevin survives, of course, but while he faces down the laziest crocodile ever, the rest of the group are separated and attacked by cannibals. The Vietnam vet leaves his wife drowning in a pool of quicksand (when Kevin had him at gunpoint earlier she was excitedly chanting "Kill him!" so you can't really blame him) but the cannibals pelt him with arrows and blowdarts. Most of them are clearly just glued to his jacket, but they still do the trick. As a poshumous insult the cannibal chief cuts out his heart and eats it, although from the looks of his physique he should probably be cutting down on red meat. Meanwhile the two girls are captured and taken back to the cannibal village, where they are stripped naked and made to wear jungle thongs.

Thus attired, they are taken to a sacrificial altar to meet a witch doctor, who is wearing a triceratops skull and matching dollar-store Halloween glove. Kevin is there too, hiding behind some boulders, and although the witch doctor is busy draining blood from one of the girls, Kevin still takes the time to craft a hand grenade from his shotgun shells as a distraction. Not really necessary since his shotgun makes short work of the cannibals all by itself (especially since it's capable of firing twenty shots without reloading) and soon the girls are bouncing and jiggling their way to the getaway canoe.

After they escape a trap down-river and deal with the cannibals once and for all, you may be looking at your watch in confusion as there is still a half-hour to go. Well, hold onto your hats, we are only getting started. While making sexytimes with the professor's daughter, Kevin finds a whole mess of fossilised dinosaur footprints. They aren't fossils, they are clearly just footprints pressed into the sand, but since he keeps all his precious dinosaur bones rattling around in a big wooden crate, I have to take his paleontology credentials with a grain of salt. I hope you don't have your heart set on a dinosaur attack, because instead they run into a big fat slaver who takes them all prisoner.

His name is China (pronounciation switches between Chy-na and Chee-na from scene to scene) and he has put a bunch of locals in a chain gang to work in his mine, so he can't let our heroes go or they'll call the cops. He ties Kevin up in a pig pen and puts the girls at the mercy of a sadistic lesbian henchman for a bit of women-in-prison action. Once the lesbian slaver has had her fun with the fashion model she tells her to make a run for it so that China can gun her down for his own amusement. He is, as Kevin puts it, a "fat, smelly, evil bastard". He also selects the professor's daughter as his personal concubine, so while Kevin is being gnawed on by pigs during the night, she's busy fighting off a sweaty hog of her own.

Kevin manages to escape during the night, and when China's men head off into the jungle to search for him the next morning, he returns to camp for a spear-versus-six-shooter showdown. Kevin turns the tide by tossing a rattlesnake at China, and although he could have easily taken a few steps away from the snake and shot Kevin, he foolishly decides to use his last bullet to blow it's head off, leaving himself open for a spear in the gut. Kevin frees the slaves (who get gunned down by China's men moments later) but leaves the girl, who has just been raped, suspended in a bamboo cage to get shot at until she apologises for yelling at him and he pushes plunger to blow up them up. Haha, what a joker! Then they steal a helicopter and fly into the sunset, Kevin making a terrible joke about their violently swaying Brazillian helicopter having "in-built rhythm".

I don't know, I really enjoyed this film. Production values are very poor and the dubbing is even worse than usual, but it's very high on entertainment value and it piles on the sleaze. It's pretty funny because although we are supposed to be disgusted by the way certain characters shamelessly leer over the girls, the camera ogles their naughty bits far more lavaciously than anyone else in the film. Those expecting your typical Italian cannibal gut-muncher might be disappointed as there is comparatively little gore, PETA-enraging animal violence or beards. Indeed, the cannibal stuff is dispensed with rather quickly to make more room for topless jungle adventuring. As a result it's only as morally bankrupt as most other Italian exploitation films, meaning a marginally sane person might derive some enjoyment from it. Recommended.

Eaten Alive (aka Mangiati Vivi) (1980)

Nice melons!

Eaten Alive, not to be confused with Tobe Hooper's 1977 film of the same name, is one of Umberto Lenzi's three entries into the Italian cannibal cycle. It's fair to say that Lenzi kicked off the subgenre with 1972's Deep River Savages and pushed it further than the viewing public were able to stomach with 1982's Cannibal Ferox. Eaten Alive is like the awkward middle child, neither groundbreaking nor extreme enough to separate it from the pack, but it does throw a Jim Jones style death cult into the mix. Probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

The film starts in Niagara falls, a first for cannibal films I believe, where a middle aged man cops an earful of poisonous blowdart and drops dead. Cut to the streets of New York, complete with groovy disco music, and two more guys get killed in the same way. By now this blowdart rampage is building up a deliciously surreal momentum and I was pretty excited to see where it leads, but unfortunately the primitive assassin fails to heed the traffic signs (fucking tourists) and gets flattened by a passing truck.

