Forget THE GREEN INFERNO, Here

So, Eli Roth’s long shelved, blackly comic gut-munch buffet THE GREEN INFERNO finally made it to mainstream theaters; no mean feat considering how ferociously it pushes the boundaries of an R rating in its giggling quest to make grown men lose their lunches.

Of course, for a film this dedicated to grue, it comes as no surprise that many critics are curling their lips at the film (though it is surprising how many free-thinkers fell prey to Roth and company’s cheeky, fabricated “controversial” marketing campaign). And even if you don’t like the movie, or frown upon Roth’s ANIMAL HOUSE-steeped approach to the genre, THE GREEN INFERNO isn’t a bad film. It’s a campy abattoir about cartoonish people eating other cartoonish people in an exotic locale most viewers will never visit and it’s an exceedingly well produced and yes, riotously disgusting big screen experience.

But never mind all that. Everyone is talking about THE GREEN INFERNO. So, let’s not follow the lemmings off the cliff. Let’s instead shift gears and look at a motion picture that makes THE GREEN INFERNO look like F.W Murnau’s SUNRISE by comparison. I’m talking about a bad cannibal movie. A VERY bad cannibal movie. And I like bad cannibal movies. But this is a VERY FUCKING BAD CANNIBAL MOVIE.

What’s the name of this very fucking bad cannibal movie, you might ask?

Well, I’ll tell you. But first, watch this…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0DlKR8iVHk

That’s right…CANNIBAL TERROR is indeed the worst cannibal movie I’ve ever seen and I’m fairly sure it’s the worst cannibal movie ever made. Well, the worst one that was shot on actual film, by supposed professionals, anyway.

Now, if you’re an ardent Eurohorror fan, this rambling posting is moot because you are well aware of CANNIBAL TERROR’s cross-eyed charms. But if you are only a casual admirer of vintage exploitation product from across the pond, then read on and cite this as a primer for what will most certainly be one the most wonderful/awful cinematic experiences of your life.

Produced by father and son French art-trash movie team Marius and Daniel Lesour, whose company “Eurocine” backed some of the late, great and wildly inconsistent Jess Franco’s most expressive films (portions of Franco’s WHITE CANNIBAL QUEEN are in fact stupidly spliced into the picture and Franco reportedly had a hand in the script, such as it is), CANNIBAL TERROR is one for the text books. The film was obviously made for cashews and curtain rods and man, does it show. The “plot” sees a pair of inept thieves (one played by Franco regular Antonio Mayans) kidnap a kid and hightail it to what the filmmakers are trying to pass off as the jungle (in fact, some well kept wealthy Frenchman’s backyard, it seems) to hide out and wait for the ransom to come rolling in. Instead of cash, the crooks encounter a flabby cannibal tribe looking for chow. Said tribe are really just a bunch of director (and prolific French pornographer) Alain Deruelle’s (credited here as A.W Steeve) poker buddies and hairy porn studs with grease paint on their mugs, bumping into each other, looking like drunken football fans and, eventually, slopping around in some admittedly gross butcher spoils. And wait until you see where they live! These flesh-eaters apparently shop at Goodwill and raid dollar stores at Halloween. It’s a beautiful thing…

Elvis impersonator by day, cannibal creep by night!

CANNIBAL TERROR is totally tone deaf from frame one to frame none. It’s so inept, so plodding, phony and crude; so poorly shot, acted, dubbed, designed and scored (oh my God…the music is like that jungle library track from the gun shop sequence in DAWN OF THE DEAD crossed with some low-grade Latino samba stock music and it never, fucking, stops…) that it becomes hypnotic. You just keep shaking your head in disbelief that this woeful excuse for a horror movie once found its way onto the notorious “Video Nasties” list.

Now, if you look deep within the torn bowels of CANNIBAL TERROR, I’m sure you could find some sort of political agenda. You could find some sort of echo of a social conscience or some kind of primal attack against colonialism. You can probably find the same thing in an episode of SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS.

Listen, CANNIBAL TERROR is operatically dumb and comes highly recommended; it’s the ideal spastic sidebar to Roth’s film and a movie you’ll never forget for all the wrong reasons.

And such is the awesome world we live in, that you can actually get this treasure on Blu-ray, as a double feature with another Eurocine gem, Jess Franco’s interesting and erotic but almost as dopey DEVIL HUNTER. Check it out HERE.