Cannibal Ferox movie - reviewed18:35 May 05 2008
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This is not a review that I wrote, this is a review by a guy I don't know, who's username on Yahoo is: headhunter32746
for more of his reviews go here: http://www.geocities.com/headhunter32746/Archives.html
Cannibal Ferox
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Released: 1981
MPAA Rating: X
Genre: Psycho-thriller
Nuts and Bolts: A team of adventurers meets up with two American drug dealers in the wilds of the Amazon jungles. But as luck would have it, they stumble upon a tribe of grub-eating, penis-chomping cannibal pygmies!
Summary: Okay, cue the corny 70s music. Like all foreign films that take place in America, we must first introduce the audience to New York City by spotlighting its most infamous landmarks; the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building. Then we move on to the apartment complex shared by a guy named Mike Logan and a woman named Myrna. But ironically enough, neither of these two are home. A waste of life known as Tim Barrett breaks into the apartment looking for some heroin. Mike Logan is his hook up man, but as I’ve already stated Mike isn’t home. In his place are two foul mouthed gangsters. The gangsters are looking to kill Mike because he took off with over $100,000 worth of drug money. They question Tim, but the little junkie knows nothing. The goombahs don’t believe him though and they shoot the shit out of him.
Now we move on to South America. Here we have three anthropology students ready to traverse the hidden jungles of Manyoka village near Panagua in the hopes of studying the legitimacy of cannibalism amongst primitive cultures. The main thrust behind this journey is Gloria Davis. Gloria believes that cannibalism doesn’t really exist and that it is merely a myth established by advanced cultures as a means of justifying their prejudice against societies that they would consider savage. Her ultra-machismo brother Rudy is along for the ride in order to watch out for her, and their friend Pat is there for no other reason than to shake her tits.
They stop at a travel office in order to get directions to Manyoka, but no one is really willing to help them. Pat prostitutes herself to the local Policia in order to get a shower. With great effort, they finally get a smattering of information concerning native tribes near Panagua. Rudy drives his jeep aboard a ferry and the three take off down river.
They get to the island and immediately run into car troubles. Rudy drives the jeep off the road and no sooner does he get it up and running again then he plows it into a patch of quicksand. Dickwad. So they walk away from the sinking jeep and decide to trek inland. No sooner do they walk a few dozen feet than they find a pasty faced little pygmy chowing down on a pile of grubs. The cameraman even zooms in to give us the close up shot of the grub crumbs rolling about the guy’s tongue. Yuck. Sickened by the act, they move on until they decide its time to set up camp. Throughout the course of the night, an anaconda comes out and eats a little rat thing that Pat had been keeping as a pet. Whatever.
They hear a tortured scream from deep in the woods and decide to go investigate. They find two more pygmies stuck to a tree impaled by a big spiked ball booby trap thing. This device looks like something a friggin’ Ewok would put together. As the three are commenting on the find, in walks Mike Logan and Joe Costolani. Mike and Joe are on the run from the savage cannibals and force themselves upon the company of others. He tells the tale of how Joe and he came to be in their predicament. Apparently, they came to South America to score some primo cocaine when they met a Portuguese man who claimed that there were emerald veins to be found in the jungle. Apparently, the natives didn’t take too kindly to outsiders exploring their grounds, so they tortured and killed the Portuguese man. Mike and Joe barely escaped with their lives. As a result, Joe is nursing a bad wound in his right shoulder.
Mike is a total dickface and immediately takes control of the entire group. He takes special delight in ogling Pat and calling Gloria a twat every fifteen minutes. Gloria is upset because apparently Mike’s story contradicts her theory that cannibalism doesn’t exist.
Later that evening, the group awakens to find that Gloria is missing. The group splits up and heads off in separate directions to look for her. Rudy and Joe find the Indio village as well as the burned and hacked remains of the Portuguese emerald miner. The natives don’t really do anything, but the two are repulsed by the sight regardless.
Mike and Pat meanwhile find Gloria. Apparently the dumb bitch fell into a pit-trap and was wallowing in the mud wrestling with a man-eating piglet. Mike jumps into the pit and stabs the pig to death with his knife. Sorry Babe. Everyone regroups back at the Indio village. Joe’s wounds have poisoned his blood and he falls over faint. They take him into one of the abandoned huts where Gloria dopes him up with some anti-biotics. The group then goes to sleep.
During the course of the night, Mike and Pat shack up for a rousing evening of coke sniffing and cock twiddling. As night passes into morning, the two are totally blitzed and decide to go fuck with the natives. They find a young pygmy girl by the riverside and Pat threatens to slice her tits off with a knife. She finally comes to her senses a bit and realizes that this is just stupid. The native girl tries to run away but Mike shoots her down in cold blood. The gunshot brings Rudy and Gloria a’ running. Rudy sees the dead cannibal and launches into Mike with a flurry of blows. They stop fighting when they realize that Joe’s fever is getting worse. Mike and Pat go watch the natives carve up a sea turtle while Rudy and Gloria take care of Joe.
