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Cannibal Terror (1981)

Dir: Alain Deruelle - with  Olivier Mathot & Julio Pérez Tabernero

Two low life crooks named Mario and Roberto, with the help of their big breasted female companion,
decide to kidnap a young girl named Florence from her wealthy parents (played by Silvia Solar and Olivier Mathot) and ransom her.

They decide to head in country with Florence and hide out at an associates house, on the way their woman driver is attacked by cannibals and dragged away.
The scared kidnappers hold up at the house to plan their next move. But the plan is ruined when one of the gang rapes their host’s wife (Pamela Stanford) and they have to flee into the cannibal infested jungle…

 

Briefly on the infamous UK ‘Video Nasties’ list, “Cannibal Terror” was quickly removed and promptly sank without a trace, only to re-appear, fully uncut and approved by the BBFC, in 2003.
And boy, do we wish it had stayed lost!

Filmed at almost the same time and in the same Spanish locations (badly standing in for South America) as Jess Franco’s much maligned “Cannibals”, “Cannibal Terror” (which also utilises bits of footage from Franco’s film) has a complicated history as far as personnel goes.
A Production of the dreaded ‘Eurociné’ (who also vomited out “Zombie Lake”), supposedly Jess Franco had a hand in writing it (maybe) but promptly disowned it leaving one H.L. Rostaine and Julio Pérez Tabernero to take the blame on their own.
Director Alain Deruelle is meant to have had un-credited directorial help in his pointless endeavours by the aforementioned Julio Pérez Tabernero as well as one of the film’s stars Olivier Mathot.
But quite frankly none of tem should have bothered.

The movie’s opening credits are backed by a catchy, jaunty (if completely out of place) piece of music the lures us into the trap of thinking the film will at least be full of energy.
Far from it sadly, and as the plodding realisation of just how achingly dull the film is takes hold of the viewer the rest of the music decides to fit in with the hellish stupor that now washes over all who dare to watch as it consists mostly of an annoying beeping noise, repetitive drones and something that sounds like radio interference.

The soundtrack horrors don’t end at the music though as we are bombarded by some (even by Euro Trash standards) awful dubbing and truly inane dialogue. Whether the dialogue is authentic to the screenplay or a creation of the dubbing process I have no idea…But it’s bad. Though some entertainment value is clawed from it.
Unintentionally amusing script highlight has to be when little Florence has to guess down the phone what the crappy paper animal model (of a cat) her Daddy’s made.
Now even though Dad says it has a moustache (which I think means whiskers actually) the kid must still be a bit of an idiot as she guesses that an animal described as having pointy ears, a sticking out pink tongue and that goes ‘meow’ when you stroke it….is a zebra or a shark!!
Seems her brain cells are just as slow in their development as her front teeth.

The best of the rest is this gem, as the crooks and the ‘companion of prominent breasts’ argue;
Man: “You mind your own ass”
Breasts: “My ass is go fuck yourself” (!?)
In fact it’s surprising how much swearing there is in this film.
It puts even the acid dialogue given to (or at least dubbed on to) Giovanni Lombardo Radice’s character in “Cannibal Ferox” to shame.
Though it’s not nearly as enjoyable.

The uneventful script drags the film’s pace to a crawl but so does the lousy direction and editing as we have to endure plenty of scenes where actors say their lines and obviously then have no idea what to do next as the camera lingers on their nervous and confused faces.
Many scenes lack any kind of energy because of these endless shots of nothing. A meeting between the kidnappers and their female driver starts off with them all just looking at each other with nothing to say, as embarrassing close-ups betray just how lost the actors seem.
And boy, does the director like to film people walking a lot.
A trek into cannibal land by our fleeing kidnappers must go on for a solid ten minutes of screen-time, broken only be the occasional shot of a bored looking cannibal skulking behind a bush.
One brief attack scene later, we’re back to another massive portion of walking along footage, backed by more of those annoying burps and farts that pass for a musical score.

And seeing as the entire thing was shot in less than mysterious and exotic Spain, as opposed to the genuine Amazonian treks that Deodato and Lenzi undertook for their cannibal flicks, we of course have no ancient, deep, half-forgotten jungles here for our cannibals to dwell in. Oh no. Instead we have just grass and scrub land. with the odd, rather sick looking, trees and the occasional rock thrown in.
And when combined with the short and easy jeep ride our kidnappers take to get to, it means we get the impression that the general area where this supposedly wild tribe of stone age cannibals actually live is 5 miles out of town on a derelict piece of land soon to be a developed as a shopping mall.
A river makes a late appearance, but even then the whole look of the area means you expect the characters to come across some guys fishing off the bank, rather than a ferocious crocodile (despite the occasional, very obvious, stock footage inserts of more exotic wildlife).
The native’s camp has a few bigger trees around it, but their wide spacing, the bright sunshine and the lack of any actual undergrowth means we have none of that stifling, oppressive, mysterious, majestic atmosphere of a true undiscovered civilisation that we get from the likes of “Cannibal Holocaust” or “Cannibal Ferox”.

