Exposé (also released as House on Straw Hill to link it to Straw Dogs and Trauma)is a 1975 (released March 1976 by Target International Pictures) British horror/thriller starring Udo Kier, Linda Hayden and 1970s sex symbol Fiona Richmond. It sparked controversy due to graphic scenes of sex and violence and was heavily censored by the BBFC. In the 1980′s it featured on the DPP’s list of original banned ‘video nasties’. It was re-released in the UK  in 2006, with around thirty cuts.

A relatively rare example of a film where both the original and alternative titles are equally strong, Exposé is the only British film to have been banned and branded a video nasty; the commonly mistaken Xtro never actually made the list. Udo Kier (Blood For Dracula/Flesh For Frankenstein etc) plays Paul Martin, a tortured novelist struggling with that ‘difficult’ second novel.

He escapes to the country and hires a secretary, Linda Hindstatt (Linda Hayden from The Blood on Satan’s Claw) to do his typing for him (it was 1975). Linda makes herself useful around the house, in the rare moments she isn’t masturbating and then on her first excursion out of the house (to masturbate) is raped by local youths played by Karl Howman from British sit-com Brush Strokes and legendary stuntman, Vic Armstrong. Having shot them, the tension is ramped up even more when Martin’s girlfriend, Suzanne, played by the famous British muckpot, Fiona Richmond, arrives and the sex and violence go into overdrive.

Anything with Udo Kier is worth a watch, however bad, and it’s a great shame he appears here dubbed within an inch of his life; he is, however, as enigmatic as ever. Linda Hayden looks stunning, though has since admitted she regrets making the film – it’s certainly ‘full-on’ in terms of the sex and violence but it’s difficult to imagine this was added at the editing stage, appearing, as she does, throughout.

Considering the vast amounts of sex and nudity, the story is still extremely engrossing, part Straw Dogs, part High Tension but still with a dash of black humour; the youths are named Smedley and Aston (the producer was Brian Smedley-Aston) and Howman sports a ‘I am a Vampyre’ T-shirt, a playful nod to Smedley-Aston’s Vampyres, Despite the credits ‘introducing’ Richmond, her acting masterclass did not lead to breakout mainstream fare but her sex scenes are plentiful, a treat if you can ignore her fluorescent orangeness. Naturally, the role did her top-shelf career no harm at all.

Cuts were required to the British version to achieve an ‘X’ rating, both the rape of Linda and the bloody demise of Suzanne proving too much for the censors. The book Martin dictates to his secretary ranks alongside Stephen King’s book within a book in Misery as one of the worst ever devised and perhaps everyone can take some solace that it is interrupted by sex and mayhem. The oddly heavy, oppressive atmosphere (possibly simply a by-product of Kier staring and sweating so much) and the lingering shots and pacing add to the tension. The film has had many attempted releases aborted over the years and this is a shame, it certainly, at least, demands a sprucing up. Bafflingly, it was remade by Martin Kemp in 2010 as Stalker and stars… Linda Hayden, clearly hating it so much, she tried twice, just to make sure.

Daz Lawrence and David Flint

The film elements for this sleazy 70s gem were long thought lost or destroyed but in 2013 the original camera negative was unearthed in a barn in rural England and painstakingly restored for its first official uncut release anywhere in the world by Severin Films on 11th June 2013. Director commentary and cast and crew interviews round out the package.

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Eaten Alive (known under various alternate titles, including Death Trap, Legend of the Bayou, Horror Hotel, Slaughter Hotel and Starlight Slaughter) is a 1976 American horror film, directed by Tobe Hooper, released in May 1977. It was his follow up to The Texas Chain Saw Masscare. It was written by Kim Henkel (Butcher Boys), Alvin L. Fast and Mardi Rustam. The film stars Neville Brand, Roberta Collins, Robert Englund (future Freddy Krueger), William Finley, Marilyn Burns, Janus Blythe and Kyle Richards.

A psychotic redneck who owns a dilapidated hotel in rural East Texas kills various people who upset him or his business, and he feeds their bodies to a large crocodile that he keeps as a pet in the swamp beside his hotel…

Loosely based on the story of Joe Ball (also known as the Bluebeard from South Texas or the Alligator Man) from Elmendorf, Texas, sometime after Prohibition ended. He owned a bar with an alligator pit serving as an entertainment attraction. Several murders of women ensued, but it was never proven that the flesh found in the pit was human. However, Joe did commit suicide upon possibility of capture.

According to make-up artist Craig Reardon, cinematographer Robert Caramico directed several scenes due to creative differences between Tobe Hooper and the films’ producers. The numerous title changes and differing versions of the film are explained by Death Trap‘s box office failure and the fruitless search for a winning formula.

Death Trap – as it was known in the UK — was one of the so-called video nasties during the early 1980s, although it was never successfully prosecuted for obscenity.

Buy Eaten Alive on Dark Sky Films 2-disc Special Edition DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

‘While it isn’t particularly frightening it does have a few disturbing moments and a completely sleazy atmosphere from start to finish makes it eerie enough even when it probably shouldn’t be, given that this is primarily a film about a crazy guy and his pet crocodile.  Neville Brand is pretty manic in his performance, coming close to going over the top in a few spots and bringing a really strange intensity to the role that makes it a little more frightening than one might expect. Though the film never comes close to matching the intensity and sheer balls-to-the-wall terror that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is so well known for it does have a similarly unseemly atmosphere to it that works really well.’ Ian Jane, DVD Talk

“Eaten Alive is the true transition flick, the moment when a potential horror hero began turning into a fright film flop. But it’s not bad, just baffling. Ignore its obvious flaws and you’ll have a sleazy breezy exploitation experience.” Bill Gibron, DVD Verdict

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Posted by Will Holland

Madman (also known as Madman Marz and working title: The Legend Lives) is a 1982 American slasher film directed and written by Joe Giannone. It stars Gaylen Ross (Dawn of the Dead) under the name of Alexis Dubin, plus Tony Fish, Harriet Bass and Paul Ehlers as Madman Marz.

