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 obviously had nothing left to prove.

In fact, by the time Cruel Jaws flopped up on our shores in 1996, it almost seemed that Bruno’s sabbatical following that film was more a byproduct of him having made every movie there was to be made as much as anything else.

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 out 14 more movies until 2007 when only Death itself finally halted his trashy cinema rampage!

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 look at the credits and anyone with a brainstem could figure that out!

Bruno may have be in his seventies, but he was still making movies like it was the 1970s! Just because Bruno had been out of circulation for half a decade doesn’t mean he wasn’t 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! Clearly “no fault divorce” hasn’t yet made it to the rainforest!

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? (Except friends from Arkansas of course.)

Horrifically cheap at every level from the camera work and the terrible-looking digital video to the atrocious dubbing (a white guy dubbing a black actor?) all the way to the military music being played by what sounds like a junior high band and used at every inappropriate time imaginable, Land of Death makes you long for the craftsmanship of a Cannibal Holocaust or even Emanuelle And The Last Cannibals!

But we can’t really lay all that on Bruno can we? I mean, he’s in there trying his hardest, 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 or his movie than monkey testicles, can you?

© 2010 MonsterHunter

As expected from an Italian cannibal flick, Ruggero Deodato’s Jungle Holocaust offers up plenty of grim death, torture, and animal abuse, but is also surprisingly involving since Deodato approaches the story of businessman Robert Harper as one of survival and how Harper does whatever it takes to stay alive, ultimately committing the very acts that he once believed separated modern man from the primitives.

Things start off inauspiciously enough with Robert and three other people on a small plane flying into the jungle to check out some business concern he’s trying to get up and running there. No one on the ground answers their radio calls and the landing strip hasn’t been mowed in a few weeks which causes the plane to lose a wheel on landing.

Robert isn’t too thrilled with his workers and upon checking the camp finds it deserted. A search of the area shows evidence that his crew may have met their fate at the hands of a tribe of cannibals, so Robert and his three companions go back to the plane, the wheel having been fixed and decide to fly out in the morning when it’s light out.

The next day, the pilot ends up impaled on one of those falling spike balls the cannibals always have tied in the trees for intruders and Robert and his remaining friend Rolf (Ivan Rassimov from Spasmo) decide they need to get back to the plane and get out of there before they’re next.

Their problem though is that the cannibals have chased them around so that they’re lost and they end up building a raft to get them down the river that they think flowed passed the airfield.

Robert and Rolf are ultimately separated when they go over some pretty nasty rapids and Robert ends up a prisoner of the cannibal tribe while Rolf has completely disappeared.

The middle part of the movie where Robert is held captive by the tribe at once hews closely to the conventions of these sorts of movies, but also manages to go beyond the expected scenes of carnage.

You are treated to various scenes of animals being slaughtered and some gore, but it’s not omnipresent or done purely to shock so much as to illustrate what Robert was going through and what caused him to descend into savagery by the end of the film.

Some of the movie’s best stomach churning moments have nothing to do with the gore as both us and Robert wonder why they haven’t simply killed and eaten him. He figures out that because he came in on the airplane, they think he’s like a bird and can fly.

This results in some queasy scenes where they hoist him up to the top of the enormous cave they inhabit and then let him drop free-fall style until he almost crashes on the ground. Who knew that the bungee jump was invented by a lost tribe of jungle cannibals?

He survives that and is thrown in a cage with some birds and realizes that he will soon be used for gator bait. This is when he decides that it’s time to get primitive on these jokers and grabs a good sturdy rock and pulls the old possum trick before brutally making his escape.

Robert’s ultimate act of becoming those that he has struggled against takes place shortly before he gets back to the plane. Once aboard the plane Robert pleads with the barely alive Rolf to tell him that Rolf would’ve have done the same thing if it were him.

A surprisingly gripping account that mostly fulfills the icky promise these cannibal movies usually fail so dismally at. Of the high profile Italian jungle movies including Cannibal Holocaust, Cannibal Ferox, and Eaten Alive, Jungle Holocaust is far and away the best of the lot.

Massimo Foschi let’s all hang out (literally) and impresses with a performance that gets across Robert’s changing character with very little dialogue and wide-eyed looks that go from shock, to haunted, to numbed.

