#Cannibal Ferox

[goryhorroor]

horror sub-genres: cannibal

[helena-bottom-farter]

[movieposters1]

[marypickfords]

Cannibal Ferox (Umberto Lenzi, 1981)

[brokehorrorfan]

Cannibal Ferox’s original motion picture soundtrack is available on vinyl for $30 via Grindhouse Releasing. Shipping July 1, Budy-Maglione’s score has been restored from the master tapes, including bonus tracks and alternate takes.

The album is pressed on three color variants: "Cocaine Crazed White" (limited to 100), "Jungle Green" (limited to 200), and "Carnage Crimson” (limited to 200). It's housed in a gatefold jacket with liner notes by film historian Tim Ferrante. A Grindhouse Releasing slipmat is included.

[horrororman]

#Horror films that were released on April 24th...

#Drácula (1931).

#CarlosVillarias

#NightofTerror (1933).

#BelaLugosi

#TheHand (1981).

#CannibalFerox (1981)(Italy).

#Ms45 (1981).

#ZoëTamerlis #thriller

[chaoticdesertdweller]

Rest peacefully, Giovanni Lombardo Radice. Not only an Italian horror icon, but someone I have called "friend" for over a decade.

[mariocki]

RIP Giovanni Lombardo Radice (23.9.1954 - 27.4.2023)

"It took some time, and a lot of stress, to learn to not be in character twelve hours a day on set. At the very beginning, when I was very young, I was totally in character from beginning to end. With the long times you have on set, that was exhausting. I slowly learned how to get in and out of character. That is not always easy, it takes time, it depends on what character you are playing. Some characters need a larger concentration, some are easier to switch on and off. That is the main difference with theatre."

[watching-pictures-move]

Viddying the Nasties | Cannibal Ferox (Lenzi, 1981)

Having recently watched and not very much enjoyed Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid, I decided that I was in the mood for more jungle adventures. Such is my affection for movies set in the jungle that in some cases I can let it slide if it isn’t even a real jungle. I think of classic jungle comedies shot obviously on sets, such as Africa Screams, in which Lou Costello slowly descends into petrifying fear as realizes that the lion with whom he is trapped in a cage is not his friend Bud Abbott disguised as a lion but in fact the real thing, and Three Missing Links, in which the Three Stooges brutalize a gorilla and later threaten it with sexual assault. The jungle in these movies may not be real, but the adversarial relationship between man and nature very much is. So in this spirit, I decided to rewatch Umberto Lenzi’s 1981 grindhouse shocker Cannibal Ferox. And I still think it sucks.

Probably the easiest way to summarize the movie would be to describe it as Cannibal Holocaust but worse, or Cannibal Holocaust with the most interesting part removed, that being the found footage element. The found footage scenes obviously give that movie a degree of verisimilitude with respect to placing us in the jungle, but even the earlier scenes give the environment an aura of foreboding as we’re tied to the perspective of the hero as he journeys deeper into the rainforest to discover the fate of the missing documentary crew. Here, I found the early scenes at least had a curious effect this time around. The movie was in fact shot in the Amazon, but the brightness of the image and the staid framing of the shots make these scenes feel like they were shot on a set. Lenzi’s limp direction cannot entirely defeat the voodoo of location, but he certainly gives it the old college try.

The most noxious element of the movie and the whole cannibal genre is the inclusion of animal cruelty. There is theoretically an artistic defense of this element, in that it shows that the jungle is an unforgiving place, so that having beast kill beast, man hill beast, beast kill man and man kill man in equally graphic detail presents a certain equalizing effect. The cruelty of the jungle does not discriminate. But at the same time, these scenes feel so divorced from the thrust of the plot that one wonders, if the filmmakers were too cheap to fake these deaths through special effects, they didn’t at least use some stock footage. It’s not like the movie would come off as anymore poorly made. I dunno, whatever intellectual defenses one can conjure up, I have a hard time getting behind staging real animal deaths for your movie.

It also feels like the movie is throwing in those scenes to pad the runtime, a purpose that also explains the mob plot that eats up way too much of the runtime despite adding little in the way of narrative momentum. The whole thing feels slipshod, although this is a movie that exists at such an extreme, where the violence, both real and simulated, is so vicious, that the rest of the movie dissolves. When a movie trots out images of a dick getting cut off, a dick getting cut off and eaten (which I admit got a laugh out of me), breasts being pierced with meathooks, torsos being split open and dug into for innards, eyeballs being gouged out and other acts of extreme violence painted with a certain level of realism, at a certain point you just gotta hand it to it. (Along with the alternate title of Make Them Die Slowly, these scenes make the movie play like an early iteration of torture porn.) It may not be enjoyable, but it certainly has an impact. I do think from this perspective, the limpness of Lenzi’s direction is arguably an asset. The rest of the movie is just the thinnest of structures to support these pungent visuals. Whether or not it’s any good doesn’t matter.

I will say that one thing I appreciate over the other movie is the, how you say, lack of intellectual rigor. Cannibal Holocaust, perhaps because it is more polished in craft and more calculated in its effect, has the pretense of seriousness about its message, even if it proves entirely disingenuous. (It’s hard to buy the argument that we’re the real savages… sorry, “cannibals”, when it explicitly paints the documentary crew as sociopaths and fails to convincingly conflate them with us.) Here, the movie is much lazier in pushing its message, usually with some ironic narration from one of three lines spouted by the heroine early in the movie. The effect is like someone trying to do a book report using only quotes from the back cover.

In my review of Anacondas, I posited that the worldview of these movies is that jungle is unforgiving but fundamentally amoral, and that the characters are able to unleash their true natures in such an environment. And much of the unleashing here is done by Giovanni Lombardo Radice, who plays his role with a coked-out derangement as he proceeds to terrorize the locals at every opportunity and eventually get his ultraviolent comeuppance. He is certainly the best part of the movie and also offers the more reliable form of levity thank to the voice actor and dialogue he’s saddled with, offering us such choice line readings as "Huh, you get off on ecology, twat?" And apparently he objected strongly to the animal killings during production. When Lenzi suggested that Robert De Niro would partake in the killings in an attempt to persuade him, he supposedly responded “De Niro would kick your ass all the way to Rome.”

Other forms of levity include the fake gruff voice that Robert Kerman is stuck with for some reason even though he speaks English in real life (and has a distinctive voice to boot), Zora Kerova’s character being defined entirely as dumb and horny and nothing else, Lorraine De Selle suggesting they sing a song to keep their spirits up before the cannibals eat them. I suspect De Selle was cast for her sad eyes and natural frown (the movie hilariously ends with a closeup of her face in the laziest attempt at generating an emotional reaction), but her performance here represents a kind of anti-acting, letting every single look, gesture, emotional beat and line of dialogue limply flop onto the ground, like you've just seen the art of screen acting die in real time.

Okay, so the movie isn’t entirely devoid of enjoyable elements, but also, a big no thanks to the whole thing.

[helena-bottom-farter]

[movieposters1]

[marypickfords]

Cannibal Ferox (Umberto Lenzi, 1981)

[crematory-of-the-macabrefanzine]

[horrororman]

#Horror films released on April 24th...

#Drácula 1931.

#CarlosVillarias

#NightofTerror 1933.

#BelaLugosi

#TheHand 1981.

#CannibalFerox 1981(Italy).

#Ms45 1981.

#ZoëTamerlis #thriller

[sovhorror]

suku...... ferox