Oliver Baroux, Eskwad 2009
(France)
French comic actor Kad Merad stars in this film about an inexperienced tour guide that ends up in debt to a mobster after losing big at a poker game. He is forced to take an extra guest on his Safari tour, a man with a mysterious suitcase that he plans to deliver to Mozambique. On the way Merad and his safari group of European tourists run into all kinds of cliche situations, including poachers, warlords and even a tribe of cannibals.
Gail Force, VPN 1993
A 1995 porn feature starring Sarah-Jane Hamilton as Safari Jane in another spoof of the Tarzan legend. Safari Jane journeys to the jungles of wherever to visit her father, the obligatory scientist/explorer character (and one of the worst actors I've ever seen). She brings with her a husband/wife team of explorers who ostensibly want to investigate the local flora and fauna, but are really interested in hunting diamonds. "There are dangerous cannibals in bugaboo" warns Dad, and advises against the trip, but goes anyway. Not surprisingly, the couple turn out to be bad guys when the diamonds are found, and leave Jane and Pop to be captured by the cannibals. These cannibals don't seem to have much of a clue. Without ever even taking Jane's clothes off (this is a PORN?) they let Tarzan just walk in and take Jane away for some jungle swinging. Dad joins the tribe and the movie is over. The video box is very misleading, both containing an inaccurate plot synopsis and some great photos which never seem to show up in the movie. It's amazing that Gail Force, who was once one of the more creative forces (pardon the pun) in the porn industry (and a pretty darned hot-looking babe herself), could come up with something this bad.
aka Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain
Christian Viel, Warehouse Films, 2003
This hard to get movie is only available on video and has never had a theatrical release. My copy looks unfinished, with time code still on the bottom, a partial sound track and several "insert here" panels at various points. This is pretty much a typical stalk and slash horror flick augmented with lots of gore and guts with a little extra sex thrown in from porn starlets Chasey Lane and Ginger Lynn Allen. This is about a group of American archeology students going to Ireland to study Celtic and Druid stone circles. Also living in that area are the mutant inbred remnants if the Sawney Bean clan, the cannibalistic clan of medieval Scotland. They seem to have a particular taste for Americans. There is one roasting scene featurng the torso of Chasey Lane's boyfriend. The women are mostly just killed and hacked to pieces while the men are stripped and chained up. One sexy blonde does get captured and stripped before being cut open and eaten raw. Better than most, yet still somehow unremarkable. Samhain is, of course, the Celtic name for Halloween.
Another sexy Italian jungle-girl picture with native tribes and lots of naked girls! The tribe of cannibal headhunters attacks three times but never gets anybody. This was sold under this title by Video Search of Miami but was probably originally released under a different title.
Jim Wayer, Ron Bonk, Thadius Pictures 2007
In many ways a remake of C.H.U.D, or at least a very similar concept. A young journalist doing an article on her father, the mayor, discovers a sinister secret beneath her fair city: a labyrinth of subterranean catacombs where innocent captives are brutalized and eaten!
Jason Maran, Brain Damage Films 2008
A truly awful movie, there is little to say about it except that it is, well, truly awful. A brotherhood of priests sends a priest-wannabe-in-training to find another priest who went missing looking for a satanic cult. The last priest that they sent ended up getting eaten and all they had left was his... well... his defecated remains. As it turns out, those are the least crappy thing in this entire movie. The wannabe priest as it turns out is phenomenally stupid and is completely unable to figure out even the most obvious plot developments, but with God's help he finds the missing priest. Father Michael is obviously completely insane, but the stupid wannbe priest cannot figure out that obvious bit of information. The two team up to help out a pregnant woman who's baby is slated to be eaten by her brother, a devil worshiper. The woman is also cared for by her sex-crazed sister who also cares for their senile mother. Who are really the bad guys and who are really the good guys? It all changes so quickly that you won't be able to keep track, but you really won't want to. Babies will get eaten by witches, priests will be murdered or become slaves and then the movie just ends with no real resolution. There is a whip in there somewhere, too. A few bloody naked titties just don't save this pile of garbage.
A brief vignette from an episode of the Night Gallery television show. Rotund actor Victor Buono is a hard to please customer of an employment agency. None of the women presented to Victor seem to please him, until he sees the chubby and awkward cleaning lady, Miss Blodgett.
