Rating: 1.5/5
Hooptober 4.0 | 25/31 | people eating people (non-zombie) 1/3
Mario and Roberto are two dipshit thieves. After botching yet another job, they meet up with Lina. Lina saw a little girl, Flaurence, whose parents are wealthy car manufacturers. They concoct a plan to kidnap her for ransom money.
Mousier Danville gets the call and races to get her, but he accidentally hits a pedestrian with his car right in front of the cops. The cops arrest Danville.
The crooks call their boss, Pepe, who instructs them to hide out with Antonio in the jungle until things cool off. A woman named Mickey helps them cross the border, but when the car’s radiator overheats, she leaves them behind to get water
The palest white dudes I’ve ever seen, dressed in face paint, wigs, and loincloths, hide in the tall grass. Mickey shoots at them, but they capture her. The others hear the gunshot and drive off without her. The “tribe” cuts open Mickey, digs out her insides and goes nuts.
This film is the rare (at the time) French cannibal flick, coming at the tail end of a slew of Italian cannibal movies. It also shares some footage/characters with Mondo Cannibale, a film directed by this film’s co-writer, Jess Franco.
The movie altogether is pretty inept. It has decent pacing until we get to Antonio’s. We don’t care if the cannibals get the thieves. But we get some stakes with a little girl in their company.
The gore and viscera are grotesque — they’re ripping apart some animal, and the white tribespeople put animal parts in their mouths and gnaw.
The Severin remaster is top-notch, perhaps to the film’s detriment — some grain and film scratches might hide the seams a bit better.
Overall, the film does as little as possible to check off the genre troupes. The only reason this movie received any attention (and why I’m watching it) is because it was on the UK Video Nasties list.
** Stray Thoughts / Spoilers **
- The dubbing is so funny — I assume it’s the script more than the performances, but they go so big, especially whoever dubbed Mario and Roberto.
- Lost for things to do, we cut between Lina trying to fuck a guitarist and Mario raping Antonio’s wife, Manuela, for no fucking reason.
- There’s a scene where everyone dances to some cheap psych rock, and Manuela sings La Cucaracha arhythmically over it.
- When the Danville’s drive to get their girl, they drive through the cannibal village set.
- “What’s that over there?! Oh, it’s just a bird.”
- Oh no, blackface — that feels like footage from the Jess Franco movie because we never see that guy again, and everyone else is as white as the driven snow
- How do you have a parrot in half of your movie, and it doesn’t say anything??
- The cannibals are vigilantes?