A group of counsellers at a summer camp gather around and one of them tells the story of Madman Marz, a farmer who one night butchered his wife and kids and disappeared into the woods never to be seen again. Rumour has it that if you say Mr Marz’s name out loud, then he will come and get you. So that’s exactly what one bright spark does, and sure enough, the young things soon have an axe-wielding maniac on their hands.

Although passed uncut for UK cinema by the BBFC the VRO pre-cert video was briefly seized by zealous Hampshire police during the 1980′s video nasty scare, although no prosecutions made. It was later released fully uncut on DVD by Anchor Bay in 2002.

Originally Madman was suppose to be based on the Cropsy killer legend, but when word reached the production that the film The Burning was being based on the same legend the script was re-written.

Wikipedia | IMDb

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“Yeah, I know, the ’80s, particularly the early ’80s, were awash with low-budget slashers, but even in this glutted field, Madman stands out as something special, a slasher film with heart. A solidly old-school, above-average entry in an often-maligned genre.” Tom Becker, DVD Verdict

“Story and structure wise, Madman is pretty much a by the books slasher film with the bulk of the time spent with the killer stalking his victims and disposing of them in creative ways. And while some may be turned off by the simplicity of what transpires on screen, the basic premise is strong enough and the kill scenes feature an ample amount of gore are all well executed. Also the film moves along at a brisk enough pace that it never lags.” Michael den Boer, 10k Bullets

Post by Will Holland

The Boogeyman - UK title: The Bogey Man – is a 1980 American supernatural slasher film written, produced and directed by Ulli Lommel. It stars his wife Suzanna Love, Nicholas Love, Ron James and John Carradine. The excellent synth score is by Tim Krog.

In 1982, it was followed by Revenge of the Bogeyman aka Boogeyman II which re-hashed lots of footage from this film. The sheer number of bizarre (often darkly comical) deaths led it to become a ‘Video Nasty’. Lommel later revisited the sequel and released a ‘redux’ director’s version that included even more footage from the 1980 original, plus newly shot scenes of himself talking directly to the camera. In 1994, he also came up with the confused and confusing Return of the Boogeyman which also includes extensive footage from the original. Apparently. Lommel has expressed interest in making a fourth film, tentatively titled Boogeyman 4D. The world can’t wait…

A young girl witnesses her brother murder a man through a reflection in a mirror. Twenty years later the mirror is shattered, freeing his evil spirit, which seeks revenge for his death...

Lommel began his career as an actor in German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films but in recent years he has become notorious for a long line of direct-to-video movies based on the lives of serial killers, most of which have been critically panned.

The film was given a limited release theatrically in the United States by The Jerry Gross Organization beginning in November 1980. It was subsequently released on VHS by Wizard Video.

The Boogeyman was placed on the UK’s DPP list in 1984, probably due to its sleazy opening and inventively gory kill scenes, but was later re-released on the Vipco label in 1992 in a cut form. In 2000, it was finally released uncut.

Wikipedia | IMDb | Slasher Films | Video Nasties

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“Certainly worthy of another look, The Boogeyman is one of those films that may fade into darkness for years at a time, but is never really forgotten. Recommended.” Retro Slashers

“A few unexpected jump scares are moderately amusing, and the triple homicide that really gets the ball rolling is gory, nasty, and inspired. Don’t go into this one expecting any serious scares as there aren’t any to be found, but it’s a fun time killer and an entertaining, if rather dumbed down, product of its time.” Ian Jane, DVD Talk

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Posted by Will Holland

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Cannibal Holocaust is a 1980 Italian cannibal film directed by Ruggero Deodato (House on the Edge of the Park) from a screenplay by Gianfranco Clerici, starring Carl Gabriel Yorke, Robert Kerman, Francesca Ciardi, Perry Pirkanen and Luca Giorgio Barbareschi. Cannibal Holocaust was filmed in the Amazonian rainforest with real indigenous tribes interacting with American and Italian actors and follows on from the director and scriptwriter’s Last Cannibal World (1976).

NB. Before scrolling down further please note that there are images in this posting that reflect the subject matter and content of this film and are therefore not suitable for younger horror fans. If in doubt, please click away now. Thank you.

Led by New York-based anthropologist Harold Monroe (Kerman), a team is assembled to search for a missing film crew who had ventured deep into the Amazonian rainforest to film a documentary about tribes still practising cannibalism. Assisted by local guides, Monroe ventures into the unknown and meets with members of the local Yacumo tribe who it seems were greatly upset by the film-makers whom he is seeking. Later meeting with the warring Yanomamö and Shamatari tribes, he gains the trust of the former by immersing himself in their culture, only to find the best they can do to help him find his friends is show him a pile of bones and some film cans.

After securing the tapes by taking part in a rather unpleasant cannibalistic ceremony, he returns to New York to view the tapes and try to piece together what has happened. We learn that the documentary, titled The Last Road To Hell, though veiled under the pretence of being a thoughtful study of ancient rites and culture, is an appalling catalogue of brutality on the part of the Americans to stage footage for maximum effect back home. As such, we see scenes of rape, amputation, the burning of an entire village and numerous scenes of animal cruelty, all with the intention of gaining an appropriate reaction from the tribes to make their film ever more sensational. The final reels show a sudden turn in events, after gang raping a female member of the tribe, they later find her ritually impaled as a punishment for ‘her’ crimes. However, she isn’t the only one to face trial, the cannibals seeking to avenge her fate by hunting down the film crew in merciless fashion. As the final reel finishes, Monroe wonders aloud, just “who the real cannibals are”?

Though, quite rightly, hailed as the benchmark and indeed the last word on the cannibal sub-genre, Cannibal Holocaust was far from the first venture into jungle brutality. The Richard Harris-starring A Man Called Horse (1970) had appeared a decade earlier and, even as a mainstream feature, alerted directors to the potential for shocking but fact-based films as serious money-makers, though earlier explorations in the pseudo-documentary field, classed as ‘mondo films’, beginning with Franco Prosperi and Gualtiero Jacopetti’s 1962 film Mondo Cane (A Dog’s World), had seen many film-makers cutting their teeth using sometimes outrageously exploitative footage.