Buck Adams, Sin City Video 1994
Yet another pornographic spoof of the Tarzan legend, featuring bogus jungle scenes, a hunky tarzan, idiotic narrated dialogue and sex scenes that are way too long. A rich man and his young blonde wife go to Africa to search for a missing heir to their family fortune. Their guides plan to rob them and leave them for the cannibals. Eventually the cannibals get everybody except for the blonde who they just leave standing there looking up in the trees. Tarzan swoops down and carries her off for sex. Even the delectable Brittany O'Connell, who has a brief scene as a maid, can't save this turkey.
Richard Lowry, Andromeda Motion
Pictures 2020
Aliens, vampires, zombies, cannibals and the coming of Judgement Day party like it's 1999 in what has all the hallmarks of a student film. Cannibals abduct two tasty looking vagabond girls and try to eat them but get the tables turned on them because the girls are... vampires! The vampires kill the cannibals and then the aliens invade and turn the rest of the human race into zombies. All except the two vampires who don't become zombies because they're already vampires. The vampires fight the aliens and the zombies and go looking for blood banks. If you're a fan of no-budget movie mayhem then this may work for you. If you're not, you won't lose anything by giving this one a pass.
aka Los Diablos del Mar (original
title)
Juan Piquer Simon, Almena Films
1982 (Spain)
Available from Video Search of Miami who bills it as a Jules Verne style story involving a shipwrecked family and a tribe of cannibals. I don't know where they got that idea. It obviously wasn't from watching the movie.
George Abbot, Paramount 1930
Richard Arlen rescues Fay Wray from cannibals and pearl theives in this 1930 Pre-Code South Seas adventure.
W.A.V.E. Productions
An odd and pointless video from WAVE Productions, this does offer a fair amount of titillation. Pamela Sutch stars as a secretary whose boss suddenly decides to sell into white slavery in the Middle East. Pam talks him into hiring and selling Barbara Joyce instead, but boss man decides instead to cook Barbara on the usual WAVE bedspring grill and seel Pam anyway as planned. Pam does a rare nude scene, and Barbara looks delicious in the buff, basted and grilled with an apple in her mouth. Silly and not nearly as interesting as Dinner For Two or Deli Hell, this one is a tasty oddity.
Tom Alderman, Media Trend 1973
Seems that a bunch of guys get stranded in a cave in and cut off one of their fellows arms to eat before they are rescued. Apparently they didn't get permission first because the one-armed man is out for revenge.
William F. Adler, Universal Film
1920
A 1920 silent adventure film from Universal. A great many of the old films, especially the silents, were made on nitrate film stock, which deteriorates over time. For this reason a vast majority of these old films have deteriorated beyond hope of restoration, and all but a few of the more important works are lost forever. This is probably not considered one of the more important works.
aka Scream of the Snowbeast
Michael Findlay, Ed Adlum and Mike
Findlay Productions 1974
A group of college students and their professor go into the woods to search for Bigfoot. The professor and the guide are really the leaders of a cannibal sect who are only interested in roast coed. Plenty of dumb jokes and ridiculous costumes substitute for the usual blood and gore.
Bob Willems, Boke Entertainment 2004
A man convinces a cute coworker to join him on a weekend getaway to his cabin in the woods, the site of a massacre by an insane clown many years before. On the way they pick up a hitchiker who may not be what she seems. When members of the party start to disappear who is responsible? Is it the hitchiker? One of the group? Or has the insane cannibalistic killer clown returned? Predictable spaltter horror with a last minute twist that doesn't really make it any more interesting.
Ezio Greggio, Silvio Berlusconi
Communications 1994 (Italy)
An obvious title for a comedic spoof of Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs, this silly slapstick horror/comedy stars Dom DeLuise as Dr. Animal Cannibal Pizza, a maniacal evil genius pizza chef whose pizzas are made with human body parts. FBI detective Joe Dee Foster needs his help to catch the Homicidal Maniac.