Shiela Morris (Janet Agren, City of the Living Dead) arrives at a New York police station after traveling all the way from Alabama with nothing but a pimptastic fur coat and a laughable Southern accent. For some reason the blowdart-happy native had a 8mm film reel on him that shows her missing sister Diana palling around in cannibal country with some off-brand Jim Jones named Jonas. Shiela shows the film to a history professor (Mel Ferrer, Nightmare City) which is mostly an excuse for Lenzi to squeeze in some Mondo footage, and he identifies the ritual as that of the fanatical Purification Sect of New Guinea. Talking to a bunch of hippies about Jonas proves to be a dead end, so it looks like Shiela is on the next flight to New Guinea.

Once she's arrived, Shiela knows that the best place to find a guide is the local dive bar, where some grizzled Vietnam veteran will no doubt be engaged in a violent competitive sport. In this case it's Mark Butler, performing a variation on arm-wrestling where the loser gets his hand impaled on a knife. He is wearing a Deer-Hunter-esque yellow headband, I guess to symbolise the fact that he's a cowardly Vietnam deserter. Mark is played by Robert Kerman (Cannibal Holocaust, Cannibal Ferox) although you might know him better as R. Bolla, a name under which he performed in a hundred other films, from classics like Great Sexpectations to the remarkably frank Men Who Love Huge Boobs.

Mark agrees to help Shiela find her sister for 20K, but I'm not sure what she's paying him for exactly. He seems hopelessly lost without a few native guides to do his job for him and his plan seems to be to wander aimlessly through the jungle and hope they find the death cult before they are eaten by cannibals. After a run-in with a crazy old man they head down river in a canoe, but one of their guides gets his arm bitten off by a crocodile, stranding them deep in cannibal country. When they come across some cannibals gang-raping and then eating a native woman (haven't these guys heard of the golden rule: don't fuck what you eat) Shiela insists that Mark kills her if that's going to happen to her. Mark slaps her and I guess she's into that because they totally do it. The next day they are discovered by cannibals, but luckily they are rescued by the cultists and taken back to Jonas' "Purification Village".

They are welcomed byJonas (Ivan Rassimov in a bright orange muu-muu), who is every bit as crazy as you'd expect. They then spot Diana at a funeral service, one of a number of topless women who parade around while they burn the body, while Jonas gives a sermon to the tune of Bach's Toccata and fugue in D minor. Who is getting cremated here? Dracula? Once the body has been reduced to ashes, the widow strips naked, lies on the extinguished funeral pyre, and then all her brother-in-laws take turns boning her. Shit, as if dealing with the in-laws wasn't awkward enough. Mark is unfazed, quipping "Nice, keeps it in the family."

When they finally get Diana alone she reveals that she's there against her will and that Jonas is brainwashing people with drugged-up jungle juice. Despite being aware of this fact, Shiela gulps down anything Jonas puts in front of her, and soon he's raping her with a primitive dildo dipped in snake blood or painting her gold (not sure why, although it does look pretty cool) and whipping her sister right in front of her. Meanwhile Mark escapes the village, but after being attacked by cannibals he figures he's better off with the cultists and pulls the old "Yeah, I'm totes a big believer in your cult now. I'm not just pretending to drink your jungle juice, honest."

Eventually Diana, Shiela and Mark escape with the help of a native woman (played by Me Me Lai). Unfortunately Diana and the native woman don't make it; Diana gets raped by Jonas' chief enforcer and then they are both captured and eaten by cannibals. Shiela nearly gives their position away to the cannibals but luckily Mark punches her right in the face before she could scream. Or maybe he was just frustrated that their mission was a collosal failure and they are both doomed. Luckily some helicopters just so happen to spot them and the Purification Village, prompting Jonas and his followers to drink the grape kool-aid and head to the cannibal-infested jungle in the sky.

If you've seen a few other Italian cannibal films, watching Eaten Alive is an experience in deja vu. Not only are there are many familiar faces to veterans of the subgenre (notably Me Me Lai, Ivan Rassimov and Robert Kerman), Lenzi commits the cardinal sin of exploitation cinema and flat-out steals the money shots from other cannibal films. From Sergio Martino's Slave of the Cannibal God we have the forementioned crocodile attack, some natives eating an iguana and a snake eating a monkey. From Ruggero Deodato's Jungle Holocaust we have Me Me Lai's death sequence, a crocodile being slaughtered and some cannibals eating snakes and cutting off a guy's wanger. It's pretty obvious too, since Lenzi doesn't make much attempt to preserve continuity in the costumes or film stock.

