- Trailer (real player) -

Back in the days before the internet and DVD's, some of the more hardcore horror films were stuff of legend - only to be glimpsed at through the pages of a Fangoria if you were lucky.  Films like Snuff (which I still haven't seen to this day), I Spit on Your Grave and Cannibal Holocaust.  You could imagine what extreme gore was available out there - and if you looked hard enough, sometimes you'd find Zombie, Faces of Death, or The Beyond at a local privately owned video outlet.  Rarer than rare were movies like Cannibal Ferox, once known as Make Them Die Slowly.  This italian import gorefest shocker has been recently made available through Grindhouse Releasing in its uncut version.  If you missed the 80's horror scene, or want to remember what it was like going into a film with stomach gurgling dread (from its no holds barred gore reputation) and sit through something you almost couldn't watch - get your hands on this.

Much like Hollywood, films from overseas tend to follow previously successful formulas.  As with any other italian horror film created during or around the era of the master Lucio Fulci, you ahave a pretty good idea of what you're going to get from the start.  The soundtrack is a droning, morbid and familiar 80's style synthesized organ, much like that from Zombie or Gates of Hell.  The story involves a quest into the primitive, unexplored jungle, and will soon end on foot with survivors fighting for their lives against zombies, or cannibals, as in this film.

A young grad student looks to do her PHd thesis on disproving cannbalism.  Gloria thinks that "the mythical lie of the cannibal ferox is but an aliby to justify the greed and cruelty of the conquistadors.  To justify their destruction"  Or, as her brother Rudolph so simply puts it, "Gloria thinks man eating man is bullshit."  The two of them, along with a female companion, travel to the Amazon from New York City in search of reputed cannibal tribes.  Along the way, their car breaks down and they continue on foot - only to come across "two survivors" Mike and Joe. 

Mike Logan tells his story of how they came in search of cocaine, and were accompanied by a Portugese emerald miner to a tribe by the river.  It was there that they were attacked by cannibals, barely making it out alive - their friend falling victim to the tribe, being tortured and castrated in front of them while they were held captive in cages full of bloodsuckers.  They recommend running for the river.

Soon they come across the tribe camp, abandoned.  There are bodies rotting on posts - one of them the Portugese emerald hunter.  He has what has to be the biggest and fattest maggots I have ever seen, eating its way into his eye socket.  You can actually see thru the skin of the maggot to the blue and gray rotted meat its engorged itself with.  In time it is discovered that Mike Logan and his partner are actually emerald hunters themselves, and the Portugese man, as well as the rest of the tribe, were tortured and killed by Logan.  Its only a matter of time before the young tribesmen return from their hunt, find out what has happened, and capture the characters.  One by one their fates are sealed in extremely violent manners.

I counted a total of 25 deaths - the film is bloody.  Cannibal Ferox film will show anything - but youre more likely to see intestines and organs before you'll see any latex shreddings or woundings in real time.  Theres blood, but mostly painted onto mutilated bodies.  Knife cuts are streaked red paint.  What turns your stomach instead are the animal killings - most of which, if not all, are real.  One guy stabs a baby pig.  A boa constrictor gets shredded by an iguana.  A monkey gets devoured by a hungry tiger.  Cave spiders and giant moths.  Tortoise and baby alligator dinners prepared right before your eyes.  Forget Fear Factor - a naked tribesman sits and eats the fattest grubs you ever saw.  Probably the most disturbing of them all is when the baby furry little anteater or some dog-like animal gets attacked and eaten by an anaconda - all of which is shown it drawn out detail - while the animal stares into your eyes, begging to be spared.  People who empathize with animals and their pain will not sit through this film easily.

The human deaths and torture scenes are great.  We're talking dismemberment and castration, stump-cauderizing and eye-gouging.  Watch victims be disembowled, intestines eaten right alongside livers.  One unlucky soul gets the top of his head scalped, and the natives begin to eat his warm brains before his last breath.  Oh yeah, and the native who castrates that guy?  He eats it.  These characters may have traveled all the way from New York, but this is no concrete jungle.  This aint Amazon.com people.  Stay out of the woods!

Final analysis:  This italian uncut prodigy of 80's horror hits home with real, gut-wrenching animal killings, and plenty of gore in the neighborhood of rotting corpses, mutilation and castration.  Remove the NYC discotech cop drama from the plotline (which stars btw the best actor in the movie, R. Bolla, the man who did Debbie in Debbie Does Dallas), and you have yourself a watchable movie chock full of jungle traumas and your age-old group of survivors dwindling down one by one.  If you're a fan of the TV series "Lost" - you'll have a hard time not making the comparison.  Its like watching Sawyer and Kate try to survive a jungle full of cannibals.  Only with nudity, and brutal, bloody violence.  In the end, its somewhere right between Lucio Fulci's Zombie and Cannbal Holocaust (a slightly more viscious film), and not for the easily disturbed.