(aka MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY)
* (out of ****)
Starring John Morghen (Giovanni Lombardo Radice), Lorraine De Selle, Zora Kerova, Danilo Mattei, and Robert Kerman
Directed & written by Umberto Lenzi
1981 NR (should be R or NC17)
WARNING: This review contains one really naughty word.
“Cannibal Ferox” is something you might stumble across on a bad movie spree, when you hit the video store in search of flicks so bad that they’re funny. A friend of mine has one of these little sprees every couple of years, and hit the jackpot with “Switchblade Sisters,” “The Life of Ricky,” “Redneck Zombies,” and “Detroit 9000,” all sterling pieces of crap, worth a couple dozen laughs each.
One Saturday we even saw an after-midnight screening of “The Beyond” at the arsty movie theater downtown (keep in mind that this same theater shows “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” every Saturday at midnight…which I guess is really every Sunday at midnight.). “The Beyond” is a movie that proves, once and for all, that if you slowly walk backwards into the average coat rack, it will punch a hole in your skull and come out through your eyeball. One of the previews before “The Beyond,” alongside “I Dismember Mama” and “Massacre Mafia Style,” was for “Cannibal Ferox.” We were encouraged by its use of disco music to highlight the consumption of obviously-phony human flesh, so we picked it up from the good people at Netflix.
Boy, was that a dumb idea. “Cannibal Ferox” is ninety minutes of bad actors getting tortured, with special focus placed on their sexual organs, by offensive Amazon stereotypes. Maybe a few beers and like-minded comrades might render this forgivable, but the scenes surrounding the torture are mercilessly dull. If I’m watching a so-bad-it’s-funny movie, I don’t care if the characters are cardboard, the plot makes no sense, the acting is terrible, and the special effects could all be made in some guy’s basement. What I don’t want is to be bored.
Okay. The plot. Let’s see. Three researcher college-types go to the Amazon to research cannibalism. They find a shifty-eyed, untrustworthy guy lost in the jungle and he promises to take them to some cannibals. The untrustworthy guy (John Morghen) scores, not with the brunet researcher (Zora Kerova), but with the brunet researcher’s blonde floozy friend (Lorraine De Selle), so we can get some pointless nudity. The untrustworthy guy claims that the cannibals attacked his party and gouged out one of his friends’ eyeballs. But when the researchers get to the cannibal village and are taken prisoner, it turns out that the untrustworthy guy had actually tortured villagers in search of hidden treasure, and gouged out their eyes.
Now the researchers are trapped and every attempt they make to escape results in more torture and being served up, uncooked, for brunch. This must be tough on the natives’ teeth but, according to “Cannibal Ferox,” they must have a lot of free time to chew because they’re always being shown sitting around, staring at nothing. As Hannibal Lecter will tell you, it’s no fun being a cannibal unless you cook first. In true Ed Wood style, the brunet even slips in some heavy-handed social commentary by concluding that the natives are only cannibals because exploitive Westerners pushed them to it. Sure. I’ll buy that for a dollar.
It seems I can find something positive to say about any movie. It’s been about two years since I saw “Cannibal Ferox,” but, as unappetizing as it is to watch, it seems to have burned itself a place in my memory, just like a nightmare might. Like a nightmare, the characters are trapped in a cycle of escape, capture, and torture, and certain graphic images have burrowed into a place where I can never get rid of them. Even the movie’s sloppy dubbing, like George Romero’s great “Night of the Living Dead,” only contributes to its atmosphere of being a bad dream. Whether or not I’m describing how the characters felt or how I felt watching “Cannibal Ferox,” I can’t say. Nor can I say whether or not any of this is genuinely in “Cannibal Ferox’s” favor, but it says something for director Umberto Lenzi that he has made something—for good or for evil—that sticks. (Lenzi's other credits include “Eaten Alive by Cannibals” and “So Sweet…So Perverse.”)
There are also a few glimmers of funny badness, as opposed to just bad badness. The movie’s misogyny is so ludicrously over-the-top that it earned a laugh or two; there’s something about the line “Does ecology get you off, twat?” that’s so absurd that its vileness is somehow dulled.
The movie stars Giovanni Lombardo Radice, under the name John Morghen. He is described by the DVD as a successful ballet dancer who doesn’t take movies seriously and only acts in them to pay the bills. His other credits include “Cannibal Massacre,” “City of the Living Dead,” “Sound Stage Massacre,” and “Demons of the Cathedral,” many of them directed by “Ferox’s” Lenzi (amazingly, Radice appeared in Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York” for a brief scene with Jim Broadbent). Radice and Lenzi seem to have something of a cult following around the world. I don’t think I’ll be a member. Maybe you are, and maybe that makes you a sick person. I don’t know. Just please don’t eat my cat.
Finished March 27th, 2003
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