LAST CANNIBAL WORLD (1977)Ruggero Deodato's opening move in the dubious game of Cannibal movie chess he played with Umberto Lenzi (see THE MAN FROM DEEP RIVER) was this poor and offensive effort. The director maintained that since Lenzi's celluloid sacrificial offering limited its anthropological investigation to a tribal initiation of the white interloper (Ivan Rassimov) inspired from the first nation Indian tribe in A MAN CALLED HORSE rather than cannibal culture, Deodato's film claims to be more truthfully a cannibal movie in its research. It's a shame he didn't study modern western audiences' culture as this movie proposes that Massimo Foschi's explorer character raping wordless native (poor Me Me Lai), is somehow sufficient to willingly bond her to him. This has to rank alongside the appallingly misguided rape-turned-acquiescence of Susan George in Peckinpah's otherwise masterful STRAW DOGS in terms of offensive titillation passed off as justified character motivation.
The film treads what would become the standard text of cannibal movies as white explorers Foschi and Ivan Rassimov trespass unsubtly on cannibal tribe territory then bitterly regret it.
There are two remarkable scenes however. The first is the epic scale of an enormous real cave structure in which the natives torture a high-suspended Foschi. The physical beauty of this location scene is undermined though by the tribe repeatedly twanging the captured Foschi's penis like George Formby warming up a ukelele. The other is his character's later survival gambit, after Lai is killed by the tribe, of biting into her heart in front of them to pretend he now shares their ways. It's thrillingly transgressive in a way but not worthwhile enough to recommend wading through this toxic swamp.
EATEN ALIVE (1980)
Umberto Lenzi's return of sub-genre serve was an equally dubious venture of rape, animal torture and foreign tribal exploitation only noteworthy for Ivan Rassimov's commanding cult leader in a plot development drawn from the then-topical tragic Jonestown suicide pact.
Me Me Lai, in the last of her three cannibal assault courses on film, again submits in more ways than one as a widowed native who here endures several bouts of forced 'attention' from fellow tribal males in a traditional ritual designed to rid her of her deceased husband's hold over her. (In an interview, Lenzi chooses to accept this as authentic anthropological detail, but that doesn't mean the viewer has to). Equally dodgy was the German studio executives' specific request that Lenzi include a scene where another woman (here Paola Senatore) is...well, you can guess the degraded picture. This says a lot about how exploitation movies were constructed back then, and what rocks were peered under to source such tasteless feedback.
Strictly for completists without any of the harmless voyeuristic fun some Italian horror films of this period offer.
Me Me Lai, in the last of her three cannibal assault courses on film, again submits in more ways than one as a widowed native who here endures several bouts of forced 'attention' from fellow tribal males in a traditional ritual designed to rid her of her deceased husband's hold over her. (In an interview, Lenzi chooses to accept this as authentic anthropological detail, but that doesn't mean the viewer has to). Equally dodgy was the German studio executives' specific request that Lenzi include a scene where another woman (here Paola Senatore) is...well, you can guess the degraded picture. This says a lot about how exploitation movies were constructed back then, and what rocks were peered under to source such tasteless feedback.
Strictly for completists without any of the harmless voyeuristic fun some Italian horror films of this period offer.
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