The Video Nasties, Part 3 – Cannibals!

Welcome back to my bite sized examination of the U.K.’s infamous Video Nasty list, the films that the Director of Public Prosecutions deemed too morally reprehensible to be viewed by any upstanding British citizen in the early ‘80s.  For the sake of time and sanity, I’m breaking the list into easily digestible chunks.  On this week’s menu is a lightly pan seared delicacy, the films of cannibalism.

The DPP really, really hated cannibal movies.  Out of the 72 movies prosecuted or considered for prosecution on grounds of obscenity, 10 were about cannibalism,  6 with the word "cannibal" in their title.  This might be due to the inherent gruesomeness of the subject, but I believe iftmostly stemmed from one movie, perhaps the most notorious off all the Video Nasties, CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST.  And while the film itself is well deserving of notoriety, it was probably this image that caused the most fuss.

This VHS cover was scientifically designed to horrify old white conservatives while intriguing everyone else (seriously, you want to turn your eyes away, but you can’t).  It was so blatant and in your face that it practically dared the establishment to ban it, which it did.  When the MPs went looking for titles to add to their list, anything using the word cannibal was guilty by association.  

To be fair, though, if you include “Cannibal” in your title, there’s a reasonable bet your movie is just a little bit nasty.  I’m sure there is some highbrow French film out there that uses the word as an analogy for the bourgeoisie, but it isn’t CANNIBAL TERROR.  

So I start this installment with the Mother of All Video Nasties, CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST.  I seriously debated putting this one in the Bummers category, as it is kind of a downer.  And by “kind of” I mean “soul crushing”.  I have seen a lot of really rough movies, but nothing compares to this one.  The biggest reason being that the movie, which is about a professor traveling through the uncharted jungles of Amazon to find what happened to a missing film crew, is actually very well made.  Director Ruggero Deodato made some incredibly hokey (and entertaining) films in his career.  CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is not one of them.  It is beautifully shot, well scored, decently acted, and most of all, very authentic feeling.  This is especially true of the found footage portion (made before that was even a term).  The combination of real violence to animals (quick, but still nauseating) and very effectively staged violence toward the characters (shot from a distance) causes the lines between movie and reality to blur.  There is a reason Charlie Sheen reported this to the police as an actual snuff film when he saw it, and it wasn’t just because of the cocaine.  

Fun fact:  While being banned in over 50 countries (allegedly), CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is the second highest grossing film in Japan, behind E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERESTRIAL.  Coincidently, this also constitutes the world’s worst double feature ever.

The power and gravity of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is most apparent when shown against its similarly themed but immensely trashier counterpart, CANNIBAL FEROX (re-titled MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY in the U.S. because no one knew what the hell a ferox was).  Umberto Lenzi’s film has practically the same plot (minus the found footage) and arguably even more gore, but none of the stark, visceral impact of Deodato’s.  There is no mistaking FEROX for anything other than the sleaziest of exploitation, especially with the incomparable Giovanni Lombardo Radice chewing up the scenery.  Radice was a staple of Italian genre cinema of that era, and perhaps the subject of more gruesome deaths than any other actor in history.  FEROX is still a rough movie, but considerably more fun (except for the animal killings, boo!).

Umberto Lenzi actually started off the whole Italian cannibalspoitation genre with THE MAN FROM DEEP RIVER (aka SACRIFICE!, aka DEEP RIVER SAVAGES).  Basically a remake of the American Western A MAN CALLED HORSE, the movie is about a photographer who is captured by a primitive tribe in the Amazon and slowly adapts to their ways (after a period of distrust and torture).  DEEP RIVER is far tamer than the cannibal films that would follow.  The gut munching angle doesn’t even appear until near the end, when a hostile (and hungry) tribe attacks.  Less of a horror movie as it is an exploration of cultural understanding.  Except, you know, a little bit racist. Oooow, scary indigenous people want to eat you!  The whole cannibal genre  is uncomfortably literal exploitation cinema.

