Cannibal Girls (1972)
Distributor: Nucleus Films
Release Date (UK): 14th February 2011
Directed by: Ivan Reitman
Starring: Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Ronald Ulrich
Review by: Ben Bussey
Farnhamville is a little Canadian town, situated somewhere between Nowhere and Buttfuck. Despite the notable absence of anything to see or do, it seems the town has enough mystique to draw in the odd tourist now and then. Such is the case with hippy couple Cliff and Gloria, who leave Toronto for the weekend to give the town a visit. While checking into the motel, the old lady owner regales her guests with the local legend of three apparently immortal young women said to haunt the area, who lure men with their beauty and then eat them. What a crazy old wives tale, eh? No chance anything like that could actually happen, especially not to these streetwise twentieth century young people… is there?
Yes, that’s a rhetorical question. One of many rhetorical questions that could be asked of Cannibal Girls, perhaps the most obvious of which would be, “are we supposed to take this crap seriously?” Answer, if it really needs to given: of course not. Perhaps the game is given away a little by the knowledge that Ivan Reitman went on to be one of the most prominent comedy directors of the 1980s, and that leading man Eugene Levy found fame as the world’s most embarrassing father in the American Pie series. Much as The Evil Dead and Re-Animator would do later, Cannibal Girls ostensibly follows the conventions of horror but at heart is pure send-up, an affectionate lampoon of the genre played to deliberate excess.
There’s certainly plenty to laugh at (or rather, laugh with) here, starting with the film’s most famous feature: the warning bell that rings to alert the more sensitive viewers to avert their eyes before the goriest moments, then a gentle reassuring chime when it’s safe to look again. It should go without saying that this is pure William Castle bullshit of the highest order, and that anyone who is actually shocked by this movie would make that guy who was escorted out of The Woman at Sundance look like Larry Flynt. Then there’s the almost unrecognisably hirsuite Levy, bearing an uncanny resemblance to P
hineas of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. The burgeoning relationship between Levy’s would-be rock star and Andrea Martin’s amusingly witless hippy girl is played for nicely awkward humour of the manner that has come to prominence this past decade or so, via the likes of Borat and The Office. This is not so surprising considering how the film was shot; in the extras Levy likens the shooting of this film to his later work with Christopher Guest, wherein the screenplay consists only of a rough outline and the dialogue is improvised. Even so, no one is likely to mistake this for Best In Show given the level of gore (even if it is pretty mild) and nudity, the latter coming in the form of the three flesh-eating females of the title. Unsurprisingly they were clearly hand-picked to cover all bases for the white male audience, as we have a blonde, a brunette and a redhead. All they need is a black one and a sporty one and they could be the Cannibal Spice Girls. In fact, I think it’s a shame no-one pitched a remake of this to the Spice Girls instead of that pisspoor film they wound up making. But I digress.
The real star of the show, however, is not Levy, nor Martin, nor the titular ladies, but Ronald Ulrich. He steals the show completely as the sinister Reverend who runs things in Farnhamville, preaching the virtues of eating human flesh and controlling events to suit his will. This power he conveys by adopting an amusingly droll theatrical manner, rolling off overloaded sentence after overloaded sentence, with many a portentous historical fact and literary reference cited. It is surely in his scenes that the film’s comedic underbelly is most blatantly exposed. And it only serves to make things more amusing and bizarre that with his gaunt physique, long hair and bushy beard, he looks strangely like Jim Henson.
This inherent oddity would seem to guarantee Cannibal Girls a degree of cult status. It’s infinitely weirder than the likes of Ghostbusters and Stripes, and therefore unlikely to appeal to any but the most diehard of Ivan Reitman fans; it’s also way milder than the vast majority of the backwoods horror movies of the 70s (many of which, we might note, it pre-dates), and as such it might not be of interest to that many horror fans. It’s a custom made midnight movie: it’s cheap, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, it’s got some weird visuals and music and naked hippy chicks. In short, it’s a film most likely to be enjoyed whilst under the influence of illicit substances. Not that we at Brutal As Hell condone such activities, of course. Cough, ahem, etc.
As far as the extras go, I gather this edition from Nucleus Films is a direct recreation of the Shout! Factory Region 1 edition released last year and reviewed here, so Stateside readers need not worry about missing anything. But my fellow Brits could do worse than to give this a whirl late one Saturday night. It won’t change anyone’s life, but it may well provide a few giggles.
UPDATE: Marc Morris of Nucleus informs me that there are some extras on this edition which are not on Shout! Factory edition:an extra trailer, an additional French credits sequence, optional subtitles for both tracks, and PDF files of the original press book and a making-of essay from the time. Apologies for my inaccuracy.