Green Inferno ( 2013 )

GREEN INFERNO Directed By Eli Roth, Starring Ramon Llao  (2013).

Review By Goat Scrote

     I opened my Friday morning with a little slice of jungle hell from Eli Roth. It’s a solid jungle-cannibal genre movie. What I mean to say is that it’s the real thing, not a tribute or a clever post-modern twist on an idea that’s been done to death. It is that very same idea, risen from the grave one more time like Dracula. Technological updates aside, this story would be right at home in a cheap, gritty 1970s/80s Italian production about gut-munching stone-age villagers. “Green Inferno” just has the highest production values of any jungle cannibal movie in history.

Captain Jack Sparrow drools over some "long pork."

    I enjoy the whole sub-genre, and director Eli Roth obviously digs it too or he wouldn’t have made a movie with such narrow niche appeal. It has been long, so terribly long, since a proper jungle cannibal film has been made. I wonder if he was hoping to bring the genre to a wider modern audience by distilling the essence of every Italian cannibal film into one well-produced movie. That kind of mad science really ought to have worked.

Screw the box office, Eli is the only audience Eli needs.

     If you’ve ever seen one of these movies before you know the basic plot. A bunch of westerners get lost in the jungle. Soon they run afoul of an entire village which lives like the family from Texas Chainsaw Massacre (minus the power tools). There are many twists and variations on this classic plot, of course. The genre is also notable for providing a vehicle for very harsh social criticism, worked seamlessly into the blood and guts and torture. Green Inferno closely follows this pattern. It is shocking, depraved, harrowing, gut-churning, cynical, morally challenging, all the things a good cannibal movie should be.

Oh shit, I forgot to pack cannibal repellent.

     So why isn’t that enough? I enjoyed “Green Inferno”, and I feel like I should be raving and evangelizing the movie, but I just don’t feel it. I wasn’t expecting anything more than a jungle torture-fest and I certainly got that. I also liked the ongoing ethical flux of the movie, with right/wrong and hero/villain shifting according to context. The movie is actually pretty smart, and it challenges political-activism-as-fashion among other things. The ending has a sharply pointed jab at the kind of ignorant douchebag “activists” who wear Che Guevara t-shirts. That alone earns the movie all kinds of bonus points, since I believe people wearing Guevara’s face really should be eaten by cannibals.

     I can think of plenty of problems with the movie. The characters are one-dimensional interchangeable victims whom we care nothing about.  A small bag of marijuana slipped into the food gets a whole village stoned to the point of passing out. The moviemakers wuss out in a climactic genital mutilation scene which could have made the film truly memorable and socially relevant. Far worse complaints can readily be aimed at older genre films which I enjoyed despite their problems. I don’t know why I didn’t get into “Green Inferno” more than I did. It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t all that original, either. I’d seen it all before, although it was nice to see it so beautifully filmed with superb gore effects. If you’re a genre fan I think it’s worth seeing it in the theater, just don’t expect it to take you anywhere you haven’t been before. I’ll certainly watch it again, which is more than I can say for most modern horror films!

SLIGHTLY RECOMMENDED! SEE IT IN THEATERS!

Pardon me, do you happen to have any Grey Poupon brand sunscreen?

Cannibal Ferox

Cannibal Ferox (Make Them Die Slowly,Women From Deep River) Directed By Umberto Lenzi, Starring John Morghen (1981). 

Against all my better judgement I decided to rewatch Cannibal Ferox (or better known in the days when video stores existed on Thriller Video as Make Them Die Slowly). Why you ask, because it just showed up in HD form on Huluplus! Every time I watch this wretched film, I get a combination of nausea and guilty enjoyment because it's extremely ugly, racist and so offensive that it becomes surreal. The main reason to see it at all, rests on the shoulders of actor John Morghen. His lines, which are so wildly offensive have to be heard to believed, who else would throw the word "twat" in every other sentence or call every body shit face-- than this guy! Frank Von Kuegelgen does a great job dubbing Giovanni Radice (or Morghen), his performance is my favorite and usually in other films he's appeared in they always give his character a very effeminate voice.