Now this part is important kiddies, so pay attention. Joe tells the two that Mike is full of shit about what really happened to them. He tells them that Mike tried to muscle the Portuguese chap out of his emerald stash and when he didn’t comply, he strapped him to a tree in the Indio village. He then tortured him by carving out his eye with a hunting knife and chopping off his cock with a machete. Mike left him to die on the tree. The natives never attacked them. Rudy and Gloria now realize that Mike is a total fucking shitbag and they have to get Pat away from him before its too late. Joe succumbs to his fever and dies.
Uhhh…for some reason the movie now cuts away to a scene in New York City. Mike’s old roommate Myrna is questioned by police chief Rizzo. Rizzo knows that the mob is looking for Mike and they want to find him before the gangsters do. Anyway, enough of this boring shit. Let’s get back to Manyoka.
A tribe of natives happen upon the hut and pull Joe’s corpse out into the dirt. They eviscerate him and begin to eat his raw innards in plain sight of Rudy and Gloria. They try to flee but are soon capture by a bunch of pygmies with blow-darts. Mike and Pat have been captured as well. They take them back to the village proper where Mike is strapped up to the tree that the Portuguese bloke had been nailed to. The others are shoved into Deer Hunter style cages and left floating in the river. One of the natives takes Rudy’s machete and uses it to whack Mike’s pecker off. Ouch! To make matters worse, he pops it into his mouth and begins gnawing it down as if it were KFC’s popcorn chicken special.
Now we cut back to another senseless New York scene. Myrna is confronted by the two wiseguys that capped Tim Bartlett in the beginning of the flick. They beat her up and ask her where Mike is. The cops show up and chase the bad guys off. Whoopee. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.
The natives pile their fresh American victims into a canoe and begin taking them downstream. They even brought the wiener-less Mike along. (They cauterized his Bobbitt so he wouldn’t bleed to death.) Once they hit the river’s edge, Rudy tries to escape. He runs deep into the woods and hides in a shallow section of swamp water. Little does he know however that the waters are infested with PIRANHA! The little darlings begin snacking on Rudy’s leg until he finally gets up the gumption to get the fuck up out of the water. The natives find him and blow a poison dart into his chest. Rudy falls over dead.
So now Mike, Gloria and Pat are taken to a separate village. The girls are thrown into this large clay cavern while Mike is chucked into a pit. In order to keep their spirits up, they engage in a sing-a-long. (Yeah, I’m sure the Jews in Auschwitz probably did the same thing. Oi.) As dumb bitch #1 and dumb bitch #2 are crooning out the lyrics to Red River Valley, Mike decides he can’t handle this anymore. He manages to escape from his cage and hobble his little dickless ass out into the woods. The cannibals catch up to him however and chop his hand off with Rudy’s old machete. They take him back to the village.
Now while all this is going on, it is revealed that Myrna is actually Mike’s ex-girlfriend. She hires a guy named Wilson to fly a seaplane over Panagua in the hopes of finding Mike. They skim the tree line a few times but don’t find him. They eventually come upon Rudy’s old jeep stuck in the quicksand.
Back at the village, the natives decide that Pat is to be their next victim. They haul her ass up out of the pit and pull her shirt open. Now normally I would say, “Woo-Hoo!” at a scene where a woman has her top torn open, but I should have known better than to expect anything but exploitative gore by this point. The natives take two huge hooks and stab them through Pat’s tits. The hooks are connected to ropes that hoist her body up into the air. She twitches in the sun until she eventually dies.
Mike is the next to go. They shove him into a three-foot high cage, which is capped off by a tabletop. The center of the tabletop has a round hole just large enough for a person to fit their skullcap through. The natives cleave the top of Mike’s head off with a machete and then proceed to pick at his gray matter. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Now believe it or not, there’s actually ONE of these filthy little chicken-fuckers that thinks it might be a tad excessive to around eating another man’s nut-sack. This kind native frees Gloria and tries to help her escape from the jungle. But as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The pygmy steps into another one of those damned Ewok booby traps and impales himself on a branch of spikes.
Gloria stumbles along until she is finally found by a group of American monkey hunters.
Now we flash forward to three months later. Gloria has completed her thesis on cannibalism but believe it or not, she maintains her original stance declaring that cannibalism doesn’t exist. To the world at large, the others died by drowning when their canoe tipped over. Gloria never reveals the truth about what really happened in Manyoka.