This is disappointing as Lenzi is usually capapble of crafting some mind-bogglingly entertaining trash. I did appreciate the cult's strict "showing off the goods" policy, having women either topless or in sheer robes at all times. Even when Diana manages to escape the village she's wearing a cleavage-baring top, daisy dukes and hooker boots. That is not appropriate jungle wear, Diana. I'm sure Shiela has another khaki pantsuit you can borrow. There's a lot of that clumsy, poorly-dubbed dialog we demand from our Italian trash cinema, such as Jonas' explanation that the cannibals' "idea of lunch is fresh, hot entrails soaked in blood" or the professor joking to some cops that "instead of buying meat from the supermarket, they get it fresh from people like you." Consequently you'll probably get a few laughs out of it, although I'd recommend watching any of the cannibal films Lenzi has pilfered to make this one.

Last Cannibal World (aka Jungle Holocaust) (1977)

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Slave of the Cannibal God (1978)

Snakes. Why'd it have to be snakes?

Sergio Martino's Slave of the Cannibal God may seem like just another scummy Italian cannibal flick, probably because it is another scummy Italian cannibal flick, but it distinguishes itself from the competition by starring actors a normal person might have actually heard of, like Ursula Andress and Stacy Keach. Ursula Andress, of course, is best known for wearing a sexy bikini in Dr. No, and although she doesn't do that here, she does strip naked and get slathered in brown goo by cannibals. So it's almost as good. Stacy Keach is best known for his brief stint in jail on drug charges and while I'm not sure if starring in this flick was the reason for his downward spiral into drug abuse and crime, it was probably a contributing factor.

Susan Stevenson (Andress) has come to New Guinea (a helpful title card tells us how savage and primitive it is) with her asshole brother Arthur (Antonio Marsina) to find her missing husband Henry, a world famous explorer. A meeting with a magnificent moustache (and the man attached) at the British Consulate is pretty useless, they claim that Henry was on an unauthorised expedition and don't want to waste any more resources to find him. The next morning she heads to one of Henry's associates, an explorer named Edward Foster (Keach). He thinks Henry might just have headed to a remote island upon which sits the hidden, forbidden mountain of ultimate mystery, called Rei-Rei-Me or doh-ray-mi or Billy-Ray Cyrus or some such. Together they gather up a few expendable natives, along with Keach's suspiciously-acting houseboy, and head out on a suicidal mission to find a guy who by now has surely passed through the digestive tract of a cannibal.

Well, as Keach says "The journey is difficult enough for a man, for a woman it would be impossible", and although Andress claims she has the chops, you know she's going to spend a lot of the film screaming, running and tripping over vines. Sure enough, only a few minutes into the journey she gets all tangled up in a bunch of vines and is approached by a curious tarantula, no doubt attracted by the light gleaming off her massive forehead. Well, she lets loose a girly shriek and Keach comes racing in to cut it in half with a survival knife. The natives aren't happy about the death of the spider (it's a bad omen or something) so they sacrifice an iguana, gutting it and munching on the entrails. Keach insists that "It's part of their religion", but I guess religious tolerance isn't one of Arthur's strong suits because he rushes in and starts kicking them around, blaming them for blowing their cover to the helicopter flying overhead. Keach's houseboy punches Arthur, Arthur punches him back, Keach punches Arthur and a couple of natives run off. Not the best start to the expedition.

When they finally reach the island they stumble across a dead leper, I guess because nobody has died yet (except the iguana) and the audience is getting pretty restless. People don't have to wait much longer for violence, because over the next leg of their journey most of the team gets caught by booby traps, eaten by hungry crocodiles and decapitated by cannibals. Luckily they're just natives so nobody cares, but eventually someone that matters is put in mortal danger. Ursula gets separated from the group and a masked cannibal tries to chase her down and stab her in the face, although judging from her plastic surgery it wouldn't be the first time.

Luckily, some dude named Manolo (Claudio Cassinelli) appears out of nowhere and saves her, taking them to a secluded mission run by a guy named Father Moses. It's here that Keach spills the beans about his past. You see, "Pooka" may sounds like the name of a Pokemon or a childhood teddy bear, but it's actually the name of a vicious native tribe who live on the mountain and worship a cannibal god. Keach got captured by them and forced to eat human flesh but eventually escaped, along with one of the tribe who is now his houseboy. He hopes by journeying to the mountain and killing every one of those motherfuckers he can get that "closure" that Americans are so fond of.