The decision to concentrate on a single man, his fears and uncertainty as to his fate, the things he has to endure, and the acts he has to commit in an effort to stay alive transforms what could have been simply another crummy collection of special effects shots and animal slaughter footage, into something shocking – a story that horrifies you, but doesn’t gross you out.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Black Emanuelle was played by Laura Gemser and she managed to star in eight movies beginning with Joe D’Amato’s Black Emanuelle. This particular Emanuelle is usually portrayed as some variety of reporter or magazine photographer and her assignments usually end up taking her into such traditional Italian schlock territory such as the cannibal-infested Amazon or a women’s prison.

The D’Amato directed Emanuelle And The Last Cannibals is listed as the third film in the Black Emanuelle series, but I counted at least twenty films in Laura Gemser’s body of work involving an Emanuelle of some sort, so maybe there is some international board of arbitration that makes the call as to what qualifies as an official entry in the series. Can you imagine having to be the one deciding that Emmanuelle on Taboo Island, Emmanuelle Goes Japanese, and The Degradation of Emanuelle didn’t have what it took to qualify?

After squirming my way through this one like I caught a bad case of whatever it was that one of the last ten guys that “co-starred” with good old Black Emanuelle must’ve had, I was wondering if there was an appeals process I could use to go before the board and get this movie booted from not only the Emanuelle mythos, but more importantly, from the Italian jungle cannibal genre.

Why are the only cannibals I see in this movie for the first hour from some grainy film a professor is showing Emanuelle back at his swank bachelor pad in a pathetic (but strangely successful) effort to get her in bed? And why are those cannibals from Africa instead of the Amazon? And why is there close up footage of them whacking a guy’s dingus off with a machete?

But before Emanuelle is proving to us how easy she is in the apartment of some square she just met, she was proving to us how sleazy she was while she was undercover in a New York City mental hospital for the magazine she worked for.

An incident occurs at the hospital that sets her off on her trek to South America in search of some cannibals. A patient attacks a nurse and eats her breast and Emanuelle sneaks into her room and sodomizes her (don’t even ask – it made no sense except that Joe D’Amato must have had it in his contract to feature at least one gratuitous sex act every nine minutes) and discovers a strange tattoo on this girl’s stomach.

Back at the magazine, Emanuelle gets tipped off that the tattoo is the marking of some ancient tribe of cannibals from the Amazon that supposedly died out a long time ago. She joins up with this professor named Mark Lester (though the way he was all over her, you’d have thought his first name was Moe) and he hooks her up with a dude he knows down in the Amazon and the next thing you know, Emanuelle is saying goodbye to her old boyfriend (his only appearance in the movie) by screwing his brains out in broad daylight in New York City under some docks!

Down in the Amazon, Mark and Emanuelle meet up with his pal, an old fat guy named Wilkes. Since he’s an old fat guy and has a young daughter named Isabelle, he sits out this expedition and instead sends his daughter out with them to look for cannibals.

Rounding out their group (not counting nameless native porters, guides, guards, cooks, etc.) is a nun named Sister Angela. This seems like a slightly dubious assortment of folks to go off into headhunter territory, but their first stop is actually at Father Morales’ mission. The Father is friendly with all the local tribes, so if there’s any cannibals among them, he’ll likely know.

Things hit a bit of a snag when they get word that Father Morales and his mission have been wiped out by an unfriendly tribe, but at least the group picks up the services of Donald and Maggie McKenzie. The McKenzies say they’re there hunting big game, but they have their own (rather mundane as it turns out) agenda.

The cannibal action in this movie doesn’t take place until over an hour into things, which means if you’re going to watch this, you’ll have to be prepared for way too much of what Emanuelle is known best for. It all seemed a bit incongruous that we’re suppose to be hunting for a bunch of vicious cannibals, but Emanuelle and Isabelle had time to bathe each other in the river.

Once the cannibals finally come out of hiding, they hold up their end of things relatively well. They eat people’s nipples, rip their guts out, tear a guy in half, gang rape a sacrificial chick, and ram spears into people with wild abandon.

The production values are pretty much what you would expect from a guy who directed no less than five films the year this one came out (four of them with the Emanuelle name attached) – beyond shoddy. Dubbing is likewise uniquely abominable with Emanuelle dubbed by someone who has just learned English and is seeing the script for the first time as she reads it out loud in the recording studio.

