Cannibal Terror (1981)

The cannibal movie has always been primarily an Italian phenomena.  Indeed, it is arguably the only genre of Italian exploitation that doesn't appear to be directly derivative of English language cinematic successes.  Instead, it seemingly takes its inspiration from Italy's own Mondo genre, with its frequent, documentary-style depictions of supposedly real 'primitive' tribal rituals, usually involving animal and human sacrifice, even cannibalism.  Cannibal Terror (1981), however, is a Franco-Spanish production, a last gasp attempt to wring some more mileage from what was, by then, a pretty much played out genre.  An exploitation movie out to exploit a near defunct exploitation genre, if you will.  Often thought to be a pseudonymous effort by Jesus Franco - it shares some cast, settings and even footage with Franco's contemporaneous Mondo Cannibale (1980), not to mention impoverished and shoddy production values - it is actually the work of French director Alain Deruelle, (although some sources credit two additional, uncredited, directors.  Franco, though, apparently made at least some uncredited contributions to the script.  It has to be said that Cannibal Terror does credit to nobody involved in its production, being poorly made, poorly scripted and poorly acted.  It adds nothing new to the genre nor does it use any of the existing tropes with any flair or originality.

The Italian cannibal film generally fell into two main camps - earlier films, like Deep River Savages (1972), tend to focus on western protagonists captured by primitive cannibal tribes and put through horrendous physical ordeals before being accepted, eaten or escaping.  Later films, mainly taking their cue from Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1980), tend to focus on juxtaposing the supposedly 'civilised' behaviour of westerners with the 'savage' behaviour of the natives they encounter in remote locations.  (There are plenty of exceptions to these two formats, though, such as Antonio Margheriti's Cannibal Apocalypse (1980), which relocates its action to an urban setting, with 'civilised' westerners reverting to cannibalism and being hunted down through a concrete jungle).  Cannibal Terror seems to be trying to emulate the second format, with its trio of criminals trying to hide out in the jungle being the ones who behave abominably and getting their just desserts at the hands of the local cannibals. Unfortunately, this scenario plays out with no sincerity or subtlety whatsoever, lacking the impact of Lenzi's similarly themed Cannibal Ferox (1981), where we learn that the natives had previously been peaceable, until encountering unscrupulous western criminals who had originally used the various brutal tortures on them.  By making its cannibals, from the outset, a bunch of rampaging, flesh hungry, savages, Cannibal Terror is unable to explore such ironies, instead simply pitting one set of brutal bastards against another.

Perhaps the film's biggest problem is its complete lack of pace - it crawls past, feeling far longer than its ninety three minutes.  It takes an age for the cannibal action to actually start, with the first part of the film involving a gang of small time crooks, two guys and a girl, kidnapping the small daughter of a wealthy couple.  Being inept, they quickly realise that they have to find somewhere to lie low until they can get any ransom, so decamp to the house of a 'friend of a friend' who, for reasons unexplained, lives on the edge of a cannibal infested jungle.  To get there they have to cross a land border.  Which brings us to one of the film's fundamental problems - we have no idea where it is meant to be taking place.  While it is clearly filmed in Spain, within the film's scenario, the coastal city where the action starts is meant to be close to a border with another country with dense jungles and cannibals.  Are we meant to assume that it is taking place somewhere in South America (like most cannibal films), or that Portugal is has a cannibalism problem?  The lack of any sense of place undermines any pretensions of realism the film might have had.  These are further undermined by the depiction of the 'jungle', which looks more like the shrubbery of a local park and the casting of the cannibals.  These latter look like a bunch of guys recruited from a local supermarket car park - they all appear Caucasian , out of condition and sport some very late seventies/early eighties hair cuts.  Moreover, their village is so remote that you can glimpse cars driving along a nearby road between the trees.

On top of all this, the film's plot makes next to no sense- not only do people behave in the most illogical way possible, (like getting out of a car in 'cannibal country' having just told other characters not to do this very thing), simply so as to give us another 'cannibal kill', but there seems to be a thriving community happily living on the edge of what's supposed to be the most dangerous jungle in wherever it is meant to be set.  Why would anyone live there, other than to provide a plot scenario?  Characterisation is next to non-existent - the criminals are simply nasty, the law inefficient and the kidnapped girl's parents rich and neglectful while the cannibals exist solely to present an existential threat to everyone else.  In fact, the cannibals could have been just about any ubiquitous movie monster - zombies, apemen created by a mad scientist, crazy cultists - they're just there to chase people around and gorily murder them.  To this end, the film does provide the usual quota of bloody dismemberments - lots of offal from the local butcher's shop gets pulled out of victims' abdomens and the odd rubber breast has chunks bitten out of it.  But it all feels as if it has been gratuitously grafted into the film, so incidental to the actual plot are the cannibals.

The film does have some curious aspects.  There are, for instance, a lot of older, much older in fact, guys married to attractive young women.  Both the kidnapped girl's father and the 'fried of a friend' who lives by the jungle sport what seem to be 'trophy wives'.  (It is the rape of the 'friend of a friend's' wife by one of the criminals which provides the catalyst for them to go on the run in the jungle, pursued by the cuckolded husband).  Also, the posse that the father eventually puts together to follow the criminals into the jungle appears distinctly geriatric, to the point that I started to get worried they might run out of breath before they even found their quarry.  Luckily, the sexually assaulted wife arrives with her own, much younger, posse of gun-toting guys in the nick of time.  Of course, it turns out that those cannibals aren't so bad after all - they might have eaten the criminals, but they apparently don't eat kids, returning the little girl to her parents.  Which is the closest Cannibal Terror gets to trying to present some kind of moral judgement - they only eat people who deserve it, (except those innocent ones eaten earlier in the movie, of course).  The criminals are bastards purely for gain, whereas the cannibals do it in pursuit of a meal.  The film ends with the criminals' pursuers making some sort of peace with the cannibals, (despite having mown down several of their number only minutes earlier).  A shoddy and ramshackle end to a shoddy and ramshackle film.

Which isn't to say that Cannibal Terror doesn't have some incidental pleasures - spotting the various bit players and extras who double up, playing both cannibals and border guards, for instance.  Indeed, just its general ineptitude provides a fair amount of viewing pleasure, but in the end it becomes something of an endurance test.  The whole kidnapping plot goes on far too long and when the action finally moves to the jungle, all the running around the jungle quickly becomes tiresome.  What Cannibal Terror illustrates is how quickly a genre can deteriorate - one minute it is producing interesting and inventive entries like Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal Ferox, the next it is being flooded with cheap knock offs like Mondo Cannibale and Cannibal Terror.  In truth, it is rather apt that the one original Italian exploitation genre of the seventies should so quickly find itself ripped off by cheap continental imitators.