When I originally started this blog, I set myself a couple of guidelines. One of them was that I wasn't going to review any cannibal movies for it, primarily because of the real animal cruelty that went on in the making of most of them. But as time went on I started thinking about this. After all, there were plenty of cannibal movies that were made relatively recently and had no animal cruelty in them at all. Some of them were even good! And there was even the occasional movie made during the height of the Italian cannibal movie craze that managed to avoid killing animals as well. Which is how we've ended up here, with a review of Antonio Margheriti's Cannibal Apocalypse.
Vietnam veteran Norman Hopper (John Saxon, better known in horror as being Nancy Thompson's father and previously seen on this blog in Tenebre) is still haunted by his time in 'Nam, particularly the time when he found two American POWs in a pit eating human flesh and one of them bit him. Back home, the two POWs are in a mental hospital recovering from their trauma, Hopper having been declared "cured" several months previously. He's obviously not, however, as he has nightmares of the incident in 'Nam and when his quite obviously underage neighbour comes round and starts flirting with him, he lifts up her jumper and appears to bite her stomach. Meanwhile one of the other vets, Bukowski (played by Italian genre stalwart Giovanni Lombardo Radice, previously seen here in The House on the Edge of the Park and Stagefright) , goes into town on a day pass and gets into trouble when he decides to try eating an audience member instead of the popcorn at the cinema. In the ensuing carnage he shoots dead a biker and a security guard before Hopper turns up to talk himself into giving himself up. The army buddies have a plan, however, and coupled with the realisation by the authorities that anyone bitten by one of the cannibals becomes a cannibal themselves, things get rather gory quite quickly.
Poor John Saxon. The story goes that he didn't realise what kind of film he had signed up for when he took the lead role for Cannibal Apocalypse, and that by the time he found out the truth it was too late to back out. The moment of revelation for him? When he discovered that a scene required him to be eating a fallen soldier's testicles, by all accounts (he managed to get himself removed from that scene at least). As it is, Saxon says that he has never watched the finished film, which I think is something of a shame as he does provide a quite sympathetic performance as Norman Hopper; a man aware of his own rapidly diminishing mental stability but still determined not to let it overwhelm him and hurt the one(s) he cares for.
There is still the issue of his scene with Mary, the teenage neighbour he bites in what it quite clearly a sexual manner, however. Mary's age is never stated, but the film portrays her as being of high school age or thereabouts. So her scene with Hopper where he lifts up her jumper to reveal her underwear and then apparently goes down on her is especially awkward and a little bit disturbing to watch - although at least the actress playing her was around 20 at the time. The whole scene is very much at odds with the rest of Hopper's character and actions through the rest of the film, and feels as though it was only put there to set up the ending stinger.
There's an obvious attempt by the director to make a film that's both a commentary on the Vietnam war and the problems its veterans brought home with them, as well as an attempt to make a cannibal film that's not your typical cannibal film for the time period. Certainly the setting alone makes it stand out, as most other Italian cannibal films were set in the jungle, far from modern society. The way that people are "infected" with cannibalism like a zombie virus also makes it stand out, as well as leading to the film's stand-out moment of unintentional hilarity - a detective hears gunshots and runs into the dispatch room, only to find an infected cop feasting on the freshly-severed breast of a female cop. Almost deadpan, the detective pleads, "Oh, my God! Put that down, son!"
Cannibal Holocaust got itself on the UK's "video nasties" list in the early 1980s, most likely because it contained the word "cannibal" in its title and the BBFC tended to freak out particularly hard about films featuring that subject. The fact that Giovanni Lombardo Radice suffers one of his imfamously gory cinematic deaths - he gets a hole blown through his abdomen large enough to film through - probably didn't help matters though. It remained banned for longer than some of the other titles because it was also one of the 39 films that the DDP successfully prosecuted for obscenity. It was finally released in the UK on 2005 uncut except for 2 seconds which breached the Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act 1937 (a rat had burning napalm splashed on it).
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