Acting/Dialogue: I won’t mince words here. The acting sucks. I used to be kind to these foreign flicks because all of the character voices were usually dubbed over. But I’m tired of defending the defenseless. Is it too much to ask to get a REAL actor to do the dubbing? For fuck’s sake, I’LL do some character voices if need be. You don’t even have to pay me for it! I’d do it for free if I thought it would insure that the world would not be subjected to any more shitty English dub-jobs.
Gore: Plenty of gore here. Half of the film comes off as a safari guide’s snuff film for animals. All of the animal deaths shown in this flick are real. None of the animals are portrayed by living actors. The remaining gore is likewise eerily realistic looking. So much so, that it’s actually disturbing. Included in the list is: Dick-chopping, tit-hooking, gut-stabbing, vivisection with spear, man eating grubs, hand-chopping, piranha attack, leeches, eye-gouging, and of course the obligatory cannibal native sloppily gnawing on some raw intestines.
Guilty Pleasures: Pat shows off her tits a few times. But if you’ve read the summary, you know how this pans out. Let’s just say that Pat’s breasts are the real driving hook of this whole movie. There’s also some native pygmy garbanzos flopping about, but who the hell wants to look at that shit? For the ladies, there’s a very quick shot of Mike Logan’s exposed pecker, right before it gets chopped off. (Consequently, this film has been accused of showing scenes of graphic rape. Now while, there are scenes involving brutal torture, there are absolutely no rape sequences shown in Cannibal Ferox.)
The Good: Cannibal Ferox, also known by the eye-rolling Americanized title of Make Them Die Slowly is one of the few horror films to ever get the highly courageous and often coveted X rating. This is the first X-rated movie I’ve ever seen that wasn’t a porno. Because of its sheer brutality, it was banned in thirty-one different countries. Hell, I didn’t even know there WERE thirty-one different countries. Mrs. Headhunter thinks I’m seriously disturbed for even watching this film much less reviewing it. Shit…she’s just learning that now?
This film is largely viewed as the Italian version of Deliverance. What makes this film compelling is its sheer graphic nature. In many ways, it succeeds in being more offensive than films such as Dead-Alive because its physics are steeply grounded in reality. Italian director Umberto Lenzi made somewhat good use of an old cliché regarding the human condition. At their core, the natives in this film are not an aggressive species. For the most part, they’re not even really cannibals, preferring to dine on such local appetizers including monkeys and sea turtles. But it is the actions of the so-called civilized Americans that turn the otherwise peaceful Indio people into an aggressive culture. When first we see them, they pretty much keep to themselves and are content with gnawing on grubs and painting themselves up in that white pasty dusty shit that is so popular amongst native communities. The film’s heroine Gloria, contests that there is no such thing as cannibalism and the concept of which is really nothing more than a myth created by higher order humans as an excuse to justify their prejudice against primitive cultures. There is a nice symmetry between the knee-jerk evolution of the Indio and what happened to the American Indians during the mid to late 19th century. (The American Indians were pretty much content with smoking their peace pipes and having pow wows until the Americans came along and introduced them to booze, firearms and syphilis.) As strong a statement as Lenzi tries to make here, it ultimately becomes lost thanks to the character of Gloria. More on that later.
It’s very seldom that I actually find myself grossed out by a movie, but even the ole Headhunter had to spit out a mouth full of beer and scream “Holy shit!” when poor Mike was de-weinered. The hand chopping scene is also graphically intense as well as the scene where Mike skewers the eyeball of the Portuguese miner. And of course, there’s Mike’s lobotomy. Again, this scene did not look like it was done by a special effects crew. I actually felt like I was watching somebody get their skullcap sliced off. The realism supplied in the special effects will strike a chord in just about any viewer and its one of the few films that goes straight for the gut.
Rather than filming on a sound stage, Lenzi shot on location in the Amazon. I think this was one of the real highpoints of the film since we get some really beautiful shots of the jungles, rainforests and river. Nature lovers are all about that shit.
Another thing that I appreciated with this flick was that Lenzi chose to go with real South American natives rather than actors. This is made obvious by the fact that these guys look completely unimpressed and emotionless about nearly everything that is going on. This actually works to the film’s betterment because it adds a layer of casualness to the actions of the cannibals. Now whether or not these guys are actually cannibals is anybody’s guess. It’s probably safe to assume that they were not, since I have not heard any reports of any of the cast or crewmembers having to defend themselves against a pygmy with an appetite.
There’s one aspect of Cannibal Ferox, which certifies its place in the annals of Italian Giallo filmmaking. When our ears are not being assailed by the cheesy 1970s disco rhythms, there is a nice haunting synthesizer riff which is reminiscent of Fabio Frizzi’s work in such films as Zombi 2, Evil Eye, the Seven Doors of Death, and City of the Living Dead.