It wasn’t until Umberto Lenzi’s 1972 film Man from Deep River, that the genre took off, with Italy firmly leading the way. Deodato’s own (excellent) Last Cannibal World (aka Ultimo Mondo Cannibale/Jungle Holocaust) appeared in 1976 to exceptional box-office results. Sergio Martino’s The Mountain of the Cannibal God even featured ex-James Bond bombshell Ursula Andress in the lead role, despite the graphic content, a sure sign of the bankability of the cannibal boom.

With the success of Last Cannibal World and the backing of German investors, Deodato and his producers, Franco Palaggi (whose credits also include working on A Fistful of Dollars) and Franco Di Nunzio (who also produced Deodato’s grimy, relentless House at the Edge of the Park) scouted South America for suitable locations, eventually settling on Leticia in southern-most Columbia, despite the remoteness meaning that getting there involved arduous trekking and boat trips. Armed with a screenplay by the prolific Italian writer Gianfranco Clerici (The New York Ripper, L’Anticristo, Last Cannibal World) they assembled a largely unknown cast but one which spoke English, both establishing a certain amount of credibility in terms of their background and making the film more saleable to foreign markets.

By far the most famous name was Robert Kerman who had made quite a name for himself in the adult film industry using the pseudonym R. Bolla. His most well-known role was in one of the most iconic films of the 1970s, Debbie Does Dallas, though his career in the field stretched well over 100 films. Continuing to act, though hampered by his hardcore career, he has since appeared in Cannibal Ferox, Airport ’79 and even a minor part in Sam Raimi’s Spiderman. The only other member of the cast to have had any sort of career not completely overshadowed by their role in Cannibal Holocaust is the Italian/Uruguayan Luca Barbareschi, who entered politics as part of Silvio Berlusconi’s government in 2008 and gained more notoriety in a filmed exchange with a journalist which resulted in the reporter being knocked out by Barbareschi.

Though Deodato has claimed that the shocking, visceral nature of the film and its dynamics are a commentary of events in Italy during the early 1970′s when the Red Brigade launched terrorist attacks in an attempt to bring about a revolutionary state through a destabilised country, this echoes slightly of many of his retrospective assertions about the film to paper over accusations over his allegedly tyrannical methods of direction. What is clear is his adoption of  Cinéma vérité techniques which used methods including provocation and staged scenarios in order to portray a ‘truth’ and realism to their films; these has already proved popular and successful in the mondo films of the 1960′s and 1971′s. The pops and crackles on the viewed footage (filmed on 16mm to add to the authenticity) in New York and the scratched frames add a genuinely convincing edge due to action.

Adding to the documentary feel is the oft-discussed violence and cruelty inflicted upon animals in the film, ranging from shrew-like fluffy creatures (actually a coati), a large spider, two monkeys (the lopping off of the head required two takes), a tethered wild pig and perhaps most notoriously, a turtle who suffers a protracted death for no other reason than to prompt revulsion and disgust from the audience. Deodato’s views have mellowed significantly over the years, indifference changing to ‘but the locals ate them afterwards’ to complete rejection, re-editing the film to excise the footage in 2011. Recollections from the cast, particularly Kerman who objected throughout the the animal deaths (and also Perry Pirkanen, who apparently cried after the turtle scene, a strange paradox considering his apparent on-screen glee). Viewed over 30 years later, these scenes are still amongst the strongest and most stomach-churning in the whole of the horror genre.

There have long been rumours that the sex scene between Yorke and Ciardi was not simulated, Ciardi already having been admonished by Deodato for her ‘prudishness’ in not wanting to bare her breasts. Real or not, it is another example of the blurring between fact and fiction which permeates the whole film. Deodato was also accused of under-paying his actors (and not paying the locals at all), as well as dictatorial behaviour throughout the shoot, upsetting and alienating most of the cast at one stage or another. The cast had a clause in their contract which stated that they were to give no interviews nor make any appearances regarding the film for a year after its release, so as to create the impression that they had indeed been slaughtered in the film. This backfired badly (or depending on your viewpoint, worked magnificently) as the authorities, convinced by the animal sequences and incredibly realistic gore, arrested Deodato on counts of not only obscenity but also murder.

In order to prove his innocence, the very much alive actors were gathered together to appear in a television program whilst many of the scenes had to be explained in great detail to convince the court that no-one was killed during the filming. The most iconic image in the film, that of the raped cannibal girl having been impaled on the wooden spike was revealed to be an actress sat on an obscured bicycle seat with a small piece of wood held between her teeth. It must be said that all the scenes of death and violence within the film remain as incredibly convincing and impressive as the day they were first screened.

The controversy did no harm to the film’s success, taking an alleged $5 million in the first ten days of release alone. Commercial video releases also did a roaring trade, the UK Go Video release being a mainstay of homely video libraries for 2-3 years before the video recordings act declared it prosecutable to rent or sell. It was also banned in many other countries, including Germany, Australia and New Zealand, but bucked the trend in Japan where it became the second biggest grossing film in the year of its release.

The film’s soundtrack was composed entirely by Italian composer Riz Ortolani, whom Deodato specifically requested because of Ortolani’s work in Mondo Cane, particularly the film’s main theme, “Ti guarderò nel cuore” (also known as “More”). Ortolani was (and still is) known for his rather romantic, sweeping scores, full of large string sections of plaintive melodies. His work on Cannibal Holocaust, perhaps surprisingly, is no different, the main theme being achingly beautiful, a reflection of the stunning settings but a counterpoint to the horrific violence portrayed. The score has become a classic of the genre and helped to elevate Ortolani to the upper echelons of Italian soundtrack composers, his work having since being used by directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Nicolas Winding Refn.

Though the cannibal sub-genre ran out of steam in the mid-80′s, the influence of Cannibal Holocaust is still felt today, the found-footage theme being used in the likes of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity, whilst also inspiring directors like Eli Roth — whose current project is the jungle-set Green Inferno — to forge their own careers.

