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…
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.