We can stop now. We've found it. The nadir of video nasty cinema. The low point is Cannibal Terror, a film lobbed onto the Video nasty list in 1983 and binned in 1985. You'd feel bad for the kids renting this out back in the day, thinking they were on for a traumatic thrill ride à la Cannibal Holocaust and ending up with a sub A-Team shitfest that looks like it was filmed in the scrub out behind someone's house and that's interminably padded out with footage from other films and gore scenes that consist of people eating sausages covered in ketchup to make them look like intestines.
Cannibal Terror was directed by a Frenchman named Alain Deruelle who made it around the same time and in the same place as the infamous Jess Franco was directing his own take on Cannibal cinema. Both share a lot of sets, some stock jungle footage and some of the same actors portraying the cannibals but .....and I can't quite believe I'm saying this..... this ain't a patch on a Franco film. He could pace a story, he could frame a shot, he could coax a somewhat believe performance from an actor. None of that kind of skill is present here. It's up there with the worst films you'll ever see. And yet, being associated with that infamous list has given it a lease of life far, far beyond anyone could have ever expected.
It's story is a very simple one. A child is kidnapped by two men and a woman to be held ransom for money. The kidnappers are warned by their driver they're in cannibal territory but the woman wonders off by herself anyway and gets munched in a messy moment that no doubt caught the eye of the BBFC snippers in London's Soho Square. The kidnappers then decide to into the jungle with the child anyway to escape the rescue party coming for her. Of course they're captured and eaten but the child is rescued and we get an improbable happy ending.
It's the sheer ineptitude with which it's all carried out though. The scrubland of Alicante in southern Spain is a stand in for the lush tropical rainforests of South America. The cannibals are played by European actors in dark makeup or in some cases no make up at all, who can't help but look into the camera each time it passes them. You'll have great fun spotting the disco tattoo fella, or the chap with the giant muttonchop sideburns but best of all are the cannibals wearing trainers....in a supposedly remote jungle village, with manicured grass and cars driving by in the distance. There's no point in even mentioning the performances because they're just non existent. No direction, no effort, no nothing. The other cannibal films on the list had subtext at least, a message of sorts, Cannibal Terror has nada, it's a cash in on those others.
It's been rumoured over the years that the only reason this ended up as a video nasty was it's title and it's not too improbable a thing to happen. During the police raids of the early 80's mix ups regularly occured with war classics like Apocalypse Now being mistaken for Cannibal Apocalypse and Sam Fuller's WW2 drama The Big Red One getting seized for having an obscene sounding name (this genuinely happened). Anyone thinking it comes near the intensity of Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust or Umberto Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox is in for a drop though. The film does contain elements that could cause it trouble with film classifiers but it's all so shoddily mounted it's hard to imagine anyone being offended by any of it. As mentioned before....sausages. Fucking sausages. It was no surprise when it was found to be unprosecutable and therefore dropped from the obscenity list.
Did Cannibal Terror deserve it's place on the video nasty list? LoL no.
Is it worth a watch? Lol no.
Up next - Luigi Cozzi's Contamination. This one kinda rocks.
Previous nasties
House On The Edge Of The Park, The
Video Nasties - Time For A Rewatch
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