Time for another video nasty, and this time it's one of the more infamous ones. Anthropophagus (also known as The Grim Reaper, Anthropophagus The Beast, Anthopophagus (for the OCD spelling crowd), The Savage Island and Zombie 7: Grim Reaper among others, just to confuse anyone trying to catalogue the film) has the dubious honour of having a scene featured on none other than BBC News in the 1980s, where it was described as an actual "snuff film" (it's not, and furthermore, there's no zombies in it either).
After we open by briefly following a German couple and their dog going for a relaxing time on the beach before they are murdered by an unseen person (don't worry, the dog runs off the moment the Zorba the Greek music is replaced by something more sinister), we meet our main characters for the movie; a group of friends heading out for a holiday on a boat where they'll be visiting several Greek islands. They are joined on this trip by Julie, a young woman also heading out to one of the islands to spend time with a couple and their blind daughter, who manages to hitch a ride with them on their boat.
When they get to the island however, they find it almost deserted aside from a woman whose response to the group's arrival in her home is to promptly hang herself, and the blind girl Julie was to be looking after. It turns out that everyone else on the island has been killed and/or eaten by a man who was driven mad after being shipwrecked and being forced to kill and eat his wife and son to survive, after which he decided that cannibalism was the only way to go. He also developed the worst case of psoriasis you'll ever see. The rapidly dwindling survivors then have to fight off the deranged cannibal before he manages to eat all of them too...
The scene that got Anthropophagus on the BBC evening news - as well as almost certainly on the video nasties list - comes around three-quarters of the way through the film, where the cannibal strangles a heavily pregnant woman to death before reaching inside her and pulling out her foetus (actually a skinned rabbit) and taking a big bite of it while the woman's dying husband watches. There are other scenes of gore throughout the film, of varying degrees of quality, but this is almost certainly the scene that caused the DDP to take notice. Well, that and the scene where the dying cannibal attempts to eat his own disemboweled intestines (I'd mark that as a spoiler, but the image is on the box art, for pity's sake).
Unfortunately, if you were to take out the gore scenes that brought the movie to everyone's attention, Anthropophagus is actually a pretty lackluster film that would probably have faded into obscurity if it hadn't been for the DDP list. There are long stretches of film in which very little happens apart from cast members wandering aimlessly around the island or dark houses so that we can have fake jump scares thrown at us (at one point a kitten is literally dropped onto some piano keys in the hopes of giving the audience a cheap scare). When that's not happening, we get shots that feel like they would be more at home in a Greek tourism film. Oh, and there's plenty of day-for-night shots as well, and a shot at the beginning that practically wears a sign saying, "We're ripping off Jaws!". It's generally a pretty low-budget, heavily-padded affair.
And yet... there's the occasional scene that shows surprising depth and talent - the key moment for me is the scene where one character, finding that her tarot cards no longer want to tell her the future and believing that means they are all doomed, sits on the boat and idly tosses the cards into the water several at a time; the camera focussing on the cards as they float away in the sea. It's a deep and even haunting scene that seems somewhat at odds with the generic stalk-and-slash/chomp of the rest of the film.
Anthropophagus was directed by one Joe D'Amato, the notorious pseudonym of Aristide Massaccesi, and written by both him and the film's cannibal star George Eastman (real name Luigi Montefiori). D'Amato is well-known for his prolific catalogue of exploitation, horror and porn, including a large chunk of the Emmanuelle movies, and in the same year that Anthropophagus was made, he and Eastman made the infamous Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (yes, that's hardcore zombie porn). The next year, the two of them worked together on another movie, Porno Holocaust (and I'm sure you don't need to me to tell you what that film was about). I'm adding all this because, apart from the parts I've already mentioned, there's not really much else to say about Anthropophagus, unless you want to address the question of just why our cannibal killer had come down with such a bad skin condition. Was it sunburn? Leprosy? Was he turning into a wendigo? Sadly, I suspect we'll never know.
Comments