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Cannibal (2005)

Dir: Marian Dora

‘The Man’ (Carsten Frank) has wanted to taste human flesh for so many years now. His Mother used to lull him to sleep with cannibal fairy tales The Brother’s Grimm style and now he can plug himself into the World Wide Web and bring the fairytale home.

‘The Flesh’ (Victor Brandl) needs to be consumed. Eaten up completely so nothing remains except what lives on in the body of the man that ate him. He longs to feel teeth clamping down upon him, longs to feel his blood flow into another.
And now he can plug himself into the World Wide Web and bring the fantasy to life.

‘The Flesh’ meets ‘The Man’ one fateful day and is taken to ‘The Man’s’ lonely home where they experience each other physically and emotionally before the time comes to experience each other in a far darker way.
Nervously, excitedly, ‘The Man’ takes out the knife…dinner will soon be served…..

 

In 2001 Armin Meiwes finally found a man willing to go through with the unthinkable. He met a man called Bernd Jürgen Brandes. And Bernd Jürgen Brandes
wanted to be eaten.

They arranged to meet over the Internet. And the day ended with Meiwes cutting off Brandes’ penis (that he later unsuccessfully cooked for them both to eat), cutting Brandes’ throat, butchering his body and finally eating his flesh with a nice wine.
Brandes' meat was frozen for later consumption and some month’s later Meiwes set about looking for another man willing to take the journey with him once again.

Before that could happen though German police (tipped off by one of Meiwes’ would be volunteers) raided his home in 2002, found the remains of Brandes, found the video Meiwes had shot documenting what he and Brandes had done and arrested him.

Meiwes, the real cannibal.

Due to the fact Brandes had given permission for everything that happened to happen, Meiwes was only convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight and a half years in prison.
The publicity though ensured that such an unthinkable ‘crime’ could never be punished enough by just manslaughter. A re-trial was ordered in 2005 and this time Meiwes was convicted of murder (due to the fact Brandes, despite losing so much blood for so many hours after the consensual castration, actually died when his throat was cut) and this time he was given a life sentence.
He is currently serving his time.

Cannibal killers were nothing new, but the fact that a man actually allowed himself, and in fact needed to be, eaten by another man, and so gave his permission for it, was something pretty much unheard of.
As such it was certain that such a ripe subject would be heaven sent for any film maker with an eye on the extreme.
And in “Cannibal” director Marian Dora has given us what will probably remain the definitive fictional account of this true life event. And probably the closest any kind of general public will get to the actual video that Meiwes made that day.

Superbly effective music (the ‘main theme’ is a thing of dark wonder) opens the story as it plays over images of ‘The Man’ as a young boy being read fairy takes by his mother, as candlelight flickers around his bedroom.
It’s a powerful opening and one that forewarns of the descent of the fairytale into grim (nay, Grimm) reality to come.

The film then move to the grown ‘Man’ trying to find pick-ups online.
Knowing the real story, we can assume that these are not just gay pick-ups but the aborted first attempts to find a ‘partner’ that will go through with what they fantasised about on-line. Something the real Meiwes had difficulty with.
But only the odd typed word on the screen leads us to this in the film and so those not familiar with the case may be wondering, due to the total lack of dialogue, what’s going on.
At one point we even see ‘The Man’ having lunch with a woman, just to confuse matters.
Meiwes was supposedly engaged at one point, but the fantasy of eating human flesh was, as far as I know, confined to the flesh being a man‘s.
So it’s a rather odd moment in a first half that could have done with trimming down anyway.

After the montage of failed meetings in bars, restaurants, cafes and in parks there is rather a lot of nothing that needlessly pads out the running time until he who would be ‘The Flesh’ shows up.
And when he does the other main problem with this part of the film rears its head; That of the post-sync dialogue which gives the film an amateur feel that is absent everywhere else. It also takes away the documentary feel (aping the real video footage later on of course) and reminds you in a less than welcome way that you watching a film.
The fact it’s in English also makes it sound worse as it can’t help but looked ‘dubbed’, despite English strangely being the original language it seems.
Live dialogue, in German, would have improved the first half of the film a great deal and it’s a strange choice anyway seeing as the subject, and certainly the content, would not remotely get a mainstream audience (or even your standard ’gorehound’ one) so why not go with German and English subs for the few dialogue moments?

The sudden use of overly cloying, almost parody, romantic piano music does not help the scenes of ‘The Man’ and ‘The Flesh’ (literally) hanging out together and makes the scenes come across as unintentionally amusing at some points and almost look and sound like an advert for a Homosexual love songs CD compilation!
As far as the Homosexual aspects of the film go (something I amusingly see distressed many reviewers even more than the cannibalism!) Dora Seems to by playing a delightful game with certain members (sadly) of her audience. Pushing their limits of patience with the ‘yucky fag sex footage’ as they wait to see the ‘groovy’ gore sequences.
Asking the question why simple sex (which is all it is at the end of the day) is a turn-off but the graphic butchery of a human being is ‘super cool’.
It mocks such attitudes, so hats off to Marian Dora for that.
Indeed the fey look of ‘The Man’ (Frank does not look like Meiwes, although Brandl looks pretty much like Brandes) ensure his character will not become some kind of Goth-Horror stereotype where the serial killer becomes a t-shirt.