It’s all suitably gory, but as it’s confined to the final twenty minutes or so of the movie, real cannibal fans are going to more satisfied going elsewhere for their kicks. And anyone else is going to have the good taste not to bother with this one at all. There’s simply too much skin and not enough skinning!

Reviews © 2010 MonsterHunter

Ebola Syndrome is not really what I’d call well made. The very workmanlike visuals and camera work will remind you more of one of those Italian jungle-cannibal movies and there’s maybe one slow motion scene, as if they knew that every Hong Kong film needed a little bit of that, but it isn’t particularly well done or effective.

That said, the movie is full of gore, sex, and Anthony Wong is pretty much way out of control from start to finish as the psycho Kai, so it lives up to its reputation as the movie to show your mainstream friends (if you have any) at parties to gross them out.

Kai is your average run of the mill creep that has a hankering for other people’s wives when they’re out working. Kai kicks his adventure off by humping some chick in Hong Kong while her hubby is away. Naturally hubby comes home and is less than amused that Kai is dipping his chopstick into his wife. This results in a good old fashioned beat down, complete with pissing scene!

Kai goes on the offensive, killing the husband, the husband’s buddy, and the woman. The woman had turned on Kai as soon as her husband came home, so I don’t think any of us can argue with Kai’s decision to break off their romance in this fashion.

Meanwhile, the woman’s young daughter is around and so Kai dumps gasoline on her and before he can fire her up, someone interrupts him and he takes off never to be seen again in Hong Kong until years later.

Fast forward several years to South Africa. South Africa? Yup, I don’t know what Kai is doing down in South Africa, but you can be sure it involves screwing women and complaining about being bullied.

That’s one of Kai’s lovable quirks. Even though he’s an accomplished killer, he still whines about being picked on by everyone!

His next target is his friend’s wife. She and Kai’s friend run the Chinese restaurant where he has taken up residence and found employment as a waiter.

She’s always yelling at him about something or other and he fumes about it, complaining to whoever will listen and spitting in the food.

Even though his buddy’s wife rags on him mercilessly, he still enjoys listening in on his buddy and the wife having sex. Kai is so into that he grabs some raw meat from the restaurant and cuts an opening in it and proceeds to use it in such a manner that makes you realize what a wussy movie American Pie was!

When Kai is finished with his business he puts the meat back in the fridge. (Insert “secret sauce” joke here.)

As if being a crabby waiter prone to doing the most unsanitary things to the customers’ food imaginable wasn’t enough for Kai, his pal takes him out into the African countryside to get some fresh meat for the restaurant.

There’s two Zulu corpses next to the dead pigs that our restaurateurs are going to buy. The Zulu guy selling them the pigs tells them that the Zulus died from Ebola. Kai also manages to pick up some Ebola for himself after raping a non responsive native girl.

Lots more stuff happens in this movie and things pick up speed once Kai has himself a dose of Ebola. He just happens to be the one in ten million people that it infects, causing a bad fever, but doesn’t ultimately kill.

Kai goes on a raping and killing spree and once everyone starts croaking and flopping around all over Johannesburg, Kai decides it’s time to cash out of the restaurant biz and go back to Hong Kong.

Along the way, the girl that he tried to burn to death sees him in South Africa and tries to tell the authorities, but they tell her what I and any half decent scriptwriter would have told her: you seeing him here after all those years is just too much of a coincidence to be believable.

Ebola Syndrome is a movie that has so little of value to recommend that you can’t help but admire it. There is no hero per se. The girl who survived her encounter with Kai is rarely seen and the movie focuses almost exclusively on Kai and his free-wheeling lifestyle.

Anthony Wong is great at looking like a total scuzz – a bit portly and sometimes with a little greasy pony tail Steven Seagal would be proud of. He even uses a disguise with this awful-looking mustache!

You watch this train wreck in spite of yourself because you wonder what Kai has up his sleeve next. How much damage can he do? How many terrible things is he capable of?

Gory, nasty entertainment that is so far over the top, you’ll be laughing to keep from gagging. A very good “party movie” that will keep your friends grimacing throughout.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

I suppose, relatively speaking, this is a better movie than other Italian icky flicks such as Cannibal Ferox and Cannibal Holocaust which is somewhat surprising since the cannibals are kind of ancillary to things and the plot that takes center stage involving a Jim Jones-style cult is quite stupid.

