Lousy Lottery 27: Get a Belly Full of Cannibal Ferox!
Welcome, friends, to the Lousy Lottery! Here’s how it works. First, I post four movies to a poll on Twitter. Fans vote to pick which movie to make me watch that week. I watch it, review it and spread the word about an amazingly awful, terribly terrific b-horror flick.
This is week 26! This week we take a jaunt into the jungle with, 1981’s infamous Cannibal Ferox! But first, let’s talk plot.
We open with a wide shot of New York landmarks. I swear, every Italian horror movie from this era uses the same opening establishing shots of NYC. It’s like someone shot a bunch of b-roll and Italian studios just kept using different parts of it like a community grab bag. Anywho, to show you, the viewer, that the filmmakers definitely weren’t filming in Italy, we open on New York. A bunch of random shit happens, including a murder, and suddenly we’re on a river in Columbia. It seems a famous anthropologist believes cannibals don’t exist and never did. Meanwhile, another anthropologist believes they still do. To the Cannibalmobile!
Almost immediately, they run into a couple of wounded drug dealers. They explain that they were attacked by a tribe of cannibals and can show the scientists where the tribe is. Holy shit, that was easy! The dealers offer to take the group there and they find a nearly deserted village and the bodies of the tribe members the dealers killed to escape. So, the group decides to stay the night. Do they play it safe and are super respectful of the tribe members whose place they’re crashing in? Hahaha, hell no. The group gets super high on cocaine, one of them fucks one of the girls from the tribe and then tries to get one of the other members of the group to kill the girl. Good times. Then, Mike, one of the group, tortures and kills their guide right in front of the tribe and tries to kidnap the young girl he’d fucked. It was then that the tribe had had enough. I mean, look, can you blame them?
One can only take so much of their crew getting raped and murdered before one simply must take a stand. Despite the utter shittiness of the white folks in this movie, it seems we’re supposed to root for them once the tribe does, in fact, turn out to be cannibals. Unfortunately this is not a native version of John Wick and, indeed, the white folks become the sort of ‘final girl’ of this film. At one point one of the group befriends one of the cannibals and he helps her to escape. Mike too was escaping and decides he’s a lone wolf, so he pushes the nearly escaped woman into a pit in the middle of the village and makes a run for it. The tribe learns of the two near escapes and they both dead. Mike gets his head put into a vice and the tribe feasts live on his brain. Honestly, this kill is platinum-level. The practical effects are truly fantastic here.
The woman escapee gets hoisted by her tits with hooks and left to die. Yowza! The tribe then starts taking out the rest of the group. While all this killing goes down, one of them actually does escape. Does she run for help? Does she stop at nothing to make sure her friends and colleagues are saved? Nah, baby, you forget these people are utter garbage. No, instead, she, being the one who argued cannibals were a myth, decides to tell people the rest of her party was attacked by crocs and killed. Back in NYC, she uses the trip to bolster her claims that cannibals don’t exist. This fucking lady, am I right?
It seems horror loves fads. Whether it’s slashers or found footage or something else, we love to feed the momentum of horror fads. Well, in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the hot thing was cannibal and jungle movies. It seemed like every other movie, especially giallo’s coming out of Italy, were cannibal movies. They were almost always hinged on thinly veiled racist plots about white folks who become victims of scary brown skinned people who are clearly just evil by nature. It’s clear in these movies that the viewer too is supposed to think these people of color are either gross, crazy, dangerous or, more often than not, a combo of all three. It is one of two big reasons why I never find these movies even remotely scary and why I roll my eyes frequently and often while viewing.
That, as I mention, is one of the reasons. The other reason is the needless animal cruelty. It’s clear, again, the filmmakers just assume the viewer will be scared and shocked seeing animals be actually, for real, killed on screen. It’s lazy and boring. It shows the filmmaker is hoping the viewer brings assumptions and expectations into the film that the mere presence of certain things on screen will shock and scare them. In other words, there’s no thought into developing the characters or the plots, it’s just ‘let’s toss this tribesman on there with a bone in his nose and everyone’s gonna freak!’ Same goes for the animal cruelty.
Like many of us horror fans, I’m not easily shocked. I also grew up in a very dangerous place and the son of a mortician. You won’t find me clutching my pearls and gasping at just about anything, ever. So, when I see a random, totally unnecessary killing of a monkey or a pig or a possum or any number of other animals that’re killed on screen like they are in this movie, I’m not shocked, I’m annoyed. It doesn’t scare me even slightly and it completely takes me out of the magic of the movie. The idea that some poor pig had to die so a shitty movie can shock some suburbanite from Des Moines just pisses me off.
Ok, well, soapboxing, here’s the rub. We now live in the age of the internet. If you want to watch animals die, it’s just a few characters and a click away. This movie, however, did not come out now, but in the days of the early ‘80s when all media was tightly controlled and came to you in one of only four ways, none of which were going to show real animal deaths. So, hey, maybe something like this truly was shocking to some Des Moines suburbanite seeing the movie in some gritty grindhouse theatre. Just like how that person couldn’t see the movie through my eyes, I can’t see them through his/hers. All I can do is watch it from a modern perspective and from that perspective, it’s shit.
Then again, I’m not a giallo guy. If you’re into giallo and into movies from this cannibalism boom, it might be your thing. For me, it just vacillated between frustrating and boring. If you feel like taking a trip into the depths of a Columbian jungle to face your fears, Cannibal Ferox is streaming on Shudder, Tubi and The Roku Channel.
Also, don’t forget to see what’s coming next in the Lousy Lottery. Make sure you tune into Twitter later today and vote for Lousy Lottery 27! My handle is @MrJosh79, look for it and don’t forget to vote!
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