If you have a degree in Fulci-economics than you'll be overjoyed to see half of his bit actors (from Gates of Hell aka City of the Living Dead and some Italian crime flicks) and similar nonsensical situations tossed in like a clump of maggots in a kale salad. But there's so much more to be excited about, we've got a piranha attack, underwater bamboo cages and racial dominance all in the sake of too much cocaine. 

I heard that there's Candy Apples on Monkey Island

Three collegiate chuckleheads venture down the river to a village named monyoka (some fictional jungle which is really Columbia) to do something something so idiotic as to prove that all History concerning cannibalism is just racist bullshit propagated by the history of colonialism and conquistadores. Anyone who's read about The Conquest of Spain knows that The Aztecs did eat people in their rituals and colonialism had nothing to do with gut munching. The scriptwriter (who's apparently Mr. Lenzi) obviously coked out of his mind, possibly just hates anthropologists and is condemning them with this film because they all come off like sub moronic turds! So yeah, dropout of college and get a job at Burger King would you or just invent facts ala-Foxs News, which makes this film slightly prophetic. 

You're saying this fuggin movie was ahead of it's time, excuse me while I die!

The HD quality magnifies the haze of grain on Lenzi's original vision (who would've dreamed that this would ever make it beyond VHS though). My favorite parts about this film are the silly lines spouted by the all dubbed cast like "Hey there's a jay walking igunana!" and other quotable favorites. This is a genre I detest and yet am thoroughly fascinated by.

The most heartless aspect of the film, which Skunkape and I saw long before the Deodato one is that it's basically Cannibal Holocaust on training wheels. Lenzi goes out of his way to copy that flick with the same senseless animal violence and just like Dr. Butcher used some of the cast of Zombie to exploit that film, some of the same actors from Holocaust re-appear. The first sign of trouble just after the tragic mongoose death (which is really uncalled for) is a googly eyed stomach eater hiding behind some leaves. Skunkape mentioned that the snake was full, so the mongoose didn't really die. Then Ferox gets really good as Mike Logan (Morghen) one of the most offensive but hysterical anti-heroes shows up, he carries a little sack of nose candy around his neck and pretends that cannibals tried to attack him and his "asshole" buddy Joe (Walter Lucchini).

Whatever I'm fine, is my hair OK?

They all kind of bond over all being New Yawkers(sic) on vacation and what led Mike to Columbia are emeralds and snow but Gloria (Larraine De Salle) and her crew never mention the retarded reasons they're there. Mike's bottom teeth pop out consistently as he talks about how cannibals ate his pals balls off and then Gloria hears the sentence echo in her mind. There are so many metal and hardcore bands that have sampled that choice line of dialogue --too funny! Pat (Zora Kerova) sleeps with a Mexican dude and post coitus says "Take a shower some time will ya?" Now here's another bit of uncalled for racist bullshit sprinkled throughout an all ready overstuffed shit sandwich--get ready for more, that's nuthin'!   

Everyone is super sweaty and grungey looking (they might look even worse in high def). I must commend Grindhouse Releasing for really packing on the extras into this shit flick classic (to steal a Gilpin-ism) and my favorite parts are the new psychedelic audio moments and overly loud gunshot sounds--the audio engineer went hog wild!  

Gloria after looking at the scared natives confirms right then and there-- OK, I've seen enough let's turn around, but nope, they have to stay because Joe "the asshole", Mike's pal gets sick and keels over. Logan, whacked out on blow, gets a hankering for some ultra violence and decides to fuck with the savages who all seem afraid of the Westerners. The natives are always Latin or Asian people in wigs smothered in white mud, they meet the animal death quota of boss Umberto by killing a big turtle and a crocodile --so fucking stupid I swear! Radice who cannot stand Lenzi (check out our video interview if you need confirmation) rips him a new one in the commentary, he tried to humiliate the actor into slaughtering animals for his project I'm guessing in the name of Neo-realism, whatever! 