First of all, this is the only cannibal movie that starts in Niagara Falls! There’s some guy running around near the falls shooting someone with a poison dart. Now, I’ve been to Niagara Falls and I can tell you that though there were a lot of impolite Japanese and German tourists, I never once saw anyone from New Guinea shooting portly sightseers with some cobra-venom-dipped toothpicks!

After the Niagara Falls business this dude goes to New York and uses a poison dart on someone else. He then promptly gets run over by a Ryder truck. This is what we in the Big Apple call “street justice.”

The cops contact Sheila Morris because there was some film found on this guy’s body that had her sister’s name on it and it shows her in the jungle participating in a ceremony that involves a little topless action and a guy in a really big mask.

A professor she consults (I think this is the very special appearance by Mel Ferrer) tells her that this footage was shot somewhere down near cannibal country. Some further half-assed investigation reveals that Sheila’s sister, Diana, went down into the jungle with Jonas, a charismatic cult leader who has very nicely styled hair for living in the middle of cannibal country.

Sheila books the next flight to cannibal country and ends up going to one of those shady sports bars that you’ll find in movies where the main male character is an American ex-patriot veteran who is AWOL from the Nam and makes his living doing cool bloodsport-type events like knife-arm-wrestling.

It is in this tough-guy environment that we find our hero, Mark. If Mark’s unshaven mug looks familiar to you, it may be because Robert Kerman, who plays Mark, has appeared in over 100 films, six of them made in the same year as this movie as well as an appearance in the next year’s Cannibal Ferox. (He also showed up in Cannibal Holocaust somehow.)

Of course you might also recall him from such projects as Debbie Does Dallas 3, Debbie Does Dallas 2, Angel Buns, and the very descriptive Men Who Love Huge Boobs. But there really isn’t any reason to dwell on the fact that sometimes he had to pay the bills by appearing in movies along the lines of Sky Pies, Cherry Cheesecake, and The Budding Of Brie. And I refuse to mention his role in the questionably named chicken epic Cock Crazed Blondes, since we probably have a loyal following that isn’t cock crazed.

Sheila gives Mark $20,000 to help find her sister. Both of them and a native guide (so what was the point of paying Mark 20K?) set off into the jungle and it isn’t long before their guide steals everything and deserts them. Mark, perhaps missing the irony that he himself is a deserter, is a little outraged that this guy would have so little loyalty, but somehow they find their way to the village that was in the film found in New York.

For reasons I never understood, a couple of white guys hold them prisoner until Mark busts out the old jungle gem where he and Sheila pretend like they were killed by a cobra, but really are only playing possum until their captor can get close enough so that they can take him hostage and escape back into the cannibal infested jungle without any idea where this sister is, except that she is with this cult that has a village 500 miles into the depths of the jungle.

Mark and Sheila wander around aimlessly until they almost get eaten by cannibals, but are rescued by some of the cult members. They are taken to see Jonas at his little camp named Purification and the next thing you know we’re watching some funeral ceremony where the widow gets to be raped by her surviving brothers-in-law.

I’m sure that Mark was just itching to come off the bench during this ceremony and show these natives how a pro does it, what with his action in such studies of human sexuality as The Love Couch, Pleasure Palace, and The Good Girls Of Godiva High.

Sadly, Mark would have to keep it in his holster for most of the movie, though I think he and Sheila got it on once, but only because she thought they were about to be eaten by cannibals. Later when she thought they were about to be eaten by cannibals again, she just asked Mark to stab her, so you can see how that relationship was progressing.

There’s a lot of time spent at the cult’s village and Jonas starts to brainwash Sheila by giving her a drugged drink and raping her with an object dipped in snake blood. This cult stuff is really laughable as Sheila periodically comes out of her brainwashing to complain that she’s being brainwashed.

I doubt that there’s enough cannibal action to satisfy the hardcore people-eaters out there, though the few scenes you get are pretty graphic. Lenzi instead concentrates on exploiting this Jim Jones angle, though he does so poorly – you can only giggle when Sheila’s sister is prancing around the jungle in her high heeled boots and skirt (Is this some kind of jungle cult for hookers?) and when Jonas falls for Mark’s lame “I’m ready to join your cult now” scheme (he was just faking it like when he pretended that a cobra ate him).

