"Cannibal Ferox" (1981)

(AKA: Let Them Die Slowly)

Starring: Giovanni Lombardo Radice, Lorraine De Salle, Danila Mattei, Zora Kerova, Walter Lucchini.

First, the lowdown: It’s those wacky cannibals in a new jungle adventure!

I dig cannibal movies. I gotta admit it. It takes a real actor to bite into a raw roast covered in grenadine and pretend that it’s been hungrily carved off some screaming tourist. This one stars veteran cannibal actor Giovanni Radice, who was in Cannibal Apocalypse with the indomitable JOHN SAXON! (Ironically enough, Radice played a cannibal VETERAN in that one. Yuk-yuk-yuk.) We start out in the Big Apple, where a Mafioso and his slimy Tom Petty/Martin Mull-esque sidekick blow away a junky. Before the audience can even say “What the expletive deleted?” we’re whipped ‘round to central Colombia where an anthropologist, her neckerchief-wearing brother, and their dippy coke-whore friend are traipsing about. Our anthropologist (who looks like Jeanne Tripplehorn with a failed perm) is out there to prove that cannibalism doesn’t exist. (Now this could just be a shortcoming in the dubbing, because as anyone who’s read up on the Donner party or gone traveling with the Argentinean soccer team can tell you, people WILL eat each other if the situation is desperate enough. What I THINK they meant is that cannibalism does not exist in tribal cultures. Which is also not true. Many of the aboriginal tribes in New Guinea use cannibalism as a death ritual.) So in order to gather evidence of this lofty claim, she plunges deep into the Amazon rainforest without even a thread’s grasp of where to go or how to communicate with the natives. After successfully marooning their jeep in a mud bog, the hapless morons decide that the best thing to do is go even further into terra incognito. Yup, real scientists here. They go hiking without worrying about food, clean water, shelter, or Deep Woods OFF!, but make sure they brought plenty of whiskey. After a while of hiking and bitching about their situation the morons three make camp; which gives the audience the chance to relive Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom by watching an anaconda kill a coati. Thrilling, eh? The next day, the kids run into the smarmy Radice and his sickly companion Joe who are running from a tribe of hungry cannibals in the mood for Manwiches (I’m just rackin’ the product placement here). After mumbled introductions and unnecessary dialog, our party just happens to stumble into the native village that Radice and Sickly Joe had fled from, but the only people who are there are the tribal elders, and they appear more frightened. (Or at least that’s what we’re told. The natives in the movie, while authentic-looking enough, are as expressionless as a granite slab.) Because it’s the only structure they’ve seen for miles, the morons three decide it would be a good idea to rest there. (After all they shouldn’t be afraid of a bunch of old people, right? Right?) Radice manages to seduce the dippy coke whore (like it was that hard to do), and then proceeds to manhandle the natives who had offered their mute hospitality. When he accidentally shoots a native girl it brings a tearful confession from his dying compatriot. Apparently the “real story” (as opposed to what?) is that the two of them were laying low for a while (and Colombia is such a great place to do that) after ripping off a heroin dealer in New York. (Remember the bit before where the junky gets blown away? Yeah, neither did I.) During Radice’s and Joe’s their stay, a native tries to sell them some high-quality emeralds. Thinking that rock hunting is a fun and profitable enterprise, they convince the native to show them where he got them. After being frustrated by days of fruitless panning in the rivers, Radice and his pasty partner finally give up laboring for wealth and come up with a better idea. Lacking in diplomacy skills, they lock up the women and children whilst their menfolk are out hunting, and torture the unwitting native rather elaborately. (Including castrating the poor sod.) However, the native ends up dying of his wounds just as the tribesmen return, leaving our hapless sods to run amok into the forest. Meanwhile, back in the present, the current group of muttering natives decide to turn the tables on the stoopid white people and imprison them in a pit; but not without graphically removing Radice’s genitals first. At this point the gears come loose from the movie and everything else is just a chaotic sequence of Radice writhing in pain, unnecessary animal torture (using REAL animals getting their REAL entrails extracted), scenes in the Big Apple which look like an old Kojak episode (and really have no point), and a classic shot where the filmmakers re-enact the vision quest scene from A Man Called Horse on the coke-whore’s breasts. My biggest complaint about the whole film is that it banks more on the shock value of killing live animals more than it does on the evisceration of the stoopid white people. Come on, the purpose of watching a cannibal movie is to see the palefaces get their sweetbreads sliced up by a gang of grinning pygmies, NOT to be subjected to a PETA documentary on the fur industry.

Line of the movie: “Why couldn't we have made it Acupulco, instead of this poison paradise?” Our blonde coke whore becoming more unlikable by the minute.

Three stars. Keep watching the skies.