Later on it's party time, and while Ursula is pretty grossed out when she sees some native women hocking lugies into a mortar and pestle, Manolo explains that their saliva mixes with seven secret herbs and spices to create a potent liquor. I think that's how they make Jagermeister. Once they're good and liquored up she makes a pass at him and convinces him to come with them to the mountain. Aren't you supposed to be here looking for your husband, lady? She also gets her top off at one point, probably should have mentioned that earlier. She looks pretty good for a 42 year old.

Meanwhile some native chick bursts into Arthur's tent, strips off and starts making out with him, and he didn't need to buy her one of those lugie-drinks or anything. Unfortunately that one cannibal from earlier busts in and she catches a spear that was meant for him. They chase down the cannibal and kill him, but it turns out to be Keach's houseboy. I guess you can take the boy out of the cannibal-infested jungle but... well, you know the rest. The next day Father Moses boots them out for corrupting his village with violence and fornication.

From the moment they reach the village you get this weird feeling that Manolo is supposed to be the hero even though he only appeared over half way in, with Keach being relegated to a second-string, Quint kind of character. Well, pretty soon the torch is officially passed when Keach loses his balance while climbing some slippery rocks. Arthur just sits there staring at him while he begs for help and Keach slides back down the rapids and cracks his skull. If you were rushing for an elevator, I bet Arthur is the kind of guy who would just pretend not to hear you and let the doors close. What an asshole. Manolo is pissed, but Ursula flutters her eyelashes at him and he lets Arthur live.

After they montage their way up the mountain (during which Manolo bites into a whole crab like it's an apple, shit at least take the shell off first) it turns out Ursula and Arthur are actually here for the precious uranium hidden in the mountain, the location of which they plan to auction off. Manolo refuses to help them, saying something about protecting the pristine jungle and the native's way of life (uh dude, they're murderous cannibals), but suddenly the Pooka show up to impale Arthur with a spear and capture them. This the part in the movie everybody is waiting for, the 15 minutes or torture and gore that is the payoff to the preceeding 75 minutes of bearded Italians and racial insensitivity. It's not as gory as a Cannibal Ferox or something, but it's pretty gruesome.

When they get to their secret cave, Henry's corpse (or what's left of it) is sitting propped up in a throne with a Geiger counter stuck in his chest. They worship him as their god, so much so that the chief wipes the goo from his decomposing body all over himself and Ursula. With these kind of unsanitary practices it's no wonder the Pooka have almost died out. The chief then turns Ursula over to couple of native women who give her a makeover. They wipe her all over with brown goo (looks like a fake tan) and put on a pretty cool outfit and headdress. She must be pretty hot shit by Pooka standards because a cannibal tries to rape her even though he gets his dinghus cut off as punishment.

Arthur's body gets cut open and all of his organs get pulled out and eaten. After that appetiser, they have a feast of all these raw lizards and snakes and a midget cannibal (between this and 2019: After the Fall of New York, I think Martino has a midget obsession) forces Manolo to eat a lizard. Later that night the same midget starts poking Manolo with a spear, but Manolo manages to trip him over and crack his head open on a rock. Manolo manages to free himself and Ursula (those cannibals are real deep sleepers) and together they escape. Ursuala's plans for a uranium mine are not addressed, but I'm assuming she changed her mind, or at least napalmed the cannibals first.

Aside from having some real actors in it, there's nothing here to separate this film from any old Italian cannibal flick. The gore effects aren't all that extensive or convincing and it doesn't have (or even pretend to have) the subtext of something like Cannibal Holocaust. There's also some of that good old animal cruelty that seems to go hand-in-hand with cannibal flicks like this. Some iguanas and other lizards get killed and there's an extended sequence of a monkey getting eaten by a big snake. It's gory and it goes on forever. It's doesn't even have anything to do with the film, it's just inserted at random. Yeah, I get it, the jungle is a cruel and savage place, you don't have to rub our noses in it like a dog that pissed on the rug. There's not a lot to recommend about this one except that Andress looks pretty good naked if you aren't too distracted by her enormous forehead.