I like the soundtrack by Roberto Donati (otherwise known as Budy Maglione), recently released on Oneway Static Records on vinyl and cassette with some amazing artwork and attention to detail check it out here. Years before, Skunkape let me dub his copy of the Blackest Heart Media CD soundtrack which had amazing tribute songs by Rok Opera, great stuff!

Is this really necessary?

They ramp up the hatred that justifies what occurs later to Mike Logan and it basically turns into a "Just Say No" to cocaine public service announcement. Because as everyone knows, booger sugar will turn you into a raving psycho that will rape innocent people and disembowel them, obviously, that's why it's bad for you!

Logan, who's wanted in NYC by a cop named Rizzo (Robert Kerman), no relation to the Midnight Cowboy co-star or the Muppet is on the lam! He keeps questioning Logan's blonde girlfriend about her beau's whereabouts. why Kerman decided to return for another jungle holocaust film despite his unabashed distain for the genre and Deodato in particular, always gives me the giggles (he appeared in Eaten Alive/Doomed to Die as well). Even though R. Bolla aka Robert Kerman hated these flicks, he's great in them and gives off a David Hess like quality of hostility even in these good guy roles. Once a rotten papaya shows up at Rudy and the gangs hut, it's all over for the cast and the last 34 minutes are a smorgasbord or mayhem and torture, starting with Morghen getting his dick hacked off and devoured! You may think to yourself, it can't get any worse than that for the poor fucker, but you'd be dead wrong as they fasten him to a lobotomy table and whack off the top of his cranium and reach in that skull bucket for some pink slimy brain treats--yum yum, a cannibal feast, invite over Screamin Jay and the Spiderbaby clan!

I'll have you know I injected my dick with thallium, Ha! Didn't expect that did you? 

A friendly cannibal takes sympathy on the gang but waits till the absolute bitter end until he steps in to help, I mean Zora Kerova's double breast meat hooks have already been inserted and she soon dies. Mike Logan, the selfish twat almost escapes (they cauterized his ballsack, so that he doesn't bleed to death and he hauls ass out of the village, but nope, they drag him back and finish the job. The tiny cannibal who helps Gloria escape looks like Nein Nub, Lando Calrissian's Mickey Mouse-like alien sidekick with a bad wig on. 

The commentary and behind the scenes stories are fascinating, almost everyone had an awful time acting in this wretched film and you get the feeling that something was off during the production, an all around unpleasant experience. Keep that patented Howard Scott Up-Chuck Cup handy! I have no idea why I like this film though it makes no sense and maybe I should reconsider things and get my priorities straight. It's funny how I have a long history with this cannibal flick and bought it on VHS from 16000 video for 2 bucks. Recently Eli Roth has decided to jumpstart this genre with his own love letter to Deodato and I have zero interest in seeing it.  

AVAILABLE ON HULUPLUS!

Blu-ray/Soundtrack on Amazon 

GRINDHOUSE RELEASING

 Trailers that Smell & TOG's

Cannibal Ferox Trailer

Dead Snow

DEAD SNOW (DOD SNO) (2009, Un-rated, 91 minutes, Euforia Film.

BY GRAHAM RAE

Two events in recent human history have basically divested the human race of any dearly-held illusions about itself: the invention of the internet, where you can see all insane human potential spread out in a vast mad anything-goes market…and the Holocaust. The latter pogrom, the single most vile and evil event ever perversely perpetrated by the human (disg)race on itself, has produced some hollow caustic experimentation-and-extermination exploitation movies: sick, tasteless stuff like “Love Camp 7,” “SS Experiment Camp” and “Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS.” Cos after all, nothing screams entertainment like the loons who carried out the horrifying and race-despairing systematic wiping out of six million Jews and gypsies and homosexuals, eh?

I guess this human baked alaska is a bit too much!