Switching from the Amazon to New Guinea but still very Italian, Sergio Martino’s MOUNTAIN OF THE CANNIBAL GOD is another one caught in the DPP’s widely spread cannibal net.  This one, starring Stacy Keach and Ursula Andress, is more of a straight up adventure movie, with subplots about corporate greed and the exploitation of nature.  Andress hires Keach to guide her and her brother through a dangerous jungle in search of her missing husband.  The gore is fairly restrained (unless you are an animal), until they get to the titular mountain and everything goes absolutely apeshit.  Ursula Andress covered in honey, cannibal orgies, forced heart eating, and one very confused pig.  I re-watched that scene last night and it was even more insane and uncomfortable than I remembered.  It’s the cannibal equivalent to CALIGULA.  

While cannibal movies were mostly the domain of the Italians, other countries were eager to get in on the action.  From France came the sublimely schlocky CANNIBAL TERROR, which I have already gone on about in more detail than the movie has probably ever received.  

Spain’s exploitation maestro Jess Franco took a bit of the pie, as well.  His most obvious offender, CANNIBALS (aka WHITE CANNIBAL QUEEN), somehow escaped the Video Nasties List, probably because everyone in the U.K. government thought it was CANNIBAL TERROR.  Or they thought it was already on the list because they mistook it for Franco’s other kind-of-supernatural-but-not-really gut-munching tale, DEVIL HUNTER.  It is primarily an action vehicle starring ZOMBIE vet Al Cliver as a tough guy hired to rescue a kidnapped actress from a mysterious jungle island that is coincidentally inhabited by cannibals.  The twist is that the tribe doesn’t do the cannibalizing (they mostly just dance a lot).  Instead, they offer up tasty people treats to their god, a man with the power of having weird bug eyes.   That’s it, really.  Not sure why they think so highly of him.   There are a few very unconvincing liver extracting scenes that were probably the reason the movie was labeled a Nasty, but the real high point is watching the uncoordinated Cliver have a fight with an almost completely blind actor on a real cliff top.  It could have so easily become an accidental snuff film.  I’m sure Franco would have released it anyway.

Not all cannibal films have to be in the jungle.  In Joe D’Amatto’s impressively named ANTHROPOPHAGUS, a group of rich tourists, including another ZOMBIE alum, Tisa Farrow, get stuck on an abandoned Greek island and discover that a horribly disfigured cannibal is stalking them.  The tourist chomper is played by legendary Italian exploitation villain George Eastman, but since his character has been driven mad to the point of catatonia, we are deprived of the standard Eastman overacting magic.  The movie has plenty of gore, including one super gruesome bit of depravity (more in concept than in execution), but honestly, it is kind of a slog to get through.  None of the characters are remotely interesting, and even the death scenes are slow moving and drawn out (not in the torture porn way, more in the “okay, we got it” kind of way).   It’s really only notable for being the movie that made Tisa Farrow conclude “You know, maybe the acting world only needs one Farrow.”

Eloy de la Iglesia’s THE CANNIBAL MAN is the real oddball in this line up because it is actually a fairly classy, introspective film about isolation, loneliness, and desperation.  It is certainly the least gory.  Clearly no one in the DPP office actually watched it, they just looked at the VHS cover and declared “Another one of those bloody cannibal movies!”  The irony is that the main character, played by Vicente Parra, isn’t even a cannibal.  He is just a guy who accidentally kills his girlfriend, and in trying to cover up the crime has to kill an ever increasing string of witnesses, snoops, and blackmailers.  He decides to dispose of the bodies at the sausage making factory where he works.  In that sense, he’s less of a Cannibal Man as he is a Cannibal Enabler.   It’s quite a good movie, really, as long as you aren’t expecting a lot of intestine yanking gore.

It is kind of a stretch, but I’ll include BLOOD FEAST, a movie which I have already described in great detail, in the cannibal section.  Faust Ramsey never consumed any of his delicious Egyptian feast made for—and from— lovely Floridians, but it was definitely his intent.  If he hadn’t been so enormously incompetent and the police very slightly more competent (and ridiculously lucky), an entire upscale neighborhood would have unknowingly been turned into flesh eaters.  