Cannibal Ferox (1981)

Insert eye pun here

Umberto Lenzi had pretty much created the cannibal genre with his 1972 film Man From Deep River. By the late 70s, every exploitation filmmaker with access to a jungle and a handful of bearded Italian actors were in a cut-throat competition to see how much pig guts they could fling at the screen. In this barf-inducing limbo competition, Ruggero Deodato lowered the bar of good taste as far as it could possibly go in his 1980 cannibal classic, Cannibal Holocaust. Umberto Lenzi promptly gathered up a handful of Italian exploitation flick veterans and booked the next flight to the Amazon, determined to out-gross (both in a financial and nausea-inducing sense) Deodato's epic. Was he successful? Kind of. It's certainly dumber.

Gloria (Lorraine De Selle, from House on the Edge of the Park), her brother Rudy (Bryan Redford) and her slutty best friend Pat (Zora Kerowa from New York Ripper) take a trip down to the Amazon so Gloria can gather supporting evidence for her dissertation. It states that cannibalism is a racist myth cooked up by whitey, and armed with a recent paper that posits the existence of cannibalism in the Amazon, she intends to head to the village mentioned and... well... I don't know. Take a poke around and say "Well, no cannibalism here" and head home. QED. I'm not sure this would pass muster in a thesis defense.

After Pat gets a moustache ride from a hairy, sweaty local, the three of them make their way into the heart of darkness. As they chug down the river in their riverboat they are startled by a parrot, which the captain promptly grabs and eats, apparently for good luck. Another local gives them a pet mongoose as snake bait. Of course, within seconds of hitting dry land, these three knuckleheads drive their jeep straight into a river and have to hoof it the rest of the way. During their journey a bunch of animals are killed on-screen for our entertainment (mongoose, turtle, etc). They also stumble upon a native who is so engrossed in his meal of tasty grubs that he doesn't notice the three grossed-out whiteys standing right in front of him.

Eventually they run into Mike (Giovanni Lombardo Radice who played half-wits in both House on the Edge of the Park and City of the Living Dead, but not here) and Joe, two injured travellers (also New York residents, it's a small world after all) who are high-tailing it out of the village. Mike gives them a suspicious story about how the natives turned on them for no good reason, captured their Portuguese buddy, tortured him and "then... then they ate his genitals!" Woah! Despite Mike's cautionary tale, they all decide to risk genital consumption by heading back to the village for some reason. Mike's story starts looking more and more suspicious as they realise that there are no young people in the village and those that remain seem very wary of the white folks.

Eventually Mike's buddy Joe, nearing death, decides to come clean about the supposed cannibalism. Turns out that they came to the Amazon with the intention of stealing the natives' hidden treasure. In a flashback sequence, Mike ties up one of the natives and, coked out of his skull, starts doing what the US might call "aggressive interrogation". Pretty soon the floor is littered with severed eyeballs and genitals and God knows what else. There is no genital eating, as far as I can tell, I think Mike added that part to his version of the story for a little local flavour. After spilling his guts (metaphorically), Joe promptly croaks, just in time for a bunch of hungry natives to arrive, spill his guts (literally) and go to town on his intestines. I never understand in these cannibal flicks why the natives always go for the intestines. I mean, that can't taste good. What's wrong with a nice thigh fillet, or a shoulder joint? Roasted up with a side dish of giant grubs? That's good eatin'.

The four remaining survivors are quickly captured by the natives, who tie Mike to a stake, cut off his pork sword and eat it. After this act of tribal justice, they cauterise the wound so he doesn't die in transit and then ship the prisoners to some other village. As they near the riverside, Rudy tries to make a run for it but heads straight into the piranha-infested waters. He begs the natives for help and gets a poison dart in the neck. Probably not what he was after, but better than getting castrated by cannibals at any rate. When they get to the village they dump the prisoners into some makeshift jail cells and drop in a snack for the women to eat. They refuse... oh, a human heart not good enough for you prima donnas? Instead they decide to burst into song.

During the night, one of the natives (no doubt moved by their singing) lowers a rope to help the ladies escape, but Mike crawls out of his tiger cage, pushes him away and cuts the rope. What a fucker. Fortunately, he immediately gets captured again and his hand cut off for good measure. Then they place him under a table with a hole in it, so that the top of his head pokes through. A quick swipe with the machete and they've got an all-you-can-eat brain buffet. Pat gets it pretty bad too, they stick hooks right through her boobs and hang her up until she dies.

Before Gloria falls victim to a similar fate, that helpful native from earlier helps her escape, but in the process he falls victim to a booby trap. Gloria makes it to the river and is picked up by a passing boat (for the deepest Amazon there sure seem to be a lot of American tourists). Three months later she is receiving her doctorate for successfully debunking the myth of cannibalism. Good to see that her experience hasn't left her too shaken to commit some good old academic fraud!