The Bad: Okay, if you’re the type that is partial to animals, then this is NOT the film for you. Lenzi goes to great lengths to paint a portrait of the laws of the wild. There is only one scene where an animal was needlessly killed and that was when Mike stabbed the piglet in order to save Gloria. All of the other animal death scenes are really no different than anything you would find on an episode of Wild America. We see an anaconda eating on some muskrat looking thing, but don’t worry the anaconda later gets mauled by a Gila monster. Then there’s a cheetah that dines on some farm raised monkey spleen. The natives show us the do’s and don’ts on how to properly prepare and dine upon a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. And Steve Irwin would run and hide like the little bitch that he is after seeing the cannibals flay and devour a live crocodile. I list this in the bad column as a warning to those who take offense to such things as well as to highlight the fact that the animal deaths were completely gratuitous and did nothing to serve the story.
Okay, remember when I said, that Lenzi’s metaphor becomes a bit soured? Well, for the most part he does an adequate job of showing how an allegedly superior foreign power can adversely affect and traumatize a lower culture. This is all fine well and good and the audience is receptive to the message. But Lenzi cops out and caters to the bottom feeders by having his heroin Gloria rattle on about all this ACLU inspired human atrocities puppy-hugging bullshit. Her delivery was completely piss poor and more ham handed than Rosie O’Donnell at a Pride rally. You had a good thing going Lenzi, but you fucked it all up by feeling the need to have to explain it to us. Hack.
I have no real problem with the film’s pacing except for the fact that Umberto insists on cutting away from the unfolding drama to show us these pointless hard-boiled cop scenes in New York City. They really disrupt the flow of the picture, and every time he switches venues I feel as if I’ve been physically pulled out of the movie. Ultimately, they go nowhere and do nothing to serve the movie. Hell, what was the point of Myrna and Wilson even going to South America? They didn’t even find Gloria. It was a bunch of other guys that rescued her. A completely pointless string of events, they actually did more to harm Lenzi’s overall message than to support it.
Now its time for me to make fun of the characters themselves. Mike Logan certainly gets no sympathy from me or any other viewer. He’s a misogynist, sadistic, murderous drug addict. I spend most of the time routing for the cannibals and a guiltless smile caresses my face when he ultimately gets his just deserts. Rudy is your typical 70s tough-guy type; young, dumb and full of cum as the saying goes. He’s just as arrogant as Mike and to be honest, I felt absolutely nothing when he died a most laughable death. The dick is sitting hip-deep in piranha infested water. Upon realizing that the little fishies are nibbling on his kibbles and bits, he jumps out of the swamp where we see one of the little buggers ferociously attacking his pant leg. Rather than flick the little fucker off of him he cries out to the natives to help him. For Christ’s sakes you pussy it’s a God damned fish! I don’t care if it’s a piranha or a minnow; bitch slap the fucker and be on your way! But by raising such a ruckus and squealing like a little girl, he attracts the attention of the pygmies. Pygmy number one shoots a blow dart at him, which kills him instantly. I have a major problem with this. The dart DOESN’T EVEN HIT HIM! It spikes the button on his shirt and doesn’t even make contact with his flesh. And yet, he falls over dead instantly. Oh well…he was a dickwad anyway. The two leading ladies aren’t much better either. Gloria is an idiot trapped inside the body of an idiot. Mike spends half of the movie calling her a twat and she just stands there and takes it with a smile (I guess twat is a big word in Rome. Mike calls her this about seven times throughout the course of the film). And in the all time cheesiest scenes I have ever seen, she inspires Pat to sing Red River Valley with her in order to calm their nerves. Oh yeah! That’s what I always do when a bunch of blood thirsty cannibals are getting ready to eat my nut sack…I start a sing-a-long! Ugh. Mike was right. She IS a twat. Utterly useless; I can’t believe she actually survived. The only one I didn’t have a problem with was Pat. Pat is there for one reason and one reason only; and that is to portray the part of the token dumb whore. As far as dumb whores go, you could do a lot worse. She talks sassy and shows off her tits, which are what whores are wont to do, and everybody’s expectations of her are met.
Cannibal Ferox is reported to be the most violent movie ever made. In that, I would have to laughably disagree. I think films like Day of the Dead, Dead-Alive and Saving Private Ryan are better suited to hold that title. But it is without a doubt one of the more disturbing films to come around, since I find myself constantly questioning the motivations of the production staff and the actors. If a person ever wanted to test their threshold for realistic looking gore, then this movie might prove to be an appropriate barometer by which to go by.
Great Lines: None. The dialogue sucked.
Overall Rating: 4 out of 10 severed heads. The only reason I gave this movie so high a rating is for its ability to linger on in the minds of its viewers long after they finished watching the film. True Horror enthusiasts will snub their nose at this, but the gore hounds and splatter freaks will probably dig it.
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