Cannibal Ferox (1981)

(On Cable TV, May 2022) One unfortunate affection of jaded movie reviewers is to couch even the most primal emotions in overly analytical vocabulary, as if to soften emotions or extreme reactions for fear of appearing less than professional or measured. Well, let’s forget about that for a while, because there aren’t many ways of working around the impact left by Cannibal Ferox:  I hated this film. I hated it. It’s gross and vile and without any merit whatsoever. It’s a net minus on the ledger of the human race. It’s an affront to everything that’s decent and wholesome about the world. It’s an appalling demonstration of the evil that lurks in men’s hearts. It’s irremediable and stains the soul of everyone who watches it. Am I being over the top? Yes. Am I being excessive? No. If this site was PG-13, this is where I’d use my one permissible F-word. A particularly disgusting example of the Italian cannibal horror movie subgenre that dirtied the late-1970s/early-1980s, writer-director Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox is nothing more than a series of excuses to showcase gore, animal abuse and human suffering. The fact that it’s a near-remake of Cannibal Holocaust does nothing to make me feel any better about it – the other film was bad enough that we did not need any imitators, especially one that shears off even the microscopic veneer of philosophy that the other film had. Part of my extreme hatred for Cannibal Ferox is that the gore is not merely special-effect stuff: real animals were deliberately killed as part of the making of this film and that’s unforgivable. Simulated human genital amputation I can take – real animal death I can’t. So, not to put too (re)fined a point on it: damn this movie, and damn it all the way to hell.