One thing I haven't mentioned is a subplot about a policeman trying to track down Mike and Joe, both having fled to the Amazon after stealing some mobster's money. Horribly acted and utterly pointless, the only reason I can see it existing is to force in some stock footage of New York. It spoils a lot of the tension of the jungle scenes, but it does have it's moments of unintentional hilarity. Over the course of several minutes, the opening sequence follows a denim-clad young man's disco-scored journey from the hospital all the way to a rathole apartment. Upon arriving, some mobsters call him "shitface" about fifty times and shoot him. That's the end of that character.

It doesn't have any of the subtext or style of Cannibal Holocaust. The gore effects look a lot cheaper too. Apart from Radice, who (as usual) overacts like a motherfucker, the acting is pretty terrible. The most hollow of lip service is paid to it's themes of racism and ethnocentricity. There isn't a single likable or interesting character in the whole film. What it does offer, however, is something to disgust everyone. I can unreservedly recommend this film to anyone who enjoys being disgusted and/or offended by non-stop brutality, misogyny and animal abuse.

Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

It's like the Swiss Family Robinson if they were cannibals...
and yes, I'd like to read that book very much

The vast majority of my movie reviews so far have been of cheap Italian zombie films, so I thought I'd branch off a bit and review a cheap Italian cannibal film. Hey, I didn't say I'd branch out very far!

The cannibal genre has it's roots in the Mondo, a kind of Italian pseudo-documentary that catalogued bizarre and shocking practices from around the world. It began in 1962 with the film Mondo Cane (literally "Dog World") and the genre was popular throughout the 60s. The cannibal genre began in earnest with Umberto Lenzi's Man From Deep River in 1972 and by 1980 the audiences wised up and realised just how cheap and despicable the films were, and Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust is largely to blame.

Cannibal Holocaust follows the standard cannibal film template. A group TV execs task a team headed by Professor Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman, you can tell he's an academic because he wears a tweed suit and smokes a pipe) to find out what happened to a documentary crew who disappeared in the Amazon jungle. The first half of the film mostly consists of the group trekking through the jungle with the help of a captive Yacomo native. On their journey they witness a native woman being punished for adultery with a primitive dildo that certainly isn't ribbed for her pleasure. Eventually they meet up with the Yacomo tribe and gain their trust by exposing their wing-wongs. Once at the village, they are offered a delicious stew, freshly regurgitated by native women. Yummy! Eventually they are led to their destination, the lands of the warring Yanomamo and Shamatari tribes. By killing some of the Shamatari, they gain the trust of the Yanamamo tribe and soon discover the gruesome fate of the documentary crew. Monroe manages to trade some of his equipment for the missing film cannisters.

One he gets back to civilisation, he tries to find out a little bit more about the filmmakers. He discovers that they not well liked and may employ questionable methods in their quest for newsworthy footage. He shows the TV executives the recovered film, and we spend the remainder of the film watching the footage.

The three-man, one-woman film crew are immediately established as a bunch of dicks. They jabber on about how famous this footage will make them and act like jerks to everyone around them. Once in the jungle, they decide to film themselves killing some animals because, I guess, that's what TV audiences want to see.

Now, it takes a lot to offend me. I've seen enough of these kind of films to realise that it's useless getting worked up over some cheap piece of exploitative trash (after all, I keep watching them). An Italian covered in pig guts I can deal with, but the thing that appalls me about this film is the animal cruelty. Monkeys, snakes, muskrats and turtles are mutilated and killed onscreen. Apart from being morally despicable, it's cheap and lazy filmmaking. The shock and disgust it engenders quickly turns to loathing for Deodato and his crew.

The crew end up meeting with the Yanomamo, but fail to obtain the juicy violence their audience craves. In order to create more compelling material for their shock-doc, they rape and murder their way through the cannibal village until the natives decide to turn the tables. In a lengthy sequence, several of the filmmakers are raped, killed and mutilated while the surviving crew members hide nearby and film it all. In the end the cannibals discover their hiding spot and beat them to death.

In the end the TV executives order the film burned and, because Deodato must consider his audience a bunch of idiots, the film ends with Monroe wondering "who the real savages are". Perhaps it was the bunch of cynical Italian dirtbags who decided that animal mutilation made for compelling cinema, and worse, hypocritically asserted that it was in service of a profound message about ruthless filmmakers?