Not as gross as other cannibal movies simply because there aren’t as many cannibal scenes (what you do get is yucky though), but at least this one has some laughs. About as good as you could expect from a movie that stars a guy who was also in Inside Jennifer Wells, Dirty Lilly, and Peepholes.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Once in the Amazon, their jeep gets wrecked so they have to hitchhike through cannibal country. The movie also periodically shifts back to New York City where a drug deal has gone bad and everyone is looking for Mike Logan. Mike is some goof who runs drugs with a buddy of his and they’re hanging out in the Amazon looking to steal emeralds from the natives.

The three hikers see a native impaled on some spikes and then run into Mike and his buddy who has been wounded by the natives. Mike spins some bogus tale about how they were attacked by the natives for no good reason. That they then all go back to the village makes no sense.

If Mike’s story was true and he had been brutally assaulted by these cannibal Amazon warriors would he go back to their village and hang out for a little while to see if Mike’s pal can get better with a little bed rest? The only thing Mike would see from me after telling his story is my ass-end heading in the opposite direction of that village!

But our three young people think that taking a little R&R in this village would be just grand. The old people in the village just give them dirty looks and they all wonder why. Even more mysterious is that all the young villagers are nowhere to be found. Then Mike’s pal begins to die and spills his guts (figuratively, he literally does it in a little bit) about what really went down.

It turns out that Mike is a psycho who gets all jacked up on coke and does some crazy stuff. He wants emeralds from the natives, but they don’t have any so Mike ties one up to a stake to see if he can jog this dude’s memory.

Then Mike gets a little out of control. He cuts this guy, digs his eye out with his knife and then castrates him. Then he leaves him there to die. The natives are unamused.

After spinning that yarn, Mike’s buddy croaks. The natives open him up and eat his guts. Finally, the hikers decide that maybe this isn’t the best place to hang around. They’re just a little too late because here come the warriors back from the jungle and they seem a bit put out about Mike’s enthusiastic questioning of their fellow native.

So Mike and the three of them are taken prisoner. Mike is tied to a stake and he gets castrated. A pee pee for a pee pee. That’s the law of the jungle! (They cauterize it so he doesn’t die which I thought was considerate.)

Then they get taken down the river for some reason and the anthropologist’s brother decides to make a break for it. He gets a spike in the leg, runs into a piranha attack, and gets shot up with a poison dart for his trouble. He’s probably had better days.

Back at the village, the women are put in a hut with only a hole in the ceiling being the way out. A bloody heart is lowered to them to eat, but they spaz out and refuse to eat it. But most horrifyingly of all, they begin to sing!

One of the natives tries to help them escape, but Mike gets out of his tiger cage and wont let him for some reason. Then he runs away, but gets caught again. (He’s moving around pretty well for a guy who just got his schlong whacked off.)

The movie is headed for the home stretch so they pick up the pace on the gore. Mike gets his hand chopped off, his skull opened up, and his brains eaten! Remember when he thought having his pecker whacked was the worst thing that would happen that day?

While all this is going on and the anthropologist is watching her friends get eaten, you can bet she’s thinking about how it turned out she was all wrong about her cannibalism is a myth theory. “I’ll never get my Masters Degree now!”

Some people from New York track her down somehow and she escapes and makes it back to civilization. She then gets her Masters Degree for proving that cannibalism was a myth!

But how, you ask? She just tells everyone that their canoe tipped over and everyone but her was eaten by crocodiles and so she proved there was no such thing as cannibalism! Boo! This movie is so disgusting because it endorses academic dishonesty!

The other reason this movie is a vile piece of trash is the violence visited upon animals. Like so many otherwise upstanding Italian cannibal movies, there are a number of scenes showing animals getting slaughtered. There’s no reason some animal should get killed so that Umberto Lenzi (Eaten Alive, Nightmare City) can make his stupid, pointless cannibal movie. How am I supposed to enjoy all the castrating, dismemberment, disembowelment, and scalping when stuff like that is going on?

© 2011 MonsterHunter

John Saxon, the serious-looking dude from Enter The Dragon, plays Norman, 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 young skanky neighbor girl.

As messed up as Norman is, he isn’t locked up in a mental hospital like the two guys that were in the tiger cage. But what exactly happened in that cage that caused everyone so many problems?