Lastly, and most enjoyable of all, Giovanni Lombardo Radice returns, along with John Saxon, in Antonio Margheriti’s CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE.   The title might be (intentionally) reminiscent of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, but that is about as close as it gets.  Margheriti completely discards any sense of realism or atmosphere by setting the majority of the movie in Atlanta, GA.  It has the strangest, most confusing connection with cannibalism of all the movies on the list.  APOCALYPSE starts off as a Vietnam POW flick, transitions to a FIRST BLOOD style PTSD drama, then mutates into a zombie film.  In a new twist, anyone bitten by a cannibal becomes a cannibal themselves.  Because of a virus, maybe?  Logic is clearly secondary to Radice’s wonderfully unhinged performance as he takes on both a weekend biker club and the cops.  Saxon brings his trademark brooding intensity, compounded by the fact that he has absolutely no idea what is happening.  The gore is impressive without being too disturbing.  As to be expected Radice takes a lot of punishment (though not nearly as much as in CANNIBAL FEROX).  I might need to revisit this one as a full post one day.

Along with the four from Part 1 and three from Part 2, and the Nasties that warranted their own full length posts (INFERNO, CANNIBAL TERROR, DON'T GO IN THE WOODS, BLOOD FEAST, EVIL DEAD, ZOMBIE, THE BURNING), these ten bring the tally up to twenty-four.  Only a scant forty-eight left.

C Chaka

The Video Nasties: Part 1

I just got back from a two week camping road trip (I did not follow the warnings).  Since it left little time for movie watching or writing, I figured this would be a good time to start a little series I’ve been planning for a while but never got around to writing.  So sit back and enjoy (?) the first plunge into the world of The Video Nasties.  

For those who don’t know, Video Nasties is a term coined by the British media in the early ‘80’s.  Specifically, the term refers to a list of 72 (mostly) horror movies that were banned by the British government for being "obscene".  More generally, it refers to the entire misguided moral crusade to save England’s children (and adults) from the damaging and dehumanizing effects of horror movies.  The movement is roughly equivalent to the PMRC’s fight against rap music and obscene lyrics in the States. In other words, it was a witch hunt designed to give the appearance that the government was looking after the public without actually having to help in any way.  It all began with the rise of the VCR and the sudden availability of gritty, post-Vietnam era horror movies like DRILLER KILLER and LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT.  Stuffy, old, moral conservatives like Mary Whitehouse heard about these films(she certainly didn’t watch any of them) and started a movement that led some equally conservative (and opportunistic) members of Parliament to create a list of movies deemed so obscene that retailers could be prosecuted for selling them.  All of their research was unscientific and biased.  For instance, they would poll a small group of kids on the playground and ask them if they had seen any of these horrible, forbidden movies.  Of course they are going to say they have seen them.  They want to sound cool and brave in front of their friends.  The researcher might have well asked if they were scaredy pants little babies who do everything their parents tell them.  No matter that the kids couldn’t recount the details of the movies or even get the names right.  They were clearly being corrupted by works of fiction.

As with most moral crusades like this, the Video Nasties scare just sort of petered out after a while as society’s values and priorities changed.  Most movies on the list are now available in the UK completely uncut.  About the only thing it succeeded in was to leave a sense of mystique and social disobedience surrounding the original 72 films on the list.  In many cases it’s way more than the movies deserved, but there is something undeniably cool and transgressive about being singled out by an ultra-conservative government as being bad for society.  They were like Pokémon for the serious British horror movie fan in the ‘80’s, you had to collect them all.

Being an American kid, I missed out on all of this first hand.  I only became aware of the phenomenon in the late ‘80’s after watching an episode of The Yong Ones (kind of a small screen UK version of ANIMAL HOUSE) in which the lads rented a VCR and planned to spend the night watching an orgy of sex and violence.  They never got the chance to watch any movies, and the only one they mentioned by name was fake, but it was enough to make me curious.  I was just getting into horror at that point, and the idea that there were movies that the government (or a government) didn’t want me to watch was irresistibly intriguing.  This was pre-Internet days, so for the longest time, I had no idea what films were on the Video Nasties list.  That just made the mystery sweeter.  It was probably for the best.  I was a lightweight back then, and watching something like CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST would have left me rocking in a corner.  Not that I would have been able to find it even if I knew what to look for.  Living in a small Southern town with only a couple of video stores, the best I could get was the censored Blockbuster version of EVIL DEAD (unbeknownst to me; I did a legitimate spit take when I saw the full strength vine scene years later).  