Whereas a lot of cannibal films play out like gory adventure flicks, full of corny dialogue and hammy performances, Cannibal Holocaust's tone is somber and serious. Technically, the film is quite accomplished, especially among the lenient standards of the cannibal genre. It works best in during the mock-documentary portion, where the grimy, low-tech feel lend an authenticy and hide any rough edges in the special effects. The gore effects in particular are very convincing.

In order to generate publicity for the film, Deodato had the actors sign contracts stating they wouldn't appear in public for a year after the completion of filming. Unfortunately his plan backfired, and upon his return to Italy, Deodato was prosecuted for making a snuff film. He demonstrated to the court how some of the more convincing gore effects were achieved (the infamously impaled woman, for instance, sat on a hidden bicycle seat with a piece of balsa wood in her mouth) and appeared on television with some of the actors. He cleared himself of the murder charges, but he was charged under obscenity laws due to the animal mutilation. For a long time the film was banned in many countries, or released in a truncated form.

If you can stomach it, I'd give this film a chance. It's central message is ham-fisted and hypocritical, but it's genuinely powerful and far more accomplished than most cannibal films. Of course, that's like being the smartest kid in Special Ed.

Zombie Holocaust (1980)

Zombies and cannibals? It's like they're reading my mind!

The cannibal genre was reaching it's peak in the late 70s, just as the zombie film was taking off, so it's no surprise that somebody would attempt to combine the two. Out of this idea, and very little else, comes Marino Girolami's Zombie Holocaust.

Something is afoot (or should that be a-hand?) in a New York hospital. It seems one of the orderlies is treating the morgue like an all-you-can-eat buffet. He is caught red-handed, but dives out of the nearest window (upon impact, an arm visibly pops off the dummy). He manages to utter the word "Keto" before expiring. Coincidentally, one of the doctors on hand, Lori Ridgeway (Alexandra Delli Colli), is also an anthropologist, and recognises the word as having religious significance in "all ancient dialects throughout South-East Asia". Well that narrows it down to about 4 million square kilometers. Thanks a lot, Lori!

She is subsequently interviewed by a New York Health Inspector, Dr. Peter Chandler (Ian McCollough, fresh from his appearance in Zombi 2). It seems there has been a rash of cannibalistic acts. They manage to pin "Keto" down to a single island, populated by bloodthirstly cannibals. Actually, according to Dr. Lori "all primitive peoples practiced [cannibalism], without exception". How about Italian filmmakers? In another astonishing coincidence, Lori grew up in the area, even possessing a Ketoan sacrificial dagger. Or rather, she did up until when her groovy pad was ransacked and the dagger stolen. Like the cannibalism at the hospital, they decide to conceal the robbery from the authorities for no good reason.

Anyway, Peter has somehow managed to wangle an all-expenses-paid, fact-finding trip to Keto and wants Lori to join him. Also coming along for the ride are expendable nobody George (Peter O'Neal), and obligatory annoying reporter Susan Kelly (Sherry Buchanan).

Upon arriving they meet Dr. Obrero (Donald O'Brien), who provides them with equipment, three native porters and a guide, Molotto (Dakkar, also from Zombi 2). He tries to dissuade them from going to Keto, dismissing the natives as primitive savages, "unwilling to accept any form of civilisation" (except those who emigrate to the US, I guess) but our team is undeterred. Lori slo-o-owly disrobes (one of several such scenes) and heads out for a swim, but upon her return she finds a maggotty severed head in her bed, which I guess is a Ketoan practical joke. The next day they head out to Keto, but engine trouble forces them to land at a different island, which turns out to be Keto anyway (don't ask).

Over the next few hours, two of the porters are killed by the natives, and it is treated with all the concern you'd expect in a film like this ("Bury your friend, and be quick about it!"). They also contact Obrero via radio, who instructs them to meet him at a nearby abandoned mission.

The next day, the third and final porter falls victim to a bamboo trap and is then consumed by hungry cannibals. For some reason, the cannibals go straight for the gooey intestines, which they consume raw. That can't be good for you. George suffers a similar fate and Susan is captured and carried away. Things are looking grim for Peter and Lori, but suddenly the cannibals are scared away by a few crusty zombies.

Peter and Lori make it to the abandoned mission (the same set used in Zombi 2... are you sensing a pattern here?) and meet up with Dr. Obrero, who instructs them to take his motorboat back to the mainland. Peter insists that he and Lori go alone, but when they get to the beach Peter senses something is amiss. You see, Obrero gave them directions to the wrong island on purpose, so he could conceal his illegal experiments. Peter manages to unravel Obrero's web of deceit, just in time to be attacked by a knife-wielding zombie. He lobotomises it with an outboard motor and, dismissing the idea of contacting the authorities yet again, they return to the mission.

