Mountain of the Cannibal God (1978)

The cannibal movie cycle of the late Seventies and early Eighties will forever seem like a strange beast. Splicing stock footage of animals doing their thing with often garish animal cruelty, then layering in gore effects, nudity and any number of practices which would very likely fail to get past an ethics committee today, the resultant films are nonetheless compelling – in their own way. All of that said, I’m a product of my own social climate, and as such I’m very pleased that Shameless Films have openly made the decision to ‘soften’ (their term) the animal cruelty originally present in their brand new version of Mountain of the Cannibal God (1978), making the point that this footage benefits the film’s narrative none. Instead, they’ve worked to restore other missing scenes, offering the usual proviso that this means some of the splicing is bound to be noticeable. And it is, a little, but it’s all in the pursuit of a worthwhile cut of this film, and the end results are very good.

As for the film itself, see above: it opens with a lot of stock footage of animals, many of whom don’t actually live in Papua New Guinea where the film is set, such as orangutans (!) The film was actually shot in Sri Lanka; orangutans don’t live there either, but it’s all part of the spell these films seek to weave; shots upon shots of exotic or potentially dangerous creatures are used to establish that the story will unfold in a remote, hostile part of the world, even if the animals shown have never set foot in the film’s location. Another cannibal horror trope is to claim quasi-factual status, probably owing influences from the ‘Mondo’ cinema which emerged a decade or more before, and Mountain of the Cannibal God establishes its ‘based on real events’ shtick early on, too, with a screenful of text making such a boast. The plot of the story is itself quite straightforward, at least at first. Susan Stevenson (Ursula Andress) arrives in Guinea with her brother Arthur. Her husband has been carrying out some ethnographic research in the region, but he’s disappeared. As the officials who greet her are keen to point out, he lost contact some three months before; he’s bound to be a goner. But when she insists, they suggest she speaks to a local expert, Dr. Edward Foster (Stacy Keach), who might be able to help her find him.

Foster is fairly amenable to helping Susan, and it turns out he might even know where her husband has gone. It transpires that Mr Stevenson was last heard of travelling to a ‘cursed mountain’, because of course he bloody was. Foster even knows the place personally, and it’s a shame he admits that out loud, because Susan immediately asks him to organise a rescue mission with her as part of the party. Foster warns her that this prospective trek would be dangerous enough for a man, let alone a woman, but hold the hashtags folks; it turns out he’s completely right, and Susan is completely hopeless from the first second of the trip, doing nothing except allowing the men to bludgeon various animals to death when she gets too close to them. Still, the group of men, and one inert female mass, head into the interior…

A haze of ulterior motives, animal scenes and great music ensue. It’s my contention that the best-known cannibal movies have such superb music for this very reason, to offset everything less palatable in a kind of cinematic karma. And as the team approach the mountain, the locals (of course) show this disapproval in all of the ways you might imagine, as well as a few which are, to be fair, very creative and ambitious. On a restricted budget, Martino achieves impressive things here; a lot of the entertainment value of these films comes from smirking at the flaws, and that’s fine, but don’t let that make you overlook the many things which Martino does rather well. The ‘mountain god’ himself looks genuinely gruesome and repellent, and some of those restored gore scenes could still make you flinch.

In fact, for all the elements of this film and others of its ilk which will always stick in my craw, there’s a lot to love in Mountain of the Cannibal God: it’s lots better than I remember it, and much credit for this must go to Shameless for its judicious editing. It does have that sense of a remote locale, it keeps the action flowing reasonably well with few lulls and although Ms. Andress is rather an odd fit (though curious minds demand to know where she bought that jungle-proof mascara) she really ‘comes into her own’ in the film’s denouement, and not just because they get her to Undress. Mountain of the Cannibal God also boasts the most staggering scene of nonchalant cracker-eating that I’ve ever seen, and I don’t mean ‘cracker’ as in ‘stupid white people getting eaten by cannibals’, either. Although granted, there’s some of that too.

It’s less tit-piercingly nasty than its successors, but Mountain of the Cannibal God is still graphic and baffling (pig at an orgy?) in the ways that all bona fide cannibal horrors are. There are also a few unexpected twists along the way. I saw a different print of this many years ago and didn’t find the film all that diverting, honestly, but Shameless have done an excellent job here making the film as cohesive as possible whilst also making it look superb.

Mountain of the Cannibal God is available on Blu-ray now from Shameless Films.