Luckily this sadly mishandled ‘love’ montage is short and the next chapter takes us into far darker terrain as the sex becomes harsher (as well as explicit) as both men get closer and closer to the fateful moment.
Soon the playful images of nude love are replaced by thudding sodomy, drained sweating bodies, aching limbs, bruised, bitten flesh and bloodied teeth.

‘The Flesh’ is also shown to be the demanding, controlling part of the partnership here and also aggressively mocking when ‘The Man’ can’t fully bite down on ’The Flesh’s’ penis.
Although Brandes did indeed put his penis out on the table and tell Meiwes to cut it off, not knowing all about the true case I don’t now how true it is about Brandes being such a driving force though.
It’s certainly shows, as with his real life counterpart, that ‘The Man’ is a reluctant killer having only a real desire to eat ‘The Flesh’ not to actually kill him (in a way a very ironic twist on the obvious attitudes of meat eating in general!).

And although I seem to have been very critical so far the film now proceeds to utterly redeem itself from it’s relatively minor faults as we enter the final phase.
After a brief false start (though it does highlight just how determined the men are to finally do the deed) the film enters it’s final, gruelling, stretch. And it’s now the full horror of what carrying out such a deed actually means in real flesh and blood terms.
From here on in the film pulls no punches as in unflinching, expertly rendered, detail the castration, death, butchering and consuming of ‘The Flesh’ is shown to us.
The actual video that Meiwes shot has never seen the light of day outside of the German courtroom, but with this fictional take on the tale Marian Dora has reconstructed the events of that fateful day with shocking authenticity. This truly is as close as you will ever (perhaps wisely) get to the horrors that took place in that lonely house.

Does it seem far fetched that a conscious man has his penis sliced off only to then sit and wait on his blood soaked chair for said penis to be cooked so he can consume it?
Does it seemed far fetched that 3 hours after being castrated, eating his own penis and evacuating his life’s blood into a hot bath that the man still clings on to life?
Well it happened in the case and it happens here. Barely a detail of the crime is missed and certainly none of the grotesque, fetid, repugnant biological horror of what it truly means to drag, gut, hack, and slice a human body is skipped over.

And it is in these anatomical, biological details where Dora’s movie leaves the slightly more acceptable extreme gore/torture flicks behind.
No matter how nasty “Hostel 2” may get, or “The Devil’s Rejects”, they still manage to keep even the bloodiest, most sadistic death ‘clean’ and hygienic. Acceptable.
Not so here…Filth caked, sweaty flesh is dragged and scraped along dirty floors and walls, black blood dries in matted hair and coats shrunken testicles and dying innards vomit forth their foul contents as we see what really happens to all those dead bodies in Horror films, as Dora’s camera unapologetically captures the emptying of ’The Flesh’s’ bowels over the floor as he’s clumsily dragged to the barn where he’ll be strung up like a good porker, opened, sawn into bits, decapitated, skinned and filleted ready to be the heavenly meal ’The Man’ has dreamt about for so long.
Using clever editing, lighting, model work and more than likely the carcass of a pig made up to look like the naked, castrated, body of ‘The Flesh’ Marian Dora takes you as close to reality as is humanly possible during the butchery sequence.

The sexual aspect of this butchery (as ‘The Man’ holds aloft steaming offal as if it was the Holy Grail) is fully focused on here as ‘The Flesh’ is savoured, kissed and tasted with far more passion than he ever was when alive.
But even here Dora remembers to rub our faces in reality as, despite his arousal, ‘The Man’ repeatedly has to vomit because of the stench emanating from the freshly eviscerated corpse.
There’s no ‘Goth wank’ fetish images of loving the dead here. This is dripping, steaming, foul smelling reality that even shows just how cheekily comic book (despite it’s delightfully ultra-extreme content) something like “Nekromantik” was.
All of the FX work here is excellent and for the film to work, to really have it hit hard, silly looking latex skin and rubber limbs would be catastrophic. This film is not meant to entertain, titillate or have you switching it off saying “Cool”! This film is anti-entertainment. Even more so than something like “Cannibal Holocaust”.
So there is no fun ’n’ silly FX to be seen here (though the stump of the penis FX walk a fine line) as yet again Dora goes all out to recreate what must be forever captured for history on that infamous home movie we can‘t see.

And the Digital cinematography here is outstanding. At once capturing that grainy home video look while still managing to pull off some striking uses of light. All helped by the excellent and atmospheric set design of ‘The Man’s’ charnel house.

The lack of dialogue (for the most part) and the way it sounds, along with the (generally effective) minimalist score may be weird at first, and the film’s first half could do with some tightening up, but ultimately “Cannibal” is a deliciously explicit look at a purely flesh (in every way) based relationship and the actual mutilation, killing and butchering sequences are grotesquely and superbly realised.

It’s a slice of uncompromising, unapologetic cinema that rubs your face (and any puritan attitudes) in sweat, blood and bodily fluids and gives you the kind of jolt that is rare today in Horror/Exploitation cinema.
There are prime underground movie-making sensibilities at work here and you either embrace it or waste it. And it would be a crime indeed if you were to waste such a succulent morsel as “Cannibal”.