Vile, offensive, and shocking, the Italian cannibal boom of the 70s and 80s grew from ground tilled by the Mondo film–documentary features purported to show real violence and strange rituals from cultures around the world. The cannibal film took this desire to see “real” violence and applied it to a narrative structure, resulting in a subgenre more reviled than any other with grand Guignol-style simulated gore and actual animal violence.
Exploitative and morally troublesome (many, if not most of the “cannibals” are played by actual tribes from the regions in which they were filmed) these films are still masterpieces of style and guerilla filmmaking, and often at least make some attempt at social commentary, criticizing the lily-hued interlopers who meet their gruesome ends. Adore them or detest them, the Italian cannibal subgenre is one of the most extreme and interesting pockets of film history. Below are ten features worth checking out, if you have the stomach for it!
10. The Green Inferno (2013)
Worth watching if for no other reason than to prove just how talented the rest of the filmmakers on this list were, Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno was a lame-brained attempt to replicate the shock and grandeur of the Italian cannibal films of old.
9. Man From Deep River (1972)
The flick that started it all! Genre icon Ivan Rassimov stars as John Bradley, a photographer on location in the wilds of Southeast Asia who finds himself captured by a local tribe. Eventually ingratiating himself into the gentle society by participating in various rituals, Bradley falls for the daughter of the chief (Me Me Lai, who would become synonymous with the genre before leaving acting to become a policewoman) and helps defend the tribe against an encroaching cannibal threat.
Extremely tame compared to the rest of the films on this list, Umberto Lenzi’s Man From Deep River is more of a travelogue in the Mondo vein than a horror movie, but its more extreme elements (nudity, animal violence, flesh-eating) were like chum to international and grindhouse audiences, inadvertently giving birth to one of the most reviled subgenres in film history.
8. Cut and Run (1985)
Ruggero Deodato’s final brush with the cannibal film downplays the flesh-eating for 80s style action, but it’s still a worthwhile entry in the genre.
Based on an unfilmed screenplay by master of horror Wes Craven, the movie stars Lisa Blount as a reporter who finds herself caught in the crossfires between a drug cartel and horde of cannibals headed by none other than Michael Berryman (The Hills Have Eyes). A transitional film for Deodato made in the waning days of the subgenre, Cut and Run is an entertaining outlier in the Italian cannibal canon.
7. Doctor Butcher, M.D. (1980)
Though even the hammiest of the cannibal films can provoke squirms with their violence and general unpleasantness, Doctor Butcher, M.D. is more laughable than icky.
A so-bad-its-bad mashup of cannibal carnage and zombie mayhem (the other Italian horror staple of the 80s), Marino Girolami brings some much needed (though probably unintended) levity to this list with a hilariously hokey tale of a mad doctor and his zombie horde. Lacking the soul-killing anguish and darkness of so much of the genre, Doctor Butcher, M.D. is a camptastic blast.
6. Emanuelle and The Last Cannibals (1977)
Italian genre directors of the 1980s were infamous for making knock-offs, but none are more notorious than Joe D’Amato, a filmmaker willing to do anything to make a buck. While Deodato and Lenzi each have a couple of genuine masterpieces under their belts, D’Amato’s filmography is made up purely of knock-offs and cash-ins, and his most famous of these is likely his work on the “Black Emanuelle” series.
Created to scavenge the box-office generated by France’s famous Emanuelle films, the “Black Emanuelle” sexploitation movies star Indonesian-Dutch actress Laura Gemser as a globe-trotting journalist who gets up to all sorts of sexy shenanigans. Though some of the films are more straight-forward sex romps, these films were malleable to the common tastes of the day, which is how this mash-up came to be. When cannibalistic attacks at a New York hospital catch the attention of Emanuelle, she flies down to South American to investigate. With plenty of soft-core sex and more-gruesome-than-expected cannibal action, Emanuelle and The Last Cannibals is one of the oddest entries in the subgenre.
5. Mountain of The Cannibal God (1978)
An Italian cannibal offering from Sergio Martino (arguably the best filmmaker on this list), Mountain of The Cannibal God hews a bit more closely to the jungle adventure mold than most of these films.
Starring Swedish beauty Ursula Andress and Stacy Keach in a hunt to locate a disappeared scientist, Martino avoids cannibal violence until the last possible moment, and when it comes, it comes hard and fast. A lighter entry in the genre with a bit more focus on character and plot-twists, Mountain of The Cannibal God is a good introduction to these types of films for those unsure they can handle them.
4. Eaten Alive! (1980)
A far more cartoonish take on the cannibal film with zero pretense of social commentary or art, Eaten Alive! sees a Jonestown-like cult harried by flesh-eating invaders. Umberto Lenzi re-unites Ivan Rassimov and Me Me Lai of Man From Deep River for this wildly exploitative jungle shocker.
Not nearly as soul-killing or unpleasant as the most famous films on this list, Eaten Alive! is the least well known of Lenzi’s contributions to the genre, but it’s also his most entertaining.
3. Cannibal Ferox (1981)
Umberto Lenzi’s return to the genre after it was “perfected” by Ruggero Deodato is something of a precursor to the torture porn of the 2000s. Starring Lorraine De Selle as a student hell-bent on disproving the existence of cannibalistic tribes, she makes a journey to South America with friends in tow, where the expected happens.
Whereas Cannibal Holocaust (the film Lenzi is riffing on here) somewhat justified its brutality by casting it as a commentary on the cruelty and callousness of “civilized” man, Ferox has no moral message. Content with submitting terrible people to one nasty setpiece after another, Lenzi made one of the most purely exploitative movies of the entire cannibal boom with few redeeming qualities other than its consistently inventive cavalcade of tortures. Its alternate title, Make Them Die Slowly was more apropos.
2. Cannibal Holocaust (1980)
The most infamous film on this list and a proving ground known even to horror fans who are unaware of the Italian cannibal subgenre, Ruggero Deodato’s masterpiece, Cannibal Holocaust was so shocking in its day that the director was ordered to produce his actors in court to prove that they hadn’t actually been murdered on camera.
Made up of “found footage” (likely the first film to use this conceit) of a documentary crew who finds themselves at the business end of a cannibal tribe’s spears, Cannibal Holocaust remains the purest distillation of what the boom was about–exposing the white man as the cruelest savage of all.
1. Last Cannibal World (1977)
The secret best Italian cannibal offering, Umberto Lenzi was meant to direct Last Cannibal World as a follow-up to Man from Deep River, but the task ultimately fell to Ruggero Deodato, whose Cannibal Holocaust would emerge as the subgenre’s gold-standard and a major innovation for the horror genre. Last Cannibal World, however, is a decidedly more reigned-in affair, taking a simple plot (Massimo Foschi and Ivan Rassimov get stranded in the jungle) and using it to comment on the nature of mankind itself.
Largely wordless for much of its runtime, with its leading man stripped naked and wandering with the always sensational Me Me Lai, Deodato crafts a visually stunning descent into barbarism in the tradition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Not an easy watch by any means (the animal violence is second only to Deodato’s own Holocaust) Last Cannibal World feels as if it outstrips its exploitative cinematic brethren to become something far more interesting, defensible, and perhaps even profound.