You’d think that the whole Third Reichsploitation field had been done to death – and beyond. Which is where “Dead Snow,” the new (at the time of writing the review – Graham) Norwegian Nazi zombie movie, comes in. It’s a fresh and new twist on the whole Herrenrasse film genre, right? Wrong. There have been at least four other Nazi zombie movies made to date (there may be more, but I can’t be bothered searching Google for them): “Shock Waves,” “Zombie Lake,” “Oasis of the Zombies” (a Jess Franco anti-classic I actually own on a 50-public-domain-horror-film DVD and put off a third of the way through after my central nervous system started to collapse) and ‘Night of the Zombies’ (not to be confused with the excellent trash Bruno Mattei “Dawn of the Dead” rip-off movie). The question here is, does it bring anything new to this undeniably stupid subgenre, and do it well?

Not really.

First off: “Dead Snow”. What does that title mean? Nothing. It’s stupid to me, and pretty much as decorticated as the rest of the part-satire part-homage film. To a bad metal soundtrack, a bunch of University of Oslo students (one of whom, a medical student, is - hyuck hyuck – allergic to the sight of blood) snow-scooter to remote area of the Norwegian mountains to party in your archetypal cut-off-from-the-world cabin, indulging in some tiresome ‘post-modern’ Kevin Williamson-alike dialogue about horror movies that have had characters who go into areas with no cell phone reception as they do. Once they arrive at the cabin, they start partying when a strange old man lurches out of the snowblown night. “This’ll be the old guy to warn them they’re doomed to a horrible death, to explain the plot,” I said to my friend Elwyn, visiting me from Scotland…and I was right. Every self-respecting cheapshit splatter movie in the 80s had them.

you think this is bad, try sitting through Zombie Lake again!

Transpires that the area they are in, Oksfjord, was occupied by the Nazis during WWII (Norway, like most of Europe, was genuinely occupied, and this is apparently big in the Norwegian recent history psyche) and a group of ubermensch were chased off by the townspeople into the mountains and were presumed dead. Or not. Obviously, or there would be no movie. So the old man buggers off and gets slaughtered, illogically hanging around overnight in a tent in an area he knew to be haunted, and the film really kicks off. The kids find a treasure trove of gold stolen by the Nazis, which causes them to rise from their frigid mountainside tombs to search for their ill-gotten gains, in a move straight out of John Carpenter’s “The Fog.” Pretty soon “Dead Snow” turns into pretty much every ‘keep the undead outside and us inside’ film you’ve ever seen…and soon grows pretty tiresome indeed.

Damn it! I just can't decide what I want at Der Wienerschnitzel!

Now. I will say this. I’m getting tired of seeing old splatter movies from the 80s or so regurgitated, simply because this limited palette of sometimes-entertaining trash was the stuff the director grew up on. The minute I saw a fat ugly guy in this effort wearing a tee-shirt of Pete Jackson’s splatter comedy classic “Braindead” (U.S. title “Dead Alive”) a few minutes into the film I knew exactly what I was going to be getting; hell, even one of the posters is a direct rip from Lucio Fulci’s “Zombie.” There’s a ridiculous scene involving that horror nerd too. He’s in an outhouse taking a dump and a drunk beautiful girl comes out and fucks him (coming while he’s going, in other words), which I couldn’t caustically help thinking was sort of a splatter freak’s wet dream come true – as well as being completely ludicrous and implausible.

I suppose if you’re going to rip off (sorry, I mean ‘pay homage to a la “Shaun of the Dead”) splatter zombie movies, you could do far worse than early Sam Raimi and Pete Jackson films, whose undead lore this film is bloody drowned in. But, to me at least, that’s the whole problem. If I want to see early Raimi and Jackson films, I’ll watch the “Evil Dead” films or “Braindead” again, cos they’re great…and not just some halfass spinterpretation of them by somebody else. I love Romero zombie movies but didn’t much rate “Shaun” for pretty much the same reason: seen it all before, and far better done. Just the filmmakers recreating their youth and putting themselves in their favorite splatter movies. Which may be fun and fine and fair enough on one level, but even though we now live in an era where popular culture has swallowed its own tail and the directors who grew up on it are just shitting out the stuff they grew up on (often because they seem to have had no real lives growing up outside of watching movies)…is trying for originality, even a vague semblance of it, a completely lost cause?

You tell me.

