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The Cannibal Man (1971)

Dir: Eloy De La Iglesia.

We start off with explicit footage of cattle being coldly butchered in the local slaughterhouse. It's strong stuff and is a queasy foretelling of what is to come. A similar opening was used in the later American slasher film "Slaughterhouse", only to a more black comic effect than the feeling the viewer is instilled with here.

Marcos (Vincent Parra,) works at the slaughterhouse in a low paid, low-grade job. This lack of money is causing trouble between him and his Fiancée Paula. Marcos refuses to marry her, much to her annoyance, until he can get a better job.

Meanwhile in a high-rise flat across the way from Marcos's ramshackle dusty wasteland surrounded house, a young homosexual man, with a strong crush on Marcus, watches him through a pair of binoculars.

One night Marcos is getting down to a little back seat action with Paula in a taxi, the driver takes offense and kicks them both out. After a fight Marcos smashes a brick on the irate drivers head.

When Marcos reads in the paper that the man has died, Paula urges him to tell the Police and say it was done in self-defense. Marcos, believing that the authorities will never believe a poor man like himself and that only the rich can get justice, refuses. Paula says the marriage is off.
Shocked at this betrayal, Marcos cunningly placates her and during a passionate kiss strangles Paula, breathing in her dying breath as he does, in a subtle yet disturbing murder sequence. He hides the body in the spare bedroom.

Even with spraying enough air freshener to wipe out the Earth's ozone layer, the smell of decay becomes unbearable and fate continues to conspire against Marcos and soon more bodies are piling up and as the gay neighbour gets friendlier with him, Marcos starts to lose his weak hold on sanity. Soon the neighbourhood dogs are scratching around his less than fragrant house, and it's obvious something's going to have to give...

 

This interesting little Spanish film is also known as "The Apartment on the 13th Floor", a much more subtle title (although the murderers house is actually an isolated one story building) than the more famous exploitative moniker it is given here and that got it caught up in the UK 'Video Nasties' scare. This title is also highly misleading, as there is no cannibalism in the film at all!

The rather lousy dubbing aside, (the gay neighbour has been given the best dub job and it actually adds to the characters mysterious demeanour) this is a well made film that although delivers on the more grizzly aspects of the plot, plays more like a character study than a straightforward horror flick.

The way Parras plays Marcos though seems strange at first. Only after watching the whole film do you really understand what a subtle and naturalistic performance he gives. No mad rolling of the eyes or sweaty breakdowns here. Marcos is shown to be a rather tragic, weak figure who obviously can't feel things for people given the detached way he not only carries out the killings themselves (look how easy he kills his own brother), but also in the way he can, although rather nervously, carry on interacting with those around him after the dark deeds have been committed.

Marcos's relationship with the homosexual peeper is a nice touch that gives the film it's own unique feel. Full marks to the director Eloy De La Iglesia, and Anthony Fos on the screenplay. The almost romantic sequence during a late night swim in a pool between the two men throws the viewer completely off balance. The editing and music (a strange hybrid score by Fernado G Morcillo that throws everything from bizarre noises to morricone style horns and female vocals at us) in this sequence is deftly handled and used in the kind of way that is normally reserved for male/female romantic interludes. This kind of unexpected development is also carried over into the subdued, even poetic finale.

The gore (by someone/something called Baquero is pretty restrained in general (including two well crafted sequences of dismemberment) but a few choice moments like a chillingly calculated throat slitting (that harks back to the cattle footage, and a scene that is cut out of later UK prints) and a cleaver in the face effect (very much like the scene in Bava's "Bay of Blood", made at roughly the same time) add that much needed exploitation coating that stops things from bogging down during the sometimes overly lengthy and badly dubbed dialogue scenes. Strangely we have a 'dialogue by' credit on the opening titles to a 'Robert H Oliver'. Well, Mr. Oliver did a rather poor job it has to be said.

This is also a film in need of some drastic editing (we could easily lose a good 5 minutes) which would have helped it no end and created a much leaner beast than the pretty stodgy movie we're left with. This dragging pace is the films only real flaw though, aside from the uninteresting photography by Raul Artigot, and it's a shame that it has not got a higher profile. It certainly deserved a better treatment than it got in the UK, where it was (due mostly to the "Cannibal Man" title) put on the infamous 'Video Nasties' list and banned for many years until it was given a small, censored re-release before being forgotten again.