Rather like many of the zombie films of the 1970′s and 1980′s, many films have passed themselves off as sequels to the original film but despite interest from Deodato in his own follow-up, set in an American city, slated to be titled simply Cannibals, this has yet to happen and the film remains as a stand-alone beacon of depravity, gut-churning set-pieces and one of the great achievements of horror cinema.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Wikipedia | IMDb | Ruggero Deodato

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The New York Ripper (Italian: Lo Squartatore di New York) is a 1982 Italian giallo film directed by Lucio Fulci. The film score was written by Francesco De Masi, whilst the screenplay was written by Fulci, Gianfranco Clerici, Vincenzo Mannino and Dardano Sacchetti. It was banned in many countries or released as an “adults-only” movie after heavy editing. Whilst most of Lucio Fulci’s other films have been released uncut in the United Kingdom, The New York Ripper remains censored to this day, even for its 2011 DVD and Blu-ray releases. At the time it was made, real-life serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, nicknamed ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’ had only recently been apprehended so Fulci’s film would have been even more contentious had it not been undemocratically rejected by unelected British censors.

In the grimy but neon-drenched streets of New York, a maniacal killer is discovered to be on the loose after the body of a local prostitute is found dismember by a man walking his dog. Dispatched to investigate is the grizzled, bitter Lieutenant Fred Williams (Jack Hedley) who after visiting the girl’s landlady is given his only lead; the girl had recently been talking with a man who had a voice like a duck. Before the detective can investigate the claims, a woman is viciously attacked and killed aboard a ferry, our first introduction to the killer who not only sounds like a duck but a very famous duck – Donald. Warned by the chief of police (Fulci himself in a not uncommon appearance onscreen) not to reveal details to the public for fear of causing mad panic, Williams learns that the duck-voiced foe has been trying to contact him, leading to film-long taunting by the killing after each victim is slain. Further hideously lurid murders take place and suspicion falls on well-known drop-out called Mickey Scellenda, already convicted for drug and sexual offences and with tell-tale missing fingers. The film introduces us to Fay Majors (Almanta Keller), who becomes the lynch-pin to the case, surviving an attack and confusing the issue by believing the killer is actually her boyfriend. The Ripper’s attacks become ever-more frenzied and increase in regularity but just as the net seems to be closing in on the killer, has Williams got the wrong man/duck?

Having already covered many genres with often stunning results (the tour de force Western, Four of the Apocalypse, and landmark zombie film Zombie Flesheaters to name but two), Fulci returned to the giallo genre for the first time since The Psychic (aka Sette Note in Nero) but with a far colder heart and with outrageously graphic sexual violence, most of which is shown on-screen, though stills suggest that even the director excised some scenes from even the most intact prints. Containing just about everything that then head of the BBFC, James Ferman, objected to in films, he allegedly ordered the print sent for certification in the UK to be escorted back to the airport where it could be flown to safety, away from sensitive British eyes. The film remained uncertified for cinema screenings and became part of the notorious ‘video nasty’ list. Ferman never let go out of his hatred for the film and several years later in a Channel 4 documentary entitled Sex and the Censors, declared the film ‘irresponsible’.

The lack of Fulci’s unmistakable gothic template and relocation to New York fills the film with despair and filth (rather like Driller Killer or Maniac) before the killer and his motivations even begin; it’s a film that is utterly without remorse. The sexual attacks are very much just that – accusations of misogyny were flung Fulci’s way as the graphic scenes of naked womens’ bodies seemingly slashed and mutilated under the veil of what can only be described as a very thin plot, rather pointlessly winds its way to a revelation that is the cinematic equivalent of a shoulder-shrug.

The New York Ripper is Lucio Fulci at his most frustrating. A sometimes gifted artist behind the camera, he resorts to slasher men-as-brutes/women-as-victims sensationalism and crudeness at the expense of a holey plot and unremarkable acting (kudos though to Zora Kerova who appears as a sex-show performer, having previously been hounded in grubby Eurotrash films such as Anthropophagus, Terror Express and Cannibal Ferox - a glutton for punishment if ever there was one!)  and electing to give the killer the voice of a cartoon duck. On first watch this is actually rather entertaining, more due to novelty than genius – repeated viewings show it to be increasingly baffling and desperate. Though other films of the 1970′s and 1980′s were similarly morally dubious and little more than excuse to titillate an easily pleased audience, few do it with such brazen garishness.

On the plus side, we are given an excuse to listen to a score by Francesco De Masi, usually to be found as the writer for euro-crime poliziotteschi films (Napoli Spara) or Italian Westerns (Arizona Colt). In truth, though great fun and an excellent listen, it’s an odd mis-match to a film that though required viewing for gorehounds, is essentially a ‘greatest hits’of sexist splatter effects with Donald Duck in the background.

Daz Lawrence

Several of the images come courtesy of the excellent http://silverferox.blogspot.co.uk/

“Sometimes I make movies which don’t interest me too much and after, with the money, I make the movies I want to make.”
Joe D’Amato

Italy’s king of trash sinema, Joe D’Amato spent most of his career locked into exploitation filmmaking. Some of his 70s films are very forthright and he would eventually find financial success during the late 90′s as the director of hardcore costume epics, only for his life to be cut short in 1999, when he died of a heart attack.

D’Amato – real name Aristide Massacessi – first entered the film industry in 1952, working as a stills photographer, and graduated to become a respected director of photography in the expanding Italian film world of the 60′s and early 70′s. Given the low opinion many critics have of his work, it’s significant to note that he was a well-respected DP. He worked on a variety of Italian productions in the late Sixties and early Seventies, ranging from the softcore More Filthy Canterbury Tales (in 1972) to the superior horror film The Antichrist, directed by Alberto De Martino in 1974. In subsequent years, these two genres would come to dominate his work.

The early Seventies also saw D’Amato directing his first films, although it would take a while for this to be publicly acknowledged. Spaghetti western Bounty Hunter for Trinity and female gladiator actioner The Arena were largely helmed by D’Amato, although he wasn’t credited as director. In the case of the latter  film, US director Steve Carver had begun the movie, and was still credited with it, but D’Amato had, in fact, handled most of the direction himself. Such an anonymous graduation from cameraman to director are not unknown in Italian cinema – Mario Bava did much the same – but D’Amato could have been forgiven for wondering if he would ever be credited for his work.