Looking back over this review, I see it’s been somewhat jaded and negative. “Dead Snow” is certainly not a badly made film. It’s certainly of a higher production quality than some of its source inspirational material, and some of the scenes work pretty well. There’s a really creepy scene where a knocked-out woman wakes up to find herself being disemboweled by devouring zombies as the screen wobbles and fades and reddens as she dies. Wirkola can definitely direct a film, and could be a fine director if he just got some better material to work with that isn’t an irritating slavish imitation of other people’s seminal sanguinary spillage-work. There is plenty of blood and guts and chaos here for rabid splatter fanatics, so they’ll definitely get their money’s worth. Other people I know whose opinion I normally agree with and respect watched it and liked it (eh Baron?) so that basically just proves the subjectivity and ultimately pointlessness of reviewing movies.

I think I’ve said enough.

Next move’s yours.

Pointless? I'm so depressed.

Massacre in Dinosaur Valley

  -Reviewed by Skunkape-

Directed by Michele Massimo Tarantini 1985 

 Let us begin with the star of this epic jungle romp, Michael Sopkiw. The Model turned actor starred in four Italian productions and this was his last. I’m not going to lie, I do have a bit of a man crush on Sopkiw, but there are always certain dudes in film we love to watch in macho action films. Harrison Ford representing the A list, Bruce Campbell for the B list and Michael Sopkiw for the Z. Massacre in Dinosaur Valley has been marketed as an Indiana Jones style adventure film and a cannibal film, it was even given the title Cannibal Ferox II in some countries but I assure you no animals were harmed in the making of this film.(not entirely true) It does a good job of blending the elements of an adventure film and the Italian cannibal films we love so much. Well, it has it all really! Like quick sand, piranhas, white slave traders, a sadistic lesbian, it also showcases beautiful women naked throughout.  If you haven’t seen it, you should probably just close this review and go buy it right now!

Three's Company in the Jungle

The sexy Eva (Suzane Carvalho) rides into a small village with her father. Her dad is a professor and author of many books on anthropology. They are there to explore the forbidden valley of the Dinosaurs. The Professor (Leonidas Bayer) charters a flight along with an ex Vietnam vet and his drunk wife, whose always giving him a “hard” time about not being able to get it up. Also on board, two gorgeous models and their photographer for some sleaze ball magazine. The plane is fully booked, so how does bone finder Kevin Hall (Sopkiw) from the Boston Institute of Paleontology manage to get on board?  He overhears the captain mention that their stop in the valley of the dinosaurs is a protected preserve and an illegal destination so he uses that to blackmail the pilot for a seat on the floor.

"Let me on the plane...please!"

"I'm Dog the bone hunter"

Why is this valley such a big deal? Well because many who go there never return. Rumor has it that there's a curse. Is the curse of this sacred valley real? I’m convinced it is! As soon as they even get near the location, the plane gets all screwy and the pilot loses all control, I’m sure it has nothing to do with the pilot's drinking. The plane crashes as we witness a toy model being thrown around in someone’s backyard. OK, maybe the crash effects aren’t quite that bad but the inside of the plane looks like it has Ed Wood written all over it. The plane is wrecked and sadly lives are lost including the professor, a model, and the pilot.  The Vietnam vet and former Captain, John Heinz (Milton Rodriguez) takes over immediately after the crash. He boasts that he knows jungle survival and will keep everyone safe. He exclaims something like, “…all jungles are the same, what’s the difference? We’re just replacing Gooks with Indianos.” (Indianos is Italian for Indian) He unsympathetically rushes those with dead loved ones to stop mourning and Eva watches her father breath his last breath and die.  Now the fun begins!

"Before I die, will my daughter get my sky miles?"

"I feel like I'm being watched."

