I spent half this movie trying to think of what it was reminding me of. Then it hit me – 28 Days Later ... it’s the gradual descent into inhumanity of the film-within-a-film documentary crew, the sudden realisation that people basically suck almost as bad as monsters. After my complaints about Jungle Holocaust, my strange, “hey, what’s so bad about cannibals,” thought, it seems here Ruggero Deodato was thinking the same thing too. This is an incredibly grim portrait of how basically animal people can become under the right (wrong?) circumstances. It’s far more visceral than Jungle; and though it seems odd to call it “slicker” ‘cos it’s still delightfully cheap, it is still more proficiently shot, and the music’s really nice. Gotta love the casting of a near totally-flat-chested woman in a role that calls for so much gratuitous nudity too, lol.

If weren’t for the fact that it’d probably be too much of an assault on the senses, I think this would make a great double bill with Last House on the Left. Both movies seem so much on the surface to be pure exploitation but the fact is they’re not. If you’re remotely titillated by what these movies have to offer (and frankly, I think a good majority of viewers would be lying if they said they weren’t) – they expose that part of you completely. “I wonder who the real cannibals are,” is the last line here, and it couldn’t be more succinct. It kind of embodies the movie as a whole – yes, as a line, like the movie it’s incredibly cheesy … but it addresses such an animal thing, and on this viewing at least, this movie just really worked for me much better than expected.

... aka a lot of other things, lol. I had three of these things lined up and as I started to read about all the alternate titles and versions etc I realised, crap – I’m gonna end up with three versions of the same movie here, aren’t I? But thankfully that wasn’t the case.

Anyway … this one is wonderfully cheap, wonderfully gorey, and most of all I was happy to find I haven’t seen it before. I’m just not sure I find the idea of cannibalism as terrifying as I once did (I’m sure they used to be up there with Gorgons for me or something). If the idea of cannibalism in itself doesn’t send chills down your spine, all you’re left with in most of these movies is a bunch of indiscriminate killing of people usually ultimately proven to be practically deserving of their fate through some form of idiocy. Since there are certainly gorier cannibal movies than this one and this has little else to offer, I’m afraid I really can’t recommend it unless you’re an obsessive of the genre.