Significantly, the first film to be officially directed by D’Amato was a warped horror movie. Death Smiles at Murder is an efficient, if unremarkable, Klaus Kinski vehicle that showed definite promise, and certainly helped set him on the road which he would travel for the next two decades. Right up to the point that the market for low budget exploitation cinema collapsed in Italy, he would alternate between gory horror and softcore sex movies – often blurring the line between the two.

He’s still best known for his Black Emanuelle series, although he wasn’t involved in the first two films. It was this series which gave him his real break. Hired to takeover from Adalberti Albertini (director of the first two films), he suddenly found himself in control of a series of movies which had a guaranteed international market (Death Smiles on a Murderer had failed to secure distribution outside Italy). Under his guidance, the series would become increasingly outlandish and bizarre. The series also introduced him to Laura Gemser, who would become a regular performer in his films.

Laura Gemser

D’Amato would prove to have a certain flair for softcore, and these  films would be his most successful. In fact, they dominated his work in the Seventies – he would often shoot several Emanuelle films in a year. He also tried his had at a typically ribald Italian sex comedy (Ladies Doctor) around this time, but humour didn’t seem to be his forté. D’Amato was much more at home with brutal violence, and this began to evidence itself within the Emanuelle series. Emanuelle in America combined the usual softcore (and brief hardcore) love-making with genuinely shocking ‘snuff’ movie scenes. These remain the most realistic images of ‘snuff’ movies ever shot, and it’s unsurprising that  several people have believed them to be real (the fact that for years they were only available on nth generation bootlegs probably helped too!). This wouldn’t be the last time that D’Amato was accused of filming real murder…

Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (aka Trap Them and Kill Them) was his final entry in the series and was a significant pointer to where his career would head next. As much a horror movie as an erotic one – arguably moreso, in fact – the film was extremely gory, and the first in a series of movies which capitalised on the success of Ruggero Deodato’s Last Cannibal World in 1976.

Beyond the Darkness

The end of the 1970′s and early 80′s saw D’Amato establish himself a director to watch for in the horror genre. Whilst Porno Shop on 7th Avenuemay sound like a sex romp, it is in fact a brutal, sleazy crime film with more than a few nods to the likes of The Last House on the Left and Italian imitators such as Night Train Murders and House on the Edge of the Park. Papaya was another jungle shocker, with the emphasis this time on voodoo, and Beyond the Darkness (aka Buried Alive/Blue Holocaust) was a remarkably sleazy study of murder and necrophilia. This film once again saw D’Amato attacked for allegedly crossing the line, this time by supposedly using a real corpse during an autopsy scene – well, it’s cheaper than special effects!

Anthropophagous

Like the work of many Italian directors of the period, D’Amato’s horror movies reached new heights (or plumed new depths, depending on your viewpoint) in gore. His two most notorious films of the time were Anthropophagous (aka The Grim Reaper) and its sequel Absurd. Both these blood-drenched shockers would branded  ‘video nasties’ and banned in Britain, and years later, Anthropophagous made newspaper headlines and prime-time TV news shows when British police claimed that it showed real baby murders! Absurd indeed…

D’Amato also continued with his Last Cannibals experiment of combining erotica with splatter during this period. The title of Erotic Nights of the Living Dead says it all, and the combination reached its natural conclusion in Porno Holocaust, which mixed hardcore sex and hardgore violence in ways which would be unimaginable now. At the time, fans were probably more surprised to see D’Amato shooting hardcore, but in fact, he’d been quietly making porn films for the domestic Italian market since 1980. Few of these films were seen outside Italy, and none were particularly great – D’Amato having shot them simply for money.

With the market for both softcore and horror drying up, D’Amato surprised many people by showing an affinity for sword and sorcery films. His two sci-fi movies of 1983 (2020: Texas Gladiators and Endgame) had failed to impress anyone, but Ator the Fighting Eagle was a surprise international hit – one of the last Italian exploitation films to have a major impact in the US market. It would spawn two sequels during the brief period that the genre was popular, and stands head-and-shoulders above every other Italian barbarian romp of the time.

The remainder of the 1980′s were spent shooting glossy softcore titles. The market for such films had been given a shot in the arm with the success and notoriety of 9 1/2 Weeks, and D’Amato struck box-office gold again with his blatant imitation, Eleven Days, Eleven Nights in 1985. In fact, D’Amato’s film was far superior to its overblown Hollywood inspiration, and proved once again that he was a genuine talent in the genre. The film was so popular in fact, that foreign distributors would change the titles of other D’Amato films shot at this time to create instant sequels – Top Model became Eleven Days Eleven Nights 2 simply because it shared the same director and star (Jessica Moore).

D’Amato had more success with Dirty Love (again inspiring sequels, both real and false), The Pleasure, Lust, Blue Angel Cafe and The Alcove. Less popular were his few horror films of the late Eighties. Killing Birds and Frankenstein 2000 failed to secure international distribution even on video. D’Amato did have success in the genre as a producer, giving Michele Soavi his first break when he produced the young director’s first (and best) film Stagefright. But the global market was changing, and Euro horror was proving increasingly hard to sell to the all-important US market. Worse still, his softcore films were no longer making money either.

Stagefright

Ever the pragmatist, D’Amato simply moved into an area he knew offered the chance to make money, and which he had a natural affinity for. He began to make a series of hardcore epics, often based on famous figures from literature and history. Often working in collaboration with porno fairytale king Luca Damiano, D’Amato built a sizeable reputation with these 35mm costume dramas, and although he didn’t take the adult film business too seriously, the acclaim heaped upon him must have been satisfying for a man more used to being described by critics as “the worst director in the world”. The films were international hits, and soon D’Amato was shooting one feature a month. Like much Italian porn, his films were films – he never shot on video. This relentless schedule from a director who was no slouch in the 1970′s and 1980′s has made him one of the most prolific film-makers of all time.

Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals

It was probably, in fact,  this frenetic workload that contributed to his untimely death from a heart attack, aged 60. He was working on the post-production of no less than five features when he died.

It was notably that the cult movie world genuinely mourned the loss of Joe D’Amato. Critics may have sneered at his work, but the fans knew better. D’Amato made some of the weirdest films ever, never took himself too seriously, and had a genuine love for the genres he worked in. He remains a much-missed figure on the scene.

