Land Of Death (2003)
What is up with director Martin Miller? From the awful-looking digital video used to shoot this uninteresting cannibal epic, to the atrocious dubbing (a white guy dubbing a black actor?) all the way to the junior high band military music used at every inappropriate time imaginable, Marty seems intent on putting to shame all those Italian guys that got this sort of film out of their systems about a quarter century ago. Even wild pigs, snakes, scorpions, and exotic spiders don't escape his clumsy cinematic wrath!
What's that? Martin Miller is really Italian legend Bruno Mattei? Did I mention how much I loved this movie?
Sliding into one of his more mundane aliases (Pierre Le Blanc and Werner Knox are two of my favorites), Bruno decides that in a career as long and as, um, distinguished, as his, it just wouldn't be complete without one of these jungle barf bag flicks under his belt. And in true Bruno style, when he tackles a project, he does it with as much gusto as the three or four days of shooting will allow a 72 year old man. And also in true Bruno style, he realizes that whatever is worth doing poorly once is worth doing even worse twice! Thus, we have another instance where Bruno makes back-to-back projects that are basically the same film! In the grand tradition of his Violence In A Women's Prison and Women's Prison Massacre, we get not only Land Of Death, but also Cannibal World!
Land of Death is our first glimpse of this Bruno renaissance we are currently experiencing. Cruel Jaws was made at the tail end of his last great run and showed us that Bruno still had whatever it was that made him whatever he was, but could the grand old man of grubby genre fare dust himself off after tricking investors into flushing their venture capital down the drain of his dismal dramas and compete at the level we all have become accustomed to? And more importantly, would he even have the drive? After all, he's accomplished everything in his field there is to accomplish.
From the late 1970s when he cut his teeth on scuzzy Nazi sex movies, through his apprenticeship in the Italian minor leagues that are the Emanuelle films, up into the early 1980s when he would effortlessly cash in on the first wave of zombie popularity, Bruno's got nothing left to prove. In fact, by the time Cruel Jaws flopped up on our shores, it almost seemed that Bruno's sabbatical was more a byproduct of him having made every movie there was to be made as much as anything else. For five long years between 1996 until 2001, the only director the Strike Commando series had ever known would be silent.
Then, as if his Italian social security had been cut off, Bruno thundered back onto the world stage in 2001 with the only movie that could have been his comeback vehicle, Killing Striptease! And then, like with most thoroughbreds who never really forget how to run, Bruno Mattei knocked six movies back in the next three years and symbolically announced to the film world, that it was most definitely ON! And you young punks out there better turn it up a notch unless you're content to smell old-man fumes as he passes you by on the way to his bimonthly directing gig.
But what about the movie? What about Land of Death? What about it? It sucks! You don't need me to tell you that! All you need to do is have a gander at the credits and anyone with a brainstem could figure that out. Of course when I say it sucks, I mean that it sucks that it ever has to end!
Oh yeah! Gramps may be in his seventies, but he's still making movies like it was the 70s! Just because Bruno has been out of circulation for half a decade doesn't mean he hasn't been doing his research! He knows full well that what we need from our cannibal movies is a gross out moment about every five to six minutes and he delivers these with the ease of someone who knows his way around a severed leg and a pail of pig guts. But Bruno isn't content to merely appeal to our baser instincts. He's also going to educate!
I learned a lot about cannibal culture from this movie. Do you know what they do when one of their women has been unfaithful? It involves a big ball of clay with spikes in it and if the cuckolded guy had his heart figuratively ripped out, well...let's just call it "divorce, cannibal style." And these savage little buggers are also clever. When they trap some dope in a tree, they'll stand around and set fire to it until dinner falls out of the tree! And the only blonde woman they've ever seen? Elevated to goddess! Hey, that's just like our world!
Taking on our savages are about five or six soldiers from the army who are in Brazil to find out what happened to the last platoon who wandered into cannibal country. I can't say that I was ever sure what mission it was that the first group was on, but that's probably above my pay grade. The rescue team gets help from a guy familiar with the territory and knows the ways of the local tribes. He's also got all those talents that keep your butt alive deep in the jungle. Like being able to tell from a decomposing skull that it used to be a Caucasian. He also was able to make a positive identification as it being his friend, just from the skull's teeth! How many of your friends could you identify just from their teeth? (People from Arkansas excepted.)
You know, a lot of people ask me just what it is that sets a Bruno Mattei movie apart from a regular old Italian dog turd of a movie? Romero, the guide with the good dental skills, is a perfect illustration of the answer. Now, in a "normal" Italian movie, the fact that he was badly dubbed and sucked on a corncob pipe through much of the action would be more than enough characterization. But in a Bruno Mattei movie, he's badly dubbed, sucks on a corncob pipe, and his beard mysteriously vacillates back and forth in how full it is throughout the movie. In some scenes it's a five o'clock shadow, then it gets pretty full and dark, then it goes back to five o'clock shadow, then returns to dark and full and so forth throughout the movie. Keeping track of its strange growth patterns makes a very handy way to keep yourself engaged in the film.
Another thing that Bruno has learned is that if there's one thing better than killing off characters we like or are invested in, it's hacking up the ones we hate! By the time dumb, bald guy in charge gets his arm whacked off and continues to shoot his gun with his other still-attached arm, we're left with a sense of satisfaction. It's as if Bruno was saying to us, "don't worry, I know you hate these people. Just go along with me for awhile and I'll chop this son of a buck's arm clean off! Trust me!" Will do, mon capitan!
I'm not going to sugarcoat things here. You're probably going to have to trust Bruno quite a bit in this one. I suppose the Filipino jungles we see in the movie are just as jungly as the ones in Brazil they're standing in for, but somehow the camera work manages to make them looks distinctly low budget. And there's a lot of mumbling about the customs of this tribe or that tribe as well as several scenes where the cannibals appear to just be mugging for the camera. But we can't really lay all that on Bruno can we? I mean, he's in there trying his dangedest, throwing skinned corpses at us, ripping hearts out, shooting natives, blowing up natives, and having the characters eating gruel that contains monkey testicles. You can't really ask any more of a man than monkey testicles, can you? I know I can't.