 Captain Heinz is clearly the alpha male here and Kevin tucks his tail under his legs, for now. Heinz takes the survivors down a trail that follows a river. When they start to hear animal noises Kevin warns them that these are the sounds of the Aquara (Aquara? not a real tribe) Indians surrounding them. The photographer sadly falls prey to piranha and loses his leg. When he makes too much noise, Heinz stabs him through the back to shut him up. Kevin attacks Heinz for his heinous act but unfortunately gets knocked down a water slide of rocks separating him from the group. Don’t worry though he’s OK and even manages to barely get away from a hungry crocodile looking for some lunch.(oh crikey) The Captain and his wife get attacked by the natives and shortly after Eva and Belinda, (Susan Hahn) the model  get captured. Betty Heinz, (Marta Anderson) the vet's wife falls victim to quicksand. This attack becomes one war the ex-soldier Mr. Heinz can’t come out of alive, he’s hit with about 5 or 6 arrows and pinned up against a tree. The chief stabs him in the chest and pulls out a piece of his entrails for a little snack. A little while later Kevin rescues the ladies from the cannibals. He disrupts a ceremony in which a shaman wearing a triceratops headdress is using Eva and Belinda in a barbaric ritual . Kevin hijacks one of the tribe's canoes, so the cannibals set up a giant net further down the river and with three shotgun shells left Kevin shoots the net and he hits the Indian’s chief causing them to retreat back to their camp.

Tricera-TopHat!

Pull my finger!

"Made you look!"

 You might think the worst is over, nope. While taking a breather and admiring some fossilized foot prints an evil miner and slave trader shows up named China. (Carlos Imperial) He takes them as hostages tying up Kevin in a pig pen and he rapes Eva. China's evil lesbian sidekick has relations with Belinda because she promises that she can help her escape. However, no more than ten feet away from her cell China shoots her the back multiple times. How will Kevin escape and save Eva from this fat bastard?! You’ll just to spend a day or two in the valley and see for yourself.

"Sorry just mud water to drink, no wheat grass juice."

"This hog's gonna bite my hog!"

"Give us some damn privacy, now!"

 There is a massacre and a valley of the dinosaurs so this is one title that lives up to its name. Just don't expect any actually living Dinos. It’s a jungle adventure only hindered by it’s budget. The director Michele Massimo Tarantini aka Michael E. Lemick was thinking big and keeps the pace moving at full throttle and when it does slow down it’s only because it’s being padded out with naked women.

Can’t recommend enough

10/10 on the CULT-O-METER

 Professor Pedro Ibanezis is dead but his books live on, don't forget to read,
"Dynamics of Evolution"
"Paleozoic Etymology"
"On the Trail of the Last Dinosaurs"

And  watch our Tribute Video! The Professor would have wanted it that way.

Massacre in Jurassic Valley

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Follow Skunkape @TrailersPU

#Sopkiw

Cannibal Terror

CANNIBAL TERROR

(TERREUR CANNIBALE)

France / Spain, 1980

Dir: “Allan W. Steeve”/Alain Deruelle

Review by Steve Fenton

EL LAGO DE LOS MUERTOS VIVIENTES / a.k.a. ZOMBIE’S LAKE and L’ABIME DES MORTS-VIVANTS / a.k.a. OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES were the worst two Eurociné horror flicks ever unleashed, right? Wrong! Being of the ever-optimistic opinion that even the very worst Continental cannibal gutmunchers have at least one thing going for them somewhere – heck, even Joe D’Amato’s awful DEMONIA / a.k.a. EROTIC NIGHTS OF THE LIVING DEAD had a couple of good scenes, dammit! – I decided to give CANNIBAL TERROR a friendly spin. A former associate of mine had challenged me to watch this film (“film” is a tenuous description at best): despite fair prior warnings that it was an unmitigated piece of merde that made even those aforementioned examples of sub-cinematic pond-slime look like daisies by comparison. At the very least, my ex-associate assured me, “It’s gory as hell!” Oh well, here goes nothing, I guess…

Step Aside it's time to make El Sabroso Human cracklins

The opening theme is an ear-itatin’ salsa / big band variation of “La Bamba.” This is repeated later on as an end-theme, but initially accompanies familiar tourist board-approved travelogue footage (presumably shot somewhere in either the south of France or further south down in Almería, Spain?) and an excess of actors wandering idly about or participating in mundane non-action: which includes chattering on phones, manicuring their nails and mixing cocktails ad nauseam. A ‘major’ early scene that introduces our main if positively motley cast is set in a sleazy bar where a sub-psychedelic instrumental ditty drones from a jukebox like an agitated, over-amped mosquito. The same whining chord is repeated over and over (and over and over) again, as if running on a tape-loop.