David Flint, Horrorpedia

The Driller Killer is a 1979 American horror film directed by and starring Abel Ferrara. The film was lumped together with other “video nasties” released at the time and a vociferous campaign was launched by the British press to ban them all. It was added to the list of banned UK films on 4 July 1983.  According to Mike Bor, the Principal Examiner at the British Board of Film Classification, “The Driller Killer was almost single-handedly responsible for the Video Recordings Act 1984“. According to Brad Stevens, author of a biography on Abel Ferrara, the banning of the film was “almost entirely due to the cover of the video.” The film is now in the public domain.

A young artist, Reno Miller (Abel Ferrara) and his girlfriend Carol enter a Catholic church. Reno approaches an elderly bearded man kneeling at the pulpit. Although Reno seems to recognize the man as his long-lost father, he is merely a derelict. After the man seizes Reno’s hand, Reno grabs Carol and runs from the church. Later, in the Union Square (New York City) apartment he shares with Carol and her lover Pamela, Reno receives a large phone bill and cannot pay his rent. He hates his crime-infested, derelict-filled neighborhood.

Reno visits Dalton, a gallery owner, and tells him that he is currently painting a masterpiece. Reno asks for a week’s extension and a loan of $500 to cover the rent. Dalton refuses, saying that he already lent money enough to Reno. However, if he finishes a satisfactory painting in one week, Dalton will buy it for the necessary amount. The following day, the Roosters, a No Wave band, begin practicing their music in a nearby apartment. The loud music makes Reno more unnerved and frustrated. That night, Reno, Carol, and Pamela watch a TV advertisement for a Porto-Pak, a battery pack which allows portable use of corded electrical appliances.

At 2:00 a.m., while painting, Reno becomes more agitated from the Rooster’s music. After seeing his own image saturated in blood, Reno walks in the dark. He sees an elderly derelict sleeping in a garbage-strewn alley. It seems that Reno plans to accost the man, but instead, he takes him down an alley where they see gang members chasing another bum. Reno drops the bum and vows that he will not end up like him or his derelict father.

The next day, Reno complains about the Roosters to their landlord. However, the landlord refuses to act because the music does not bother him. He gives Reno a skinned rabbit for dinner, but demands the rent money. Reno takes the rabbit home and repeatedly stabs it while preparing it. Later, Reno buys the Porto-Pak. During a brief reprieve from the music, Reno hears voices calling his name and sees an image of an eyeless Carol. That night, Reno goes out with the Porto-Pak and his drill attached to it. He sees another bum sleeping inside an abandoned diner and kills him by drilling into his chest…

Wikipedia | IMDb | Rotten Tomatoes

“Ferrara uses overwhelmingly mundane everyday things to drive his character to the edge. Like Chinese water torture; the repetitive riffing of the band and the nagging ‘New Yawk’ nasal drawl of one of the women, constantly changing her mind where she wants a hole drilled, mirrors the grating, incessant whine of the portable drill Reno uses on his victims. The effect is much the same as the unsettling way Marilyn Burn’s screams constantly throughout the end of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974)- un-nerving the viewer. Unable, or unwilling, to deal with the grind of daily life and his apparent alienation from those closest to him. He slaughters the homeless drunks that litter the sidewalks, possibly because of his unbalanced revulsion that he will become like them if his life continues to slide. A repressed sexuality or perhaps impotence is hinted at.” Hysteria Lives

“The acting of the film’s mealy cast is amateurish across board, a cast that includes Abel Ferrara as the painter/boring enthusiast. To the director’s credit, I did find his pizza eating to be disgusting and his drilling to be superb. At any rate, this apparent inexperience only manages to elevate the seedy realism of the piece. The wide array of homeless people who get drilled all had a genuinely disheveled aura about them (they were probably indigent in real life) and the rock crowds during the clubs scenes seemed authentic.” House of Self Indulgence

House on the Edge of the Park (Italian: La casa sperduta nel parco) is a 1980 Italian exploitation film from the Italian director Ruggero Deodato. It stars David Hess, Giovanni Lombardo Radice and Lorraine De Selle and features a musical score by Riz Ortolani. The entire film was shot in under  four weeks, on a very limited budget.

Degenerate New York mechanic, Alex (David Hess, to some extent reprising the role he played as Krug in Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left) spends his downtime prowling the streets abducting and assaulting, sometimes murdering the local women. A typical day sees Alex and his workmate, the slow-on-the-uptake Ricky (Giovanni Lombardo Radice of Cannibal Ferox, Cannibal Apocalypse and City of the Living Dead), closing the garage for the night, only for a car containing socially mobile yuppie types Tom (Christian Borromeo, Tenebrae, Murder-Rock) and his girlfriend Lisa (Annie Belle, Absurd) who need some urgent repairs on the cadillac. Ricky agrees to help and in no time the job is done – as a way of thanking them for their time, Tom invites them to a party at their friend’s large villa, situated, yes, next to a park. Pausing only for Alex to equip himself with a straight razor, they set off for a night of high jinx.

Upon arrival, it’s clear that the social and financial divide between the two groups of party-goers is some cause of amusement, at Alex and Ricky’s expense. Ricky is coerced into cinema’s greatest dance sequence and later a game of poker, with some extremely naughty cheating going on. As Alex’s anger continues to rise, he is seduced by Lisa whose sexual advances lead him to the shower, only for her to reject him. His rage is unleashed on another of the guests, Howard (Gabriele Di Giulio), who after a severe beating  is urinated on and then tied to a table leg as Alex announces that he’s running the show now. Despite being outnumbered, Alex and Ricky subject the group to a relentless torrent of sexual and violent attacks, Alex slashing Tom with his razor and Ricky becoming involved with Gloria (Lorraine De Selle from Cannibal Ferox and Wild Beasts) who finds it easy to distract him from his more violent intentions by performing a striptease. Meanwhile, Alex is running rampage, with next door neighbour, Cindy (Brigitte Petronio, The Cynic, The Rat and The Fist) cut to ribbons and the rest of the household lining up to be next. Ricky finally snaps and begs him to stop, only to be disemboweled for his troubles. The worm turns when, rather belatedly, Tom remembers there’s a gun hidden in a desk drawer. Quicker next time, eh?

