Umberto Lenzi turned his hand to many different kinds of genre film during his career, so it’s perhaps little surprise that he looked to the kind of cannibalism movies being made by his peers (such Ruggero Deodato), making two of them in very rapid succession, after almost a ten-year break between these and the first of his films to nod towards anthropophagy, The Man from the Deep River. Cannibal Ferox and Eaten Alive were made within a year of each other, though I’d suggest that Ferox is still the better-known title of the two, often for some of its more notorious scenes, and perhaps still for its association with the ‘video nasty’ debacle, which has so often led to a long legacy of different cuts and titles.
Now we have the Blu-ray era, and a lot of these thrice-copied, mangled and rare titles are readily available. To give Shameless Films their due, they have struck a good balance here between restoration and avoiding over-polish, explaining that the film originally had a ‘grainy’ quality which they’ve retained, whilst also rendering a lot of the ubiquitous animal cruelty scenes into something more implied than shown. These all seem reasonable ideas to me; nothing would be gained from making this film sharp and glossy, and if you are disappointed not to see more animals being stabbed, then have a fucking word with yourself.
Cannibal Ferox starts, as so many exploitation horrors do, in New York, which often seems to be seen as the ultimate dichotomy between civilised and uncivilised. A ‘wrong case, wrong time’ scenario unfolds: a string-out junkie looking for someone called ‘Mike’ is intercepted by some very irate gentlemen who are also looking for him, because he’s ripped them off for a lot of money. A murder ensues: the cops assume it’s nothing but a turf war between small time dealers, but they decide to track down Mike’s landlady – she’s their only way of working out what is going on. We cut to – where else? – the Amazon, where a group of young Americans – Pat, Gloria and Rudy – are heading into the jungle, against the best advice of literally everyone they encounter. Specifically, they’re looking for a village called Manioca: Gloria, a PhD student, is looking for evidence that the whole cannibalism thing is nothing but a beastly myth. If Gloria was a PhD student today, she’d no doubt talk of Othering, privilege and false narratives, but even as it is, ‘asking for trouble’ doesn’t begin to cover it.
Their jeep soon packs in when Rudy tries to avoid a “jay-walking iguana” and gets stuck (the script is quite funny in places, though not always completely intentionally, I’m sure). They decide to continue on foot, and it’s soon clear they’re being ominously stalked by a small group of mute, muddy tribespeople: they begin to see grisly scenes en route, and then out of nowhere, two more Americans appear. There’s Joe, who’s badly injured, and Mike – the Mike mentioned in the opening reels. Mike relates what’s happened to them, how they were attacked by cannibals and barely escaped with their lives. From here, and under the sway of Mike, an erratic character to say the least, things begin to fall apart. First Gloria, disappointed no doubt that key elements of her thesis have turned out to be bollocks, wanders off and then gets trapped, and then as the others look for evidence to corroborate Mike’s story, he decides to indulge in a bit of casual sadism which make things go from dreadful to obscenely dreadful.
In many respects Ferox is a sort-of morality tale, whereby every white person setting foot in the Amazon basin is an irredeemable fool, nasty beyond measure, and so they get served accordingly. Even Gloria eventually fathoms this, bless. However, they don’t simply get picked off in order of awfulness, with some of the better-meaning characters dying way before the worst of them, so it’s not as straightforward as it might be. It’s also worth knowing with these cannibal horrors that a lot of the more notorious and gory scenes are often crammed into a short amount of time, usually towards the end of the ninety minutes: they certainly are here, and in common with The Mountain of the Cannibal God, there are lulls. Whilst I’ll never understand these films’ preoccupation with severing willies and rendering all tribespeople ever as almost-mute, intractable wig-wearers, but these tropes are present and correct, together with a little more ambition in plot development as events in New York gradually link up with the jungle. Cannibal Ferox will never be for everyone, but as these films go, it’s a fairly entertaining watch, with Giovanni Lombardo Radice’s manic turn as Mike a big contributing factor to that entertainment value. Shameless Films clearly know and love their exploitation cinema, and their presentation of this film – together with some engaging extras, including one of the last interviews with director Umberto Lenzi before his death in 2017 – make it a great little package overall.
Cannibal Ferox is available on Blu-ray now from Shameless Films. For more information, click here.