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!

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.

After Charlie bites a lady while out on his pass, he flees with a biker gang in hot pursuit! 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.

The police arrive and Captain McCoy 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 talk Charlie down.

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 and she called Norman at home because she thought it might be him! Thanks for your support, honey!

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 how they used to handle tear gas back in the day. “Piss on it!” So Charlie did and it worked!

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 he 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 and spend the remainder of the film engaging in all sorts of gorgeously gory mayhem!

The DVD’s extras includes a great interview with Saxon who bemoans how he got tricked into doing this movie (he didn’t realize it was a gory cannibal movie until halfway through), but that director Antonio Margheriti was a nice guy and he had two mortgages to pay.

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!”).

Margheriti (Ark Of The Sun God, Jungle Raiders) 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.

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. The rest is all Italian goodness though and should not be missed by any horror fan.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Ruggero’s movie somehow manages to actually be worse because he tries to cloak all his gory shenanigans as some type of commentary on the modern world and the primitive world. (At the end of the film, one of the guys wonders who the “real” cannibals were: the film crew that abused the natives or the natives that abused the film crew. Uh, how about the morons that made this and pretended that all their animal killing was some type of commentary on the state of the modern journalism?)

Most will be disgusted by Cannibal Holocaust and a deranged few will be entertained as there is a catalog of nastiness the likes of which haven’t been seen since the last Italian cannibal movie. There’s animal killings, rape, abortion, and worst of all, way too much male nudity!

Like I wasn’t sickened enough seeing this poor tortoise laid out on its back and having its head whacked off and then having to watch as they tear its shell off and play around in its innards, I also had to watch some guys standing around with their tallywhackers hanging out!

The set up for the story is that some guy from New York is sent off to the Amazon to try and find out what happened to a documentary crew that disappeared into what several people call The Green Inferno.

The movie is structured somewhat oddly with the first half of things following this guy trying to find out what happened to the first film crew and the second half concentrating on checking out the footage recovered in the Amazon from the first crew.

Forty-five minutes are spent watching this guy run around with his guide and their sidekick as they try and make friends with various tribes in an effort to figure out what became of the film crew.

The guide is one of those gruff, grubby types that swears a whole lot and is able to recognize the remains of one of his badly decomposed buddies by looking at his teeth.

Our professor, who is supposed to be looking for that film crew, does stuff like throw up when he sees something gross happen and decides to get naked in an effort to gain the trust of one of the local tribes. Somehow or other the tribe wasn’t intimidated by his undersized member and he ends up being guided to the elusive tribe called the Tree People.

They all live in some type of tree house that you might expect to see in Swiss Family Robinson, but unlike the Robinsons, they offer our naked hero some chunks of cooked humans. (I wonder if that was as tasty as the gruel that was puked up by the native women that he also had to eat?)

He manages to trade these natives his gun and tape recorder for the canisters of film that remain from the first group of people. He takes the film back to New York where these TV types want him to host a documentary about the film. He’s a little leery of doing it since he hasn’t seen all the footage, so the projector is fired up and the remainder of the movie consists of watching the footage purportedly shot by that film crew.

The film crew is made up of three scuzzy guys and one skanky broad. Subtlety is clearly not one of Deodato’s fortes as he instantly paints these people as the spotlight craving slugs all TV people clearly are as they constantly babble about how famous this trip is going to make them.

The stupid part of all this is that they aren’t even portrayed as driven professionals willing to do whatever it takes to succeed. Instead, they act more like rowdy frat boys let loose with daddy’s movie camera, more interested in documenting the shower of their female crew member than anything else.

These characters behave so outlandishly that any point Deodatao was trying to make about the “cannibalistic” nature of the media is lost amidst the pointless raping and killing that these goons carry out in the jungle. By the time the natives get their revenge, you don’t really care beyond the fact that it means the movie will be ending soon.

The natives rape, castrate, decapitate and do what ever else they do to kill time in the jungle to the film crew and when it finally ends, the film is so shocking that the TV people order it burned – some things are even too much for the human refuse that are TV executives!

There’s a pointless bit of text before the credits roll about how the projectionist stole the footage and sold it. I guess that’s supposed to give it that “real” feeling, though watching the credits roll and seeing the name “Lamberto Bava” among the crew should dispel that notion in a nanosecond.