Sporting a title which revels in the greatest obsession of exploitation filmmakers, houses and the environs thereof, House on the Edge of the Park is regularly compared to The Last House on the Left, primarily because Hess plays a similarly unhinged killer. Hess was singled out for the role because of his portrayal of Krug and was allegedly lured to the part by the promise of half the film’s rights. However, the tragedy and dynamics of the earlier film are shifted considerably by Deodato’s effort, with the rich party hosts being morally dubious and the whole household frankly needing a stern talking to.

The infamous director came straight from filming Cannibal Holocaust and was in no mood to lighten things up, employing hard-nosed writers Gianfranco Clerici and Vincenzo Mannino to sketch out the sense-light/violence-heavy screenplay – and their track record for sadistic sleaze was admirable, with a host of grim shockers under their belt, from Don’t Torture a Duckling to Last Cannibal World and, in 1982, the misogynistic yet mesmerisingly mean The New York Ripper. Despite admitting that he thought the script was ‘too violent’, Deodato went ahead and filmed it anyway, omitting only a ‘bridge too far’ scene involving abuse with a tampon.

The savage make-up effects by Raul Ranieri, who also worked with Deodato and Hess on Hitch-Hike and on Umberto Lenzi’s Eaten Alive! coupled with an unremitting sexual violence landed the film in hot water in the UK, being rejected for a cinema certificate in March of 1981 and after sneaking out on VHS finding itself on the now notorious DPP ‘banned list’. When it was resubmitted in 2002, it was, ironically, savagely cut by over 11 minutes, essentially all the rape and slashings. The latest cut is still trimmed by 42 seconds of razor mayhem some 33 years on from its initial release.

Though regularly flagged up as an example of films which are morally bankrupt and can only serve to corrupt the mind, House on the Edge of the Park is unfailing enjoyable, primarily because of the energetic and all-or-nothing performances of Hess and Radice. Their victims are almost a roll call of Italian exploitation faces whose names may escape you but are part of the firmament of 70′s and 80′s grub-core.

Buy House on the Edge of the Park uncut on DVD from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

The disco dancing scene, whether intentionally or not, is a riot and the fact that all the characters are represent many of the worst elements of society simply adds to the rather cartoon quality of the film, something of an uber-violent pantomime. Though Ortolani’s score is nowhere near as accomplished as that of his masterpiece for Cannibal Holocaust, it is nevertheless similarly inappropriate, raising the question of whether he ever understood the kind of films he was scoring for.

Before the untimely death of David Hess, plans were underway to revisit the film with a sequel, with both Radice and Hess appearing in some capacity, and Deodato slated to direct.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Dance along like Ricky!

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The 1970s saw old taboos falling away in the cinema, and few horror film sub-genres benefited from the relaxation in censorship more than the cannibal film. In fact, this is a genre that scarcely existed prior to the Seventies. Sure, horror films had long hinted at cannibalism as a plot device – movies like Doctor X (1932) and others portrayed it as an element of psychosis without ever being overly explicit, and this would continue into the 1970s with films such as Cannibal Girls Frightmare and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – but no one had really explored the idea explicitly. Some things were just too tasteless, and cannibalism was something of a no-no with assorted censor boards around the world.

Yet the idea that remote tribes in the Amazon or on islands like Papua New Guinea were still practising cannibalism was a common one at the time, thanks to a conflation of suspicion, colonialist ideas, misunderstanding of tribal rituals (such as head hunting / shrinking) and old-fashioned racism. And, if we are to be fair, these beliefs were not entirely without validity, as some cultures still did practice cannibalism, albeit not as determinedly as was often made out. Certainly, the subject was exploited – 1956 roadshow movie Cannibal Island promised much in its sensationalist promotional art, even if the film itself was Gaw the Killer, an anthropological documentary from the 1931, re-edited and re-dubbed, that was notably lacking in anthropophagy, despite the best efforts of the narrator to suggest otherwise.

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Elsewhere, cartoons and comic books perpetuated the idea that any great white hunter who was captured by natives was bound to end up in a cooking pot, and Tarzan movies hinted that he bones the natives wore as decoration were not all from animals. 1954′s Cannibal Attack saw Johnny Weissmuller playing Johnny Weissmuller, fighting off enemy agents in a cannibal-filled jungle.

Hell Night director Tom De Simone’s terrible movie Terror in the Jungle (1968) had a small boy captured by a cannibal tribe and only saved by his ‘glowing’ blonde hair. Worship of blonde white people would be a theme in later, trashier cannibal movies too). Even the children’s big game hunting Adventure novel series by Willard Price had a Cannibal Adventure entry. But notably, none of these early efforts actually went the extra mile – the natives in these films may have been cannibals, but we had to take the filmmakers and writers word for that – no cannibalism actually took place on screen.

In the 1960s, the Mondo documentary would also take an interest in bizarre tribal rituals, and these mostly Italian films would subsequently come to inform the style of the cannibal films that emerged later. Certainly, later shockumentaries such as Savage Man, Savage Beast, This Violent World and Shocking Africa were closely related to contemporary films like Man from Deep River and Last Cannibal World, with their lurid mix of anthropological studies and sensationalism.

One such mondo movie was the 1974 Italian/Japanese Nuova Guinea, l’isola dei cannibali. Tribal scenes from this production – which also includes footage of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip on a Royal visit to the island (!) – were inserted into the zombie film Hell of the Living Dead (1981) to add verisimilitude. It was  later opportunistically released on DVD in the USA as The Real Cannibal Holocaust.

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The cannibal film as we know it now began in 1972, with Il paese del sesso selvaggio, also known as Deep River Savages, The Man from Deep River and Sacrifice!  It was directed by Umberto Lenzi, who would spend the next decade playing catch-up in a genre he pretty much invented with scriptwriters Francesco Barilli and Massimo D’Avak. This film essentially set many of the templates for the genre – graphic violence, extensive nudity, real animal slaughter and the culture clash between ‘civilised’ Westerners and ‘primitive’ tribes.