Now we learn the fate of the annoying reporter. Dr. Obrero is using her in one of his ghastly experiments to turn people into zombie slaves! Unfortunately, before they can stop Obrero they run afoul of some of his zombies and Peter is captured while Lori is carried off by the natives.

Like many cannibal films, there is a inherent vein of racial superiority. And like those other films, they try to offset it here with a hilariously forced exchange at the beginning of the film ("But Dr. Drake, do you really think we're that much different from savages?"). Of course, that's betrayed by Dr. Obrero's implication that Peter's juicy caucasian brain is more complex and valuable than those of the locals (I wouldn't be so sure about that, Doc). This leads to one of the best lines in the film: "I could easily kill you now, but I'm determined to have your brain!". In fact, the film is at it's best during these scenes, O'Brien's scenery-chewing doc spouts some fantastic mad-scientist dialogue.

Back at the native's village, the stark nekkers Dr. Lori is painted with a remarkably tasteful floral pattern and placed on a form-fitted sacrificial altar. As one of the natives approaches her with the sacrificial knife from her apartment (I guess they shipped it back express), the altar starts to tilt back and the natives get riled up and start worshipping her, for some reason. Repeated viewings of this scene didn't help reveal the cause of the native's excitement.

The natives revolt and swarm on Dr. Obero's lab. Lori and Peter manage to escape before the building is consumed by flames, in an ending that seems very familiar. I think it was from another film... started with a "Z".

With their abundance of jungle locations, pig intestines and bearded Italians, the cannibal film and the zombie film seem like a natural fit. It's a shame, then, that Zombie Holocaust combines them in the most sloppy and unimaginative way possible. Almost every scene is poached from better films of either genre. Even the title is a lazy combination of Zombi 2 and Cannibal Holocaust, both better films released the previous year (don't expect an actual "zombie holocaust", or you will walk away disappointed).

At least it doesn't resort to the unforgivable animal cruelty found in other cannibal films, but that's like praising Ted Bundy for not being Hitler. This film doesn't just insult your intelligence, it gives it a Shin Shoryuken to the balls, but if you are a gorehound you will find a lot to enjoy.

Guy N. Smith Book Review - Cannibals

Happy New Year! I'm back reviewing another masterpiece from the prolific Guy N. Smith.

Some idiot Scot named Doug Geddis builds holiday homes right next to some mountain caves which house mutant cannibals. As a result the villagers shun him, and I can't really blame them. Doug's solution to the cannibal problem is to issue his guests cryptic warnings about staying off the slopes and confined to their chalet after dark. Even without the mutants, Invercurie seems the worst holiday spot in Scotland, and that's saying something.

However, this doesn't stop happy holiday-makers from streaming in. First up are Eddie and Sarah. Eddie is an older, married man having an affair with one of his students, so straight away we know they are cannibal chow.

Next are the Halseys. These people are really determined to have a holiday. They are not deterred by sullen villagers issuing veiled threats. They don't even budge when the family dog gets torn to pieces during the night. They only start to worry when their son disappears up on the mountain slopes (eaten by cannibals, natch). I'll say one thing for Guy N. Smith, he isn't shy about knocking off a few kids here and there.

A cop named Phil shows up in search of his philandering brother Eddie (who by this time is resting in the stomachs of hungry cannibals) and straight away we know he's the hero. A couple of mutant-fodder teenagers show up, their names don't matter. After a run-in with the cave mutants, a few of them confront Doug and eventually he spills the beans. There is a reason the villagers are so cagey about the cave-dwellers. It seems that many years ago people began giving birth to horrible mutants, so they dumped them in some mountain caves, dusted off their hands and called it a day. Sounds like a good plan to me!

Unfortunately it seems the mutants produce horrible offspring faster than Guy N. Smith produces horrible books. The mutants have outgrown their food supply and have started making nocturnal visits to the village in search of food. Now, angered by the holiday-makers, hungry cannibals rush down the mountain slopes and the village erupts into an orgy of violence.

There's something I love about cave-dwelling mutant cannibals. Caves are pretty spooky at the best of times, but add in mutants and I am one happy camper. Guy N. Smith pulls out all his typical tricks, padding out the body count with incidental characters. The good Reverend Macpherson is introduced and offed in just over 10 pages... a sad fate for any literary character. This one was a fun, trashy read and worth it for any fans of mutants, cannibals or Scottish villagers who say things like "On yer ain head be it".