MonsterHunter

A couple of observations about Vietnam vets and post traumatic stress disorder need to be made after watching this odd hybrid of the Italian cannibal and Rambo genres. It probably would be better for your mental well-being if you are having flashbacks about how crappy the war was, specifically when your hometown buddies take a bite out of your arm when you’re rescuing them from a tiger cage, if your bedroom wasn’t adorned with photos from the war, including a really nicely framed and matted picture of a bunch of stuff blowing up.

The other thing that I took away from this movie (and probably about fifteen other movies about crazed soldiers) is that when the haunted military guy goes to his closet near the end of the film and breaks out the old military jacket and beret, sets his jaw into one of those granite poses usually reserved for guys trying not to cry at funerals for good buddies that didn’t make it back, and hauls out the service revolver from its trusty shoe box (that’s where you’ve been all these years, old friend!), the rest of the family better brush up on their best zigging and zagging skills because daddy’s about to go back in-country, if you know what I mean.

In between the flashback and the resulting freak-out, there’s a whole bunch of Italian gore and cannibal stuff that John Saxon has to wade through. Saxon, the serious-looking dude from Enter The Dragon, plays the veteran tormented by the fact that his worthless pal bit him and now all these years later, he is starting to get the urge to take bites out of the skanky, but young neighbor girl.

Saxon’s Norman Hopper is a decent guy in spite of his cravings - he even lets the neighbor boy fly his model plane and doesn’t complain when the little twerp crashes it into the ground! If I was Norman and that little turd wrecked my model plane after I showed him how to use it, that’s when I would suffer one of those flashbacks that would cause my CO to show up at the local school and try and talk me down from doing something stupid. I would also probably have a walkie talkie with me for some reason and say stuff like, “Sir, do we get to win this time?”

As messed up as Norman is, he isn’t locked up in the nut hut like the the two guys that were in the tiger cage. But what exactly happened in that cage that caused everyone so many problems? Well, it seems that these guys (Charlie and Tommy) were fed human flesh by their captors and through a process that only a movie like this can attempt to explain (oh wait - they didn’t except for some vague reference to a biological mutation and likening it to a rabid dog spreading rabies) now have an uncontrollable urge to eat other people.

Also once someone is bitten they also become infected and crave human flesh, well, except that is when they die. I was never too sure about how it was decided whether a bite was fatal or just caused someone to join your team.

Somewhere along the line, someone recognized that Charlie and Tommy were having problems re-integrating themselves into civilian life so they got locked up at the Hospital For Nervous Disorders (that’s what it said on the screen). Charlie is supposedly progressing quite well, because his doctor gives him a day pass and he and Tommy will probably be released in a couple of weeks since they’re just about cured. You would think that part of the therapy would be to put the war behind them, but someone at the hospital apparently thinks it good for Charlie’s mental state if he still walks around with his military surplus coat on while he’s ambling aimlessly about Atlanta looking for trouble.

Since I don’t know Atlanta from Shinola, I can’t really say whether the scene where the biker gang harasses the women joggers in the middle of downtown is an accurate depiction of reality, but this is the deep south we’re talking about after all, so who knows, right? Charlie walks on by all this and decides to go to the movies. Luckily, his favorite war movie is playing and double-luckily is the fact that the couple in front of him decide to start storming each other’s foxholes right there in front of him!

One bitten-up broad later, Charlie is fleeing, with the biker gang in hot pursuit. What’s their interest? They’re bikers so they’re just looking for some action I suppose. Charlie hides out in a flea market and gets into a shoot out with the bikers, who stupidly decide it would be cool to chase him in there on their motorcycles. Finally, after windows have been blown out, tires squealed, engines revved, merchandise destroyed and a biker blasted by a shotgun, a security guard from the back decides to see what the devil is going on out front.

Charlie wastes him like a three day pass in Saigon and the cops finally roll up. Captain McCoy, the guy in charge of things in this precinct is remarkable because he manages to swear in just about every sentence he utters. He also doesn’t mind letting Norman go in to try and pull one of those Trautman/Rambo moments on Charlie.

What is Norman doing there? His wife is a TV personality and their station got the report that some Vietnam vet went psycho down at the local flea market (does that really qualify as news in the South?) and she called Norman at home because she thought it might be him! That sounds like a solid relationship.

Norman knows it’s his friend because his pal called him a little while ago wanting a drink. Yeah, I don’t make the connection either, but it must be a soldier’s instinct or something. Like when the hair on the back of your neck stands up whenever one of your army buddies is about to get themselves into a standoff of some type.

