Umberto Lenzi

  • Cannibal Ferox (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.

  • La casa 3 [Ghosthouse] (1988)

    La casa 3 [Ghosthouse] (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2021) Acceptably executed but narratively suspect, La casa 3 best shows its low-budget exploitation roots in the way it throws better movies in a blender and tries to pass the incoherent result as something that is worth our attention. It has a haunted house, creepy clown dolls, spooky time-travelling radio signals, an exploding mirror, and a bus-smashing downer finale — if you’re expecting all of those elements to fit together harmoniously, well, it’s not for nothing that the film is well known in so-bad-it’s good circles. It does help that the film, written and helmed by Italian exploitation veteran Umberto Lenzi, is rather better shot than would be the norm for lower-budgeted, markedly commercial films such as this one. The creepy clown doll is rather better than the rest of the film and so are snippets of the score, but that’s really not quite enough to shake the low-imagination, slap-dash way La casa 3 is put together. The story, characters and individual plot beats are terrible in ways that the presentation can’t quite overcome.

  • Incubo sulla città contaminata [Nightmare City aka City of the Walking Dead] (1980)

    Incubo sulla città contaminata [Nightmare City aka City of the Walking Dead] (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, September 2020) I have no perceptible affection for circa-1980 Italian horror films (whether they’re about zombies of cannibals—same difference) but there were a few times in Nightmare City when I caught myself thinking, “Hey, this is almost interesting.” Not often, and never for too long, but still—I suppose I’m reacting more favourably to the idea of a city-wide zombie emergency, to the promising opening sequence (in which a cargo plane disgorges a group of zombies, effectively beginning the apocalypse), and to an audaciously dumb double-jot-nightmare ending. Alas, it doesn’t amount to much because director Umberto Lenzi doesn’t have the budget nor the wits to keep this interesting on a moment-to-moment basis. The makeup effects are not good, and the film’s cheap production values keep undermining whatever it wanted to do: gore in a well-made film can be tolerable, but it just looks laughable and pretentious in a cheap film like Nightmare City. Whatever promise it has is frequently wiped out, and, in the end, only confirmed my prejudices against that horror film subgenre.