Ok, we've arrived at the first of the truly notorious nasties. A film that has proudly proclaimed on it's posters (under the American title of Make Them Die Slowly) that its banned in 31 countries. And for good reason too. The Italian Cannibal film boom started in 1972 with a film called The Man From Deep River and the modern cannibal film was born. The trademark nudity, rape, close up gore and real life animal butchery that gave these films their name all started here. Cannibal Ferox was the 15th such film made in Italy and by that stage excess was the name of the game. The director who started it all, Umberto Lenzi, was back too and here you can get the feeling that he wasn't even trying anymore.
It starts off like an episode of the A-Team with a tame, bloodless murder of a drug dealer in a New York apartment which is investigated by a familiar face in exploitation cinema (Robert Kerman, also a porn star who performed under the stage name Richard Bolla). Then it cuts to Colombia where we meet a brother and sister called Rudy and Gloria and their friend Pat, who are there to prove Gloria's thesis about cannibalism being a myth. Huh, guess how that one's going to go. On their way into the jungle they're given a muskrat that they can tie up at night to keep the attention of snakes away from them and straight away we get to see the muskrat killed. In the uncut version that is. I'm watching the BBFC snipped version and for once censorship is a good thing. We only see the reaction to it but it's still a bit sickening. Then we meet the bad guys Mike and Joe, on the run from the killers from the opening scene. Joe is in flitters and Mike is saying a cannibal tribe did it. But why did they do it? We spend the rest of the film finding out in graphic detail.
Cannibal Ferox is one of the best known nasties but it's a dreadful film. It's plot merely serves as a hook on which to hang a dozen gore scenes. Sexual torture, penis severing and eating, eyeball gouging, brain chomping, amputation, breast stabbing and loads more animal butchery. There's an awful whiff of cash in about it too, coming a year after Cannibal Holocaust got worldwide notoriety. It even has two of that film's actors in supporting roles (Kerman and Perry Pirkanen) but it has none of it's quality. Yep, I said quality because despite CH's catalogue of transgression, it's a very well made movie, unlike this piece of shit. This one even rips off CH's message, that the civilised world is capable of far more brutality than anyone else.
One of the few things this one has to offer is yet another gruesome death for Giovanni Lombardo Radice. He died horribly in the last video nasty, Cannibal Apocalypse and he gets it even worse here. First he's beaten and has his lad lopped off and turned into a cannibalistic mcnugget, then he loses a hand and finally he gets the top of his bonce lopped off and has his brain eaten like a soft boiled egg. But he plays a bastard so he deserved it. It's so ridiculously over the top that you can't be offended by it, unlike some of the other shit we see here. The film's treatment of women for one thing is something else, not just by the evil characters either. There's a really distasteful leering misogynistic edge to the whole enterprise that will make you want to have a scrub when it's over. Mercifully its just a touch over 90 minutes.
Would i recommend this one? Nope. It's a nothing film with a pointless ending. There's nothing here.
Does it deserve nasty status? The uncut version yes. Definitely.
What's next? Next is Cannibal Holocaust. The undisputed king of the Video Nasties.
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