Anthropophagus review by The Grim Ringler
God bless the Italian sleaze industry and their endless array of seventies and eighties gory trash movies. Made quickly and cheaply to cash in on the video and grindhouse markets, these gems made up the diet of any self-respecting gorehound during the early days of home video and I can count myself among those who gained sustenance from their chunky offerings. Anthropophagus I saw on a Detroit station, cut to ribbons and re-titled Grim Reaper and it wasn’t until I was about twenty until I saw what all had to be cut to even make this a film you can show in America, let alone on broadcast television. No wonder the version I saw as a kid was under an hour in length.
Anthropophagus tells the tale of some ill-fated vacationers out on a boat and looking for good times and better sex. They have the misfortune of landing on the island home of a cannibalistic ex-seaman and are just in time for dinner. So, with belly grumblin’, our hero, the ‘Beast’, stock, hunched forward, and face partially covered with what one can only assume is something akin to leprosy, goes out on the prowl for food. Each victim he offs in any number of nasty ways, at one point even pulling a baby out of a mother’s womb and eating it. Yeah, it’s that nasty. The plot thickens as the survivors realize that most of the townsfolk are MIA and that the fella that’s after them had been lost at sea years earlier and had turned from average joe to joe cannibal, munching on his wife and son in order to survive. The film climaxes with a fight between the lone survivors, a man and woman, and the ‘Beast’ and ends with old Beastie being impaled and left for dead, which of course only means that they had to leave the film open for a sequel and with the image of the Beast munching on his own guts.
Yummy.
Adequately acted for a sleazy gorefest but the film belongs to the ‘Beast’ himself, who takes great pleasure in playing this awful part. The gore is pretty damn good and pretty damn gross, I mean hell, I still get freaked out at some of the stuff in this. Joe D’Amato, the director, is known for his gore and his porn, and the guy did the gore as well as any of the ‘Z’ directors in the boot and this is no different. To find it uncut you’ll have to get a bootleg, but it’s worth the search. I can’t imagine that this won’t turn up on DVD uncut some day as it’s too infamous NOT to. It has a sequel and a remake that I haven’t seen but am curious about.
Bust out your barf bags kids.
…c…
7 out of 10 Jackasses blog comments powered by Disqus