Jonathan Demme, Strong Heart/Demme
Productions 1991
What could I possibly write about this film that hasn't already been said, and how often is it that a "cannibal movie" gets the Academy Award for Best Picture? While no actual graphic cannibalism is depicted, the matter of fact way in which Anthony Hopkins says "I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti" is far more chilling than the graphic violence of "Cannibal Holocaust," which is merely nauseating.
Robert Rodriquez, Frank Miller 2005
Based on the graphic novels by Frank Miller this film is an homage to classic Film Noir style while retaining the look of Frank Miller's comic book imagery. It features a series of seeminglt unrelated stories that only loosely come tegether at the end. Mostly in black and white with bits of color, the film noir elements are conveyed in the heavy use of shadow, heavy metaphore voiecover, the sultry saxophone soundtrack and the setting in a city where it is always night and almost always rains. In one segment, Elijah Wood (better known as the hobbit Frodo from Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" movies) plays he silent farmboy Kevin. Kevin is a cannibal with a taste for beautiful prostitutes who mounts the heads of his victims on his wall as trophies and eats the rest. This movie is full of stunningly sexy women to excite Kevin's appetite, including Jessica Alba and Carla Guigino, the latter Kevin gets to experience a taste of. An artfully done film, but perahaps a bit too long.
aka La Ciel et la Boue (original title)
Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau,
Ardennes Films 1961 (France)
A 1960's documentary about an expedition into the New Guinea interior. The film crew visits cannibal and headhunter tribes and films some indigenous flora and fauna. Available on videotape, it's on my list of films to see, but there are still a few films ahead of it.
aka Mountain of the Cannibal God,
La Mantagna del Dio Cannibale (original title)
Sergio Martino, Dania Film 1978
(Italy)
Super Sexy Ursula Andress searches for her missing husband in the jungles of New Guinea where Stacy Keach once lived with the cannibal Puka tribe. Ursula is captured, stripped and painted red. After that, nothing happens. It's interesting to note the similarities to John Derek's "Tarzan the Ape Man" featuring another of John Derek's wives, Bo Derek. In the latter movie, Bo gets captured, stripped and painted white before Tarzan shows up and kills the chief who looks strangely like Ronald McDonald. The longer "Mountain of the Cannibal God" version is a little bit better, but still you have to wonder why the filmmakers of this thing went through so much trouble for something so pointless. It was listed as one of the "Video Nasties" in the UK.
Dan Rosenthal, Venture
International Pictures 1985
This (probably) Filipino made production features the delectable Debra Blee, last seen in "The Beach Girls." It's a standard "girl hires rogue to search for kidnapped sister/friend/roommate lost in the jungle somewhere" action picture. In one brief scene they escape (all too easily) a tribe of stone-age, cave dwelling Filipino cannibals. Even with all that, there is little to recommend it, and Debra looked a whole lot better in "The Beach Girls" anyway.
William A. Levy, Athena Film
Company 1976
Cheryl "Rainbeux" Smith and Debra Winger (in her first feature) head this typical 70's T&A comedy about a group of high school girls at a slumber party telling stories about their "first time." One of the vignette style stories involves the making of a movie called "Torment in Tahiti" in which one of the girls is an actress playing a girl captured and cooked in a pot by a tribe of south pacific cannibals. Worth a look, if for nothing else than to see a younger and chubbier Debra Winger in the nude.
Edward F. Cline, Columbia Pictures
1933
An old Wheeler and Woolsey jungle movie spoof. It does contain most of the genre cliches, but no cannibals.
Brian Yuzna, Wild Street Pictures
1989
"Society" refers to the society of the rich, the upper class, the Beverly Hills elite. In this film the members of "society" are not only a different class, they're a different species who prey both figuratively AND literally on the lower classes. Yuzna bites the hand that doesn't feed him in this suspenseful and creepily excellent (as well as virtually bloodless) horror film.
Del Lord, Columbia Pictures 1941
The Three Stooges go to the island of Rhum Boogie to search for the rare Puckerless Persimmon tree. Standard Cannibal Comedy Cliche is the result.