The remastered DVD from EC Entertainment does look very nice, giving you a much better picture than you would expect from backwash like this. They also have some interviews with Deodato, including an embarrassingly inept one conducted by his son. This is where you get your biggest laughs as Deodato refers to himself as a “craftsman” and laments that he would like to do a sequel if only he find a story as unique and special as the one in this film.

On the plus side, he does explain how he achieved that effect where the woman was impaled on a pole (it involved a bicycle seat and some balsa wood). Unfortunately he never does explain how he achieved the effect where he pretended to make a movie about anything beyond inflicting meaningless violence on forms of life obviously higher than himself.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Regular viewers of such Amazon atrocities as Cannibal Ferox, Cannibal Holocaust, and Eaten Alive will likely view this film as a rather tame entry in the genre and I actually found myself wondering why it was so wimpy. (Only one brief scene of a guy having his stomach ripped open? What is this? A savage-infested jungle hell or a Sunday School?)

At the local hotel, we meet a doctor and his daughter. The doctor is an expert in dinosaur stuff and his daughter is an expert in bra-less jungle adventuring. She also manages to squeeze in a shower scene before departing for the savage land, but that’s pretty much the extent of her character development.

The doctor wants to visit good old Dinosaur Valley, but it’s pretty cursed and is off-limits so it doesn’t take him long to convince an unsavory French pilot to make a stopover at Dinosaur Valley so that he can poke around some rocks.

The star of our movie is a bonehunter named Kevin and he’s literally just off the banana truck and laughably attempting to channel a little Indiana Jones with his outfit and humorous responses to difficult situations.

Also along for the ride is a Vietnam vet and his ex-wife. And just to make sure we have all the conventions of the genre covered, a photographer and two of his fashion models come along for the ride as well. Until I started watching these movies, I never would have guessed that the headhunter population of the Amazon was equaled only by the supermodel population.

Once everyone is loaded into the plane, it hits a little turbulence over Dinosaur Valley and crashes in an area inhabited by a bunch of Indians that eat people.

The Vietnam Vet assumes command and the group encounters the usual jungle related problems such as leeches and piranha attacks. After the photographer gets his leg shredded by some piranhas to the point where his ankle is just a bunch of bone with a little bit of hanging skin, Vietnam Guy stabs him to death with his machete.

Kevin takes exception to this even though it was clear that the photographer was just going to slow everyone down and whine about how he didn’t have a leg anymore. Kevin and Vietnam Guy have a big fight that eventually results in Kevin (or at least a dummy sort of dressed up like him) going over some pretty rough falls.

The doctor’s daughter and remaining model are taken prisoner by the cannibals following the demise of the others. Since this is Dinosaur Valley, it only makes sense that the captives would be all dressed up like natives in order to be sacrificed by the guy wearing the triceratops mask and armed with the triceratops claw.

And since Kevin is played by Michael Sopkiw of 2019: After The Fall Of New York fame, it also only makes sense that a bumpy ride over some rocks wouldn’t stop him from showing up and shooting everyone in sight with his shotgun. Thank goodness he managed to hold on to it while he was bouncing off all those rocks in the waterfall!

Once their escape is completed, the savage cannibal portion of the film is over even though there is still about twenty-five minutes to go. Next on their jungle tour is a layover at the local slaver who runs some sort of mine full of precious stones.

He’s a lard ass who has a bunch of locals in chains and makes them mine the gems and he decides that Kevin’s girlfriend would make a nicer girlfriend for his lesbian associate. (That must have been thrown in there to appeal to the “women in prison” crowd.)

The movie wraps things up with Kevin’s escape from his pig pen prison, his revenge on lard ass, his freeing the slaves, him blowing up all the bad guys, and his hijacking of the helicopter. Somehow, when you list it all out like that, it doesn’t sound as routine and low budget as it actually was.

Massacre in Dinosaur Valley won’t please the hardcore crowd very much since it minimizes the cannibal action. For those though who don’t need another movie that dwells of the finer points of guys getting their nads whacked off and their brains scooped out, things move along at a fair enough pace so that you aren’t pounded into numbed boredom by all the depravity these movies usually serve up. An Italian jungle film with training wheels.

© 2010 MonsterHunter