Norman arrives on the scene and goes into the flea market and tries to talk some sense into Charlie. Charlie is a bit reluctant to listen at first, but finally seems to come around. The highlight of all this is when Captain McCoy has some tear gas fired into the flea market and Norman reminds Charlie (is that really a good name for a Vietnam vet?) how they used to handle tear gas back in the day. “Piss on it!” So Charlie did and dadgum if it didn’t go out! I’ll have to file that one away the next time my team wins the Super Bowl and I’m downtown rioting, I mean celebrating.

Charlie comes out and manages to bite a cop before being hauled back off to the very same hospital that just gave this crazy moron a furlough from the Italian Eating Disorder Unit. There’s some babble about treating this guy and getting him help and McCoy seems to forget about the two murders he committed and lets him go back to that cushy hospital.

Things finally get rolling properly once Charlie and Tommy (what luck that they’re both being held at the same mental hospital!) team up to bite and wreak havoc in the facility. Meanwhile, Norman is starting to worry that he has the same problem that Charlie and Tommy do. He confesses to his wife that he wanted to bite the neighbor girl, but the wife brushes it all off, probably as some type of midlife crisis.

Soon he checks himself into this hospital for a little blood test to see if he has Cannibalism. The fact that you took a hunk out of the girl’s stomach is probably inconclusive. While he’s there, there’s some trouble with the other two soldiers and soon a nurse that they bit is breaking them out and the next thing you know, Norman has bitten one of the doctors and all four make their escape!

They steal a station wagon and run smack dab into that very same biker gang again! What are the odds? The ensuing fight allows Saxon to demonstrate some of his left-over kung fu on these dorks. At some point in all this, the foursome also stop at a gas station and kill the mechanic working there. You get a really awesome scene where Charlie takes a circular saw and chops up this guy’s leg.

Finally they end up in the sewer system. The thing you’ll notice about the sewer system in this movie is how well lit it all is. There’s lights in this place about every four or five feet and of course they have these rats periodically run around to give it that whole “icky sewer vibe.” The cops follow them down there and you get a bunch of people shot and then you have the classic death scene of Charlie’s that is actually pretty impressive. He gets hung up on some bars and the cops blast a hole clean through him so you can see out the other side. The special effects guy gets his props for that gag.

Eventually Norman is the only one left and he escapes back to his home where he and his wife have a final showdown. This is where he puts on the beret and gets his gun. Adios Norman Hopper and family.

This disc is probably about the best EuroShock DVD that I’ve run across. For one thing, the movie, in spite of its lurid title, doesn’t really degenerate into the scuzzy gorefest it might suggest. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have its share of scenes where there’s gallons of blood and chunks of flesh hanging around, but the whole thing comes off almost as much as an action movie and veteran-coming-home drama as it does a straight out gutmuncher.

Saxon is really good as Norman his obvious discomfort with everything that was going on in the film translates very well to a restrained, bottled-up performance of a man battling the animalistic urge building inside of him. He anchors the movie and gives it a credibility that holds the viewer’s attention during even the most ridiculous scenes (even if only because you’re sitting there thinking, “I can’t believe John Saxon did this film!”).

Director Antonio Margheriti (Ark Of The Sun God, Yor, The Hunter From The Future is a sure hand and the movie looks very nice with the exception of the grainy Vietnam stock footage used at the beginning of the film. This is one of those DVDs where the picture is remarkably sharp for this type of thing and the accompanying sound actually resembles the sound you would hear on a movie and not from Bruno Mattei’s tape recorder.

The disc’s extras includes interviews with the director, Saxon, and the guy that played Charlie. Listening to Saxon bemoan how he got tricked into doing this movie (he didn’t realize it was a gory cannibal movie until halfway through), but that Margheriti was a nice guy and he had two mortgages to pay is great. Giovanni Lombardo Radice, who played Charlie talks about his experiences on this and other Italian gore movies and basically says that Umberto Lenzi likes to see animals killed in movies and that he (Radice) refused to do it in Cannibal Ferox . He also brags about smoking a joint while he was made up as a zombie with another zombie on the set of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond. Great stuff.

I sat transfixed by the interviews (Margheriti seems mainly concerned with how Quentin Tarantino likes his movies) for almost an hour, and this was after sitting through the movie itself for an hour and a half. A very entertaining package from beginning to end, the only quibble being the combination of CHiPs style music and regular zombie music they used throughout. You can also skip the six minute video tour of the locations used in the movie, I mean we just saw them in the movie, didn’t we? The rest is all Italian goodness though and should not be missed by any horror fan.

© 2008 MonsterHunter