Walter Lang, Twentieth Century Fox 1942
Betty Grable, Victor Mature, Jack Oakie and Hilo Hattie star in this World War II era romantic comedy. Betty Grable is Eileen O'Brien, daughter of an Irish beachcomber who owns part of the Hawaiian island of Ahmi-Omi. He shares the island with a cattle ranch, and the son of the ranch owner (Victor Mature) and his cowboy sidekick (Jack Oakie) have come to convince O'Brian to sell his interest in the island, where the only deep-water harbor is located. But Victor falls in love with Eileen (Betty Grable in a grass skirt, wouldn't you?) and cocks up his plans. This island is loaded with scrumptious island lovelies, and Jack Oakie takes a shine to the lovely Paulani, only Paulani's cousin Palola (Hilo Hattie) takes a shine to Oakie. Unfortunately for Oakie, Palola's cannibal father has his own ideas about the pudgy cowboy. Full whacky island songs like "The Cockeyed Mayor of Kaunakaikai", "O'Brien has Gone Hawaiian" and "Cannibal Chant" and so many lovely wahinis, it makes you wonder why the cannibal is interested in Jack Oakie.
Ming-Hung Chou 1984 (Hong Kong)
Another grim, sick and mean spirited movie in the tradition of the Italian chunk-blowers. People resort to cannibalism to survive a shipwreck. Eating a baby provides some real taboo smashing. The Indo-Chinese cinema tries to prove they can make 'em just as sick as the Italians.
aka Cannibal Orgy, the Liver Eaters, the Maddest Story Ever Told
Jack Hill, Lasky-Monka 1967
According to the RE Search volume "Incredibly Strange Films" this film is one-of-a-kind and I agree entirely. Lon Chaney Jr. stars in his strangest film and even sings the title song which is all about monsters at a cannibal feast. The Merry family have a weird genetic degenerative disorder which makes them go insane at an early age, eventually turning into cannibalistic beasts which have to be kept locked up in a pit in the basement. Lon Chaney Jr. is the butler who takes care of the three homicidal maniac children, one of whom fancies herself to be a black widow spider. Available on videotape from various sources, but you're not likely to find it at the Blockbuster. It's a rare oddity which is definitely worth checking out.
Peter A Dowling, FilmTiger 2008
Take "Wrong Turn", add a bit of 'The Hills Have Eyes" and a generous portion of "Death Line" and you have "Stag Night". A bunch of guys are on the NYC subways on their way home from a bachelor party. With them are a couple of strippers from the party. One guy hassles some women on the subway just to show that he is a bit of an asshole. They get off at the wrong stop and end up trapped in an abandoned part of the subway pursued by a group of cannibals that live there. The usual horror flick gore F/X ensue.
Stanley Tong, Golden Gate Film
Production 1991 (Hong Kong)
Another indochinese jungle adventure which strives less to be italian. Two pretty chinese girls, one an insurance agent and the other a martial arts champion, go into the New Guinea jungle to look for one of the girls' missing father who has been taken prisoner by a gang of drug runners and a tribe of cannibals.
Club Dead
A compilation of shorts from earlier Club Dead videos that include several cannibal subjects, including "All Buttered Up" and "BBQ Time" presented with different titles. Stories include human sacrifice, cannibalism and aliens.
aka La Loi de la Jungle (original title)
Antonin Peretjatko, Rectangle Productions 2016 (France)
A French farcical comedy about a bureaucrat sent to French Guyana to build a ski resort in the Amazon jungle. His guide is a pretty young trainee of the National Forest Service who goes by the name of "Tarzan". They get lost in the Amazon jungle and run into all kinds of adventures including being captured by a tribe of cannibals. The film has been described as a screwball comedy in the vein of "Airplane!" and the British "Carry On" series. The movie is French, so expect some Jerry Lewis style comedy in there somewhere.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Columbia
Pictures 1959
Elizabeth Taylor teeters on the brink of madness after witnessing the horrible death of her uncle. Psychotherapy and shock treatment bring her to the terrible recollection of what happened at the movies climax.
aka Superviventes de los Andes
(original title)
Rene Cardona, Avant Films S.A.
1976 (Mexico)
The movie version of Piers Paul Reeds "Alive" about the true story of the soccer team which crashes in the Andes and eats the bodies of those killed in the crash to survive. An unexciting and highly exploitive documentary/dramatization. The recent American made "Alive" is a much better version of this story, concentrating on a survival drama rather than just on the cannibalism.