The cannibals themselves have of course gone down in bad movie history as perhaps the worst seen in the genre. And for good reason.
A bit of cheap face paint can’t hide the fact that this tribe is made up of confused Spanish locals filled out with a bunch of tanned white dudes in bad wigs, who seem to be having a ball playing dress up and grinning at the camera.
It looks like am overly ambitious frat party out in the countryside where Billy Bob decided it would be cool to dress up like natives, have a BBQ, get drunk and go ‘ugga bugga’ round the world’s wimpiest camp fire.
Although saying that it also looks like one of the dudes brought his balding, paunchy, accountant Father along with him to play at being cannibals too. And this guy unfortunately figures prominently in many shots thus exploding even the slightest chance there ever could have been of portraying an even remotely effective bunch of flesh eaters.

‘Do we at least have some nudity’ I hear you cry! Yes indeedy we do.
We have a full frontal bath tub scene from the very attractive Pamela Stanford which is very welcome, but again even this is handled badly.
Ms Stanford washes herself down in such a frenzied hurry you spend more time wondering if it was particularly cold that morning for the poor dear, rather than revel in the (rather pleasant indeed) nudity offered up. Nothing else to report bar a very brief bit of topless native dancing action.

Even the gore effects are equally bad and obvious in their execution.
We admire the way the makers decided to shove the gore right in the viewer’s face…we really do…but they could at least have tried to hide the fact that the ‘lost locals/frat boy cannibals’ are simply ripping at a pig’s carcass in the first gore scene.
Check out the rough skin full of pock marks where the shaved off bristles once were (not very flattering for the actress supposedly being consumed) and the fact that the supposed torso of the woman is no wider than 10 inches or so.
It’s true the (long) scenes of guts, flesh, and various innards being pulled out, ripped apart and generally messed with are suitably gross, but the fact it simply looks like a dead pig being mauled means any shock and horror is lost.
Check out a similar slaughter sequence in “Jungle Holocaust” to see how a genuinely disturbing cannibal feast should be filmed and constructed.
The gore is also very sparse. There is absolutely nothing at all after this early gut munching sequence (a nicely messy corpse aside) and you have to sit through about 40 minutes of tedious nothingness (nude bathing sequence not withstanding) until an astonishingly weak bit of unidentified bit of meat munching near the end that delivers no actual death scene for the supposed owner of said meaty morsels.

This goes on until we get another full-on bit of pig abuse. And if the fact we were seeing a pigs carcass was obvious in the first scene, here it’s spelt out in neon letters fifty foot high!
Classic bad moment to end them all is when, despite the quick cut away from it, we clearly see a split pig carcass on its back, held by it’s front legs, being supposedly cut open with a big sword.
I care not how many weak cries of supposed human suffering they dub over the poor porker , of that they squeezed a pair of blue jeans onto its back legs (I kid you not) , this is perhaps the most shockingly unconvincing gore sequence I have seen since the papier-mâché head in the rubber crocodile’s mouth abused my senses in “Brutes and Savages”.
And that’s your lot really, a couple of joke shop severed arms aside, as far as gory action goes.
Banned as a ‘Nasty’? Perhaps those that decided such a fate for the movie were all devout vegetarians.

The big surprise (and shame) is that the film simply doesn’t play at all (dubbing aside) like those Euro Trash movies we love so much. There is a certain feel ,a certain tone and vibe to Euro Trash flicks of the late 70’s early 80’s that they all share, now matter how diverse.
Everything from “Nightmare City”, to “Cannibal Holocaust”, to “Buio Omega” to “The Bronx Warriors” share this lovely vibe.
“Cannibal Terror” though truly plays and feels (even though it is shot on film) like one of the many no budget, shot on a friend’s video camera, Indy outfit American films that clog up the shelves of budget stores everywhere.
It’s a tragedy of epic proportions…This is more “Camp Blood” than “Zombi 2”.

Overall then a complete and utter stinker. A total waste of celluloid and one of the worst (though perhaps not quite the worst, maybe) films on the ‘Video Nasties’ list.
Trust me…Just don’t bother.