Even now, it’s relatively hard to find all the movies on the list.  Thanks to niche market distributors like Shout Factory, Synapse, Arrow, and Code Red, a lot of the films have fancy Blu Ray releases, but there are still a few that aren’t readily available in any format.  I haven’t even seen all of them.  I thought I had, but it turns out what I assumed was Jess Franco’s WOMEN BEHIND BARS was in fact, Jess Franco’s BARB WIRE DOLLS, which he made at the same time with the same people, pretty much about the same thing.  Jess Franco did that a lot.  

These movies may be a kind of cinematic Holy Grail for me, but even I have to admit, some of them are garbage.  I’m not talking about the entertaining kind of garbage, either.  I think that’s why I’ve seen so many people start a Video Nasties review project only to let it go to seed five or six films in.  There are a lot of total bummers on the list.  Worse yet, there are a bunch that are straight up boring.  Taken as a whole, the Video Nasties list is a fascinating subject.  Movie by movie, it can be a slog.  That’s why I’m breaking them into easily digestible chunks.  Actually, a few of these chunks I wouldn’t recommend digesting at all.  Maybe just give them a sniff and slide them directly into the trash.  

It’s not all bad, though.  Not even mostly bad, really.  There are more than a few legit masterpieces on the list.  I already mentioned Sam Rami’s debut film, EVIL DEAD.   Andrzej Zulawski’s POSSESSION is a Cannes Film Festival award winner.  Believe it or not, CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is actually a very well made movie.  It’s really hard to make jokes about it, though, so I’m not about to write a whole piece on it.  The crazy, unusual, or fun films will get their own posts eventually.  Several already have (CANNIBAL TERROR, DON’TGO IN THE WOODS, INFERNO).  The rest will get a sentence or two in this series.  That is at least one sentence more generous than some deserve.  

Let’s get the worst offenders out of the way first: Naziploitation.  I have a question, History of Cinema:  What the fuck, dude?  Can there possibly be a more unseemly subject?  Naziploitation films are essentially Women in Prison films, but with even less dignity.  They are all about Nazis doing terrible things to almost exclusively women concentration camp prisoners.  Movies about talking anal warts would be more wholesome than these.  The sub-genre has it's roots in the much more artsy and narratively complex Nazi movies like THE DAMNED, THE NIGHT PORTER, and the utterly revolting SALO.  The success of those movies led to cheap knock-off versions which ditched the pretense of art and just went for the subterranean sleaze.  Four of them made it to the Video Nasties list: SS EXPERIMENT CAMP, GESTAPO’S LAST ORGY, LOVE CAMP 7, and (shudder) BEAST IN HEAT.  The titles alone are enough to make you feel unclean.  The only redeeming factor is that they are so incompetently made that they are not the slightest bit realistic.  Prisoners are tortured by rats which are clearly guinea pigs painted black.  German Shepherds look more eager to play fetch with inmates than terrorize them.  Peter Seller’s Nazi scientist from DR. STRANGELOVE comes off as nuanced and understated compared to the overacting nitwit villains in these movies.  The bad guys always get their gruesome and well deserved comeuppance in the end, but it’s not worth having to suffer through the first hour to get there.  Unless you are a completest, and a seriously dedicated one at that, there is no reason to ever subject yourself to these movies.  This comes from a person who owns CANNIBAL TERROR on Blu Ray.  If I’m saying don’t bother.  Trust.

On the bright side, that is the bottom of the barrel.  Everything else on the list is a cake walk.  I’m not guaranteeing the quality of the cake, but at least it is not covered in filth and rats.  Or guinea pigs.

That’s four scratched off, three previously reviewed, and sixty-five left to go.  Tune in for Part 2, whenever I get around to it.

C Chaka