At least melt some cheese on it first, then roll it up in a burrito shell

At last, a bunch of scratchy, dog-eared stock aerial footage of jungle-heavy tropical islands (no doubt these same inserts were also borrowed by Umberto Lenzi’s cannibal opuses too) announce a jumpily edited segue into some no doubt cannibal-infested ‘exotic’ clime. Exactly where is tough to deduce. Anyway, our little heroic family of mighty whiteys drive their jimmy well off the beaten track into the wilderness. From what is presumably the closest thing to a bona fide ‘rain forest’ that CANNIBAL TERROR’s producers could scout for a stand-in jungle location on the French Riviera, ‘savage cannibals’ (note quotes) emerge, evidently hungering for human meat (or perhaps just some take-out escargot?). Basically, this film’s backdrop is a rather sparsely-wooded area – peppered with fir trees, no less – and a bargain-basement tribal village set whose anthropological authenticity wouldn’t fool a four-year-old, even if their parents didn’t have a subscription to National Geographic. The cannibal clan itself is an unlikely conglomeration of multiracial (and almost exclusively male) extras. These are usually heavily made-up with facial greasepaint, as if in hopes of obscuring the fact that Orientals and Hispanics, blacks and whites are all represented in their numbers (perhaps there may have been some details buried in the untranslated French dialogue which I may have missed). In several shots, a scrawny looking Caucasian spear-chucker sports sideburns that would have rivalled those worn by Elvis during his Vegas period. Another guy in heavy warpaint and a drop-handlebar mustache seen peeking from the vegetation looks a lot like Tom Savini!

Or Peter Criss

In spite of their unabashedly unconvincing appearance, these cannibal terrorists cart off our heroes’ native woman guide, whom they then disembowel and devour in short order without even so much as a garnish or finger-bowl in sight. Adding to this unrepentant addition to the ranks – accent on the rank – of grungy gutcruncher exploitation, we have one girl’s purely gratuitous nudie scrubdown in an outdoor washtub (a similar scene occurred in ZOMBIE’S LAKE, so you might say some sort of Eurociné oeuvre was developing; then again, you might not). After rinsing off, the starlet is dragged off kicking and screaming to be roped and raped by a degenerate scumbag in the bush. This scene is accomplished with such ludicrous phoniness that it’s hardly very offensive, as it should be, but instead is only embarrassingly inept. More so due to the actress’ dogged insistence on sobbing and wailing oh-so-professionally, as if convinced she was actually involved in a real film (presumably this starlet was ‘giving it her all’ for what she hopefully assumed would be her ‘breakout role’ or something).

have you got any floss?

Pacing (Hah!) descends to new lows of sluggishness, heavily dependent on meaningless filler. 52 minutes and counting… when oh when are those Heinz 57 cannibals gonna chow down on this uncharismatic, unlikable cast and put both them and us out of our misery? Remains of chomped-up victims are found in the ‘jungle’ as our heroes and a safari of white hunters and military types dressed in mix’n’match hand-me-down bush fatigues hunt the lost cannibals. While we are on the topic of forest fashion here, it should perhaps be mentioned that leading lady Silvia Solar opts for the more practical cotton summer dress and matching high-heeled pumps ensemble for her taxing excursion beyond the fringes of civilization.

Oh good it's time for my self immolation C-section

CANNIBAL TERROR’s nonexistent effort to convincingly create the illusion of a dense tropical locale might be considered audacious, if it wasn’t so utterly pathetic. Badly spliced antique inserts of mismatched crocodiles and other wildlife, as well as pudgy or anorexic extras who often appear painfully self-conscious in their loincloths (and so would you if you were in their sandals). Seldom has European trash cinema looked so cheap.

I know this is an overused cliché, but CANNIBAL TERROR is assuredly one of the all-time WORST movies (n)ever made. It was fun to write about though, and sometimes that helps one to endure a film.