When ethnologist Henry Stevenson disappears during an expedition into the jungles of New Guinea, his wife Susan (Ursula Andress) and her brother Arthur (Antonio Marsina) enlist the help of Professor Edward Foster (Stacy Keach), a colleague of Henry's, to mount a search. Accompanied by a group of porters, who are dark-skinned and therefore expendable (the only reason these guys are in the film is so there'll be someone to get killed off along the way -- just once I'd like to see one of the white guys die first), they make their way toward Ra Ra Me, a mountain that is sacred to the cannibalistic Puka tribe that inhabits the region and Professor Foster's best guess as to Henry's destination. On their way, they meet up with adventurer Manolo (Claudio Cassinelli), who joins them. After run-ins with Puka decimate the party's ethnic heterogeneity, we learn that some of the group's members have been less than honest about their motives.
This is a solid adventure film in addition to being decent exploitation fare. It has a higher budget than most films of the cannibal genre and boasts beautiful cinematography, a solid score by Guido and Maurizio De Angelis, and a script that isn't completely ridiculous. Still, it recognizes that if it's going to have the word "cannibal" in the title it'd better deliver on the gore, nudity, and barbarism that junglesploitation aficionados have come to expect, so it tosses in an all-out cannibal-style sex party replete with human intestine ingestion, a guy fucking a Range Rover-sized hog in one of the more explicit bestiality scenes my thoroughly desensitized eyes and brain have witnessed in a mainstream movie, a native woman pleasuring herself (complete with a close-up of her doing a little vaginal spelunking with one finger), a guy getting his wee wee chopped off, people biting into live snakes, and, of course, Ursula Undressed.
"I don't kill animals," says Manolo at one point in the film. Unfortunately, he's the only one associated with this film (or, for that matter, with any film of the genre) who possesses that particular scruple. There's plenty of animal abuse in this one, though it's fortunately less gratuitous (I have less of a problem with nature documentary-type footage of animals killing each other, and if the violence is inflicted on animals by humans, I'd prefer that the humans at least eat what they kill) than that found in Lenzi's and Deodato's films. Alternate titles include Slave of the Cannibal God, Prisoner of the Cannibal God, and Primitive Desires.
No comments:
Post a Comment