"Cannibal Apocalypse" (1980)

Starring: JOHN SAXON!, Elizabeth Turner, Giovanni Lombardo Radice, Cinzia De Carolis, Tony King

First, the lowdown: Three Vietnam vets come back home with a hankerin’ for long pork.

What can I say? I goofed up when I got this one. I was recommended Cannibal Holocaust and instead I rent Cannibal Apocalypse. Whoops. But anyway, Cannibal Apocalypse starts out deep in Viet-Cong jungle. A surprisingly fit John Saxon leads his rag-tag mob of GI’s to an enemy held POW camp. After firing randomly and killing enough civilians to fill their quota, they set fire to a woman running by. (Remember folks, Enemy Combatants are exempt from the Geneva Convention.) She ends up falling into the pongee pit two POWs are held in. After the body stops smoldering, the prisoners, having been fed as much as Kate Moss, start chewing up the body like a Rotweiller with a lamb shank. John Saxon ends up stumbling on the whole scene, and for his reward, a prisoner leaps up and starts chewing on him. Flash forward to the tubular ‘80s, John Saxon is now married to the hostess of a public access TV show (who lives rather luxuriantly for that kinda thing), and is plagued by dreams of the misbegotten cannibal Marines. Both of the liberated POWs have been institutionalized (go figure), but after years of regression therapy and Thorazine highballs, one has been deemed fit for society. Our “cured” cannibal wanders through a community college, where a feral pack of handballers (I’m not kidding on this one folks) are harassing a pair of spandex-clad coeds. After interrupting the handballers, our wayward loony goes to the local theater that’s showing a thrilling wartime drama that consists of nothing more than stock footage. (Yeah, that’s a good idea. Put the shell-shocked vet into a room filled with guns and explosions.) His enjoyment of the chaotically put together movie is interrupted by an airheaded teenager and her paunchy boyfriend (who looks like Beau Bridges as a college freshman). Forgetting all schoolyard conventions, they decide to start necking in the middle of the theater. This however gives fate the ability to prove that psychotherapy is an inexact science, so our “reformed cannibal” proceeds to chomp a bite out of the swooning airhead’s neck. Unfortunately, the loony didn’t realize that cannibalism is best left in the home, and thusly an angry mob arises. The cannibal vet flees to the local strip-mall, only to be pursued by the feral pack of handballers whose help has been enlisted by the angry theater mob. The handballers chase him into an abandoned flea market, where the vet acquires a gun and blows away one them. Finally the police arrive, but (exercising some actual police procedure for a change) decide not to rush him out, but talk him out. Of course this sits REAL well with our “reformed psycho” and he starts shooting at random. (In Grand Theft Auto game terms, he would’ve had a 4 star wanted rating and they would’ve started sniping him from a helicopter.) Meanwhile, John Saxon is playing with his toy plane in his backyard only to be interrupted by his Susan Lyon/Linda Blair-esque teenage neighbor. She asks to borrow a hairdryer, but is using the pretense to flirt with John Saxon. (Hey, who could blame her? He looks pretty damn sexy in this pick.) John Saxon cannot, however resist the phantom call of cannibalism and bites Sultry Teen on the inner thigh (kinky, no?). Mrs. John Saxon, on the other hand, has wrapped up taping her show at the Public Access TV studio, only to find out that “some nut” has holed himself up at the flea market. So she calls home to make sure that John Saxon isn’t the aforementioned nut (lacking in trust skills much, lady?) John Saxon is at home, but heads to the flea market anyway to talk the guy down. After a thrilling sequence of guys talkin’ crazy talk, the vet walks out and gets thrown back into the loony bin. And there the fun starts. Apparently the other veteran cannibal was still incarcerated and the sight of his partner sets him off like a gibbon with heatstroke. Taking a dim view of their chewing on the staff, the administrators of the fun palace place them in solitary until they feel sorry for what they done. Back at the police station, an officer who was bit by the cannibal vet at the flea market goes apeshit and tears out the throat of two coworkers before being gunned down by his boss. Mrs. John Saxon, however, is concerned with her husband’s weird behavior (like you could tell with a guy like John Saxon), and telephones his shrink. Dr. Shrink has discovered that the two crazy vets in the fun palace have a form of communicable cannibalism (and you thought having herpes was socially awkward.) John Saxon, fed up with his odd craving for flesh, goes to Dr. Shrink’s hospital for a complete workup. The doctor who examines him ends up getting his tongue ripped out by the newly infected staff member who was attacked by the wacko veterans earlier. Infected Coworker ends up freeing her cannibal brethren and they in turn team up with the indomitable John Saxon who has now given into his Hannibal Lector-like taste for sweetbreads. Together they make up an unstoppable crime-fighting force of cannibals, or at least that’s what the theme music would have you think. The police get the scoop on the escape by our ravenous quartet and eventually end up chasing them to the cleanest sewers in the nation (either that or they’re in Canada). And from there the movie comes to a grinding halt as the only victims turn out to be the cannibals themselves. (And they’re not ironic endings either, like being caught in a meat-grinder or shoved into a pizza oven.) Honestly if you want to call a movie Cannibal Apocalypse, make sure there’s an “apocalypse” part of it, guys.

Line of the movie: “How can a social phenomena like cannibalism be transmitted as a disease?” asks a puzzled Mrs. John Saxon. Find out the answer in next week’s episode.

Three and a half stars. It’s not my fault.