The film is, essentially, a rip-off of American western A Man Called Horse, with Italian exploitation icon Ivan Rassimov as a British photographer who finds himself stranded in the jungles of Thailand and captured by a native tribe. Eventually, after undergoing assorted humiliations and initiation rituals, he is accepted within the community, who are at war with a fierce, more primitive cannibal tribe.

Co-starring Mei Mei Lai (who would become one of the sub-genre’s stock players), the film is set up more as an adventure story than a horror film, but the look and feel of the story would subsequently inform other cannibal movies, and the scene where the cannibal tribe kill and eat a native certainly sets the scene for what is to come.

Buy The Man from Deep River + Warlock Moon + Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat on DVD from Amazon.com

Made in 1976, Ruggero Deodato’s Ultimo mondo cannibale (Last Cannibal World; Cannibal; Jungle Holocaust) also had the feel of an old-school jungle adventure, though Deodato expanded on what Lenzi had started – this tale of an explorer (played by Massimo Foschi) who is captured by a cannibal tribe features a remarkable amount of nudity (Foschi is kept naked in a cage for much of the film, teased and tormented by the tribe) and sex – including an animalistic sex scene between Foschi and Mei Mei Lai (Rassimov also co-stars). It also featured more graphic gore and real animal killing – the latter would become the achilles heel of the genre, something that even its admirers would find hard to defend. Even if the slaughtered animals were eaten by the filmmakers, showing such scenes for entertainment still left a bad taste with many, and over and above the sex and violence, would be the major cause of censorship for these films.

The Last Cannibal World proved to be a popular hit around the world (it even played UK cinemas after BBFC cuts) and sparked a mini-boom in cannibal film production. In 1977, Joe D’Amato continued his bizarre mutation of the Black Emanuelle series – which, under his guidance, had evolved from soft porn travelogue to featuring white slavery, rape, snuff movies, hardcore sex and even bestiality – with Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (aka Trap Them and Kill Them), a strange and uniquely 1970s mixture of of softcore sex and hardcore gore, as Laura Gemser goes in search of a lost cannibal tribe. Quite what audiences expecting sexy thrills thought when they were confronted with graphic castration scenes is anyone’s guess, but the film played successfully across Europe and America, albeit often in a cut form.

D’Amato returned to the genre in 1978 with Papaya – Love Goddess of the Cannibals, with Sirpa Lane which, despite its title features no cannibals, in a film that again mixed gore and softcore yet still managed to be rather dull.

Also in 1978, we had the only cannibal film with a big name cast. Mountain of the Cannibal God (aka Slave of the Cannibal God; Prisoner of the Cannibal God) saw former Bond girl Ursula Andress stripped and fondled by a cannibal tribe as she and Stacey Keach search for her missing husband. The starry cast didn’t mean that director Sergio Martino wasn’t going to include some particularly unnecessary animal cruelty and a bizarre (faked) scene of a man fucking a pig though, as well as graphic gore. At heart an old fashioned jungle adventure spiced up with 1970s sex ‘n’ violence, the most remarkable part of the film is how Martino managed to persuade Andress to appear completely naked. Perhaps she just wanted to show off how good her body was 16 years after Dr No!

Buy The Mountain of the Cannibal God on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

That same year saw an Indonesian entry in the genre with Primitives, also known as Savage Terror. This was essentially a rehash of The Last Cannibal World, but with less gore and no nudity, which resulted in a rather plodding jungle drama. This one is definitely for genre completists only, and proved to be a major disappointment when released on VHS to a cannibal-hungry public by Go Video in the UK as a follow-up to Cannibal Holocaust.

Ahh yes, Cannibal Holocaust. The Citizen Kane of cannibal movies, and the genre’s only undisputed masterpiece, the film would also become the most notorious film in the genre, shocking audiences and censors alike and even now seen as being about as extreme as cinema can go.

The film began life as just another cannibal film, Deodato hired to make something to follow up The Last Cannibal World. But with the relative freedom granted to him (all his backers wanted was a gory cannibal film), he came up with a movie that critiqued the sensationalism of the Mondo movie makers and the audience’s lust for blood, with his tale of an exploitative documentary crew who set out to film cannibal tribes but through their own arrogance and cruelty bring about their own demise.

Deodato’s film effectively invents the Found Footage style of filmmaking, his fake documentary approach being so effective that he found himself facing a trial, accused of actually murdering his actors! Given that the film mixes real animal killing with worryingly effective scenes of violence, all shot in shaky, hand-held style, it’s perhaps no surprise that people thought it was real – even into the 1990s, the film was reported as being a ‘snuff movie’ by the British press.

But there is more going on here than mere sensationalism and sadism – Deodato’s film fizzes with a righteous anger and passion, and makes absolutely no concession to moral restraint. There’s a level of intensity here that is beyond fiction – certainly, the story of the film’s production and reception would make for a remarkable movie in its own right. Almost imprisoned and seeing his film banned in Italy and elsewhere (in Britain, it was one of the first video nasties), Deodato was suitably chastened, and never made anything like it again.

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But despite the bans, the legal issues and the outrage, Cannibal Holocaust was enough of a sensation to spawn imitators. Umberto Lenzi returned to the genre he’s more or less invented in 1980 with Eaten Alive (Magiati Vivi; The Emerald Jungle; Doomed to Die), which managed to mix cannibal tribes, nudity and gore with a story that exploits the recent Guyana massacre led by Jim Jones. This tale of a fanatical religious cult leader had an cannibal movie all-star cast – Ivan Rassimov, Mei Mei Lai and Robert Kerman (aka porn star R. Bolla) who had starred in Cannibal Holocaust were joined by Janet Agren and Mel Ferrer in what is a textbook example of a cheap knock-off. Not only does the film cash in on earlier movies and recent news events, it actually ‘cannibalises’ whole scenes from other films, Lenzi’s own Man from Deep River amongst them. Yet despite this, it’s fairly entertaining stuff.

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Lenzi followed this with Cannibal Ferox (aka Make Them Die Slowly; Let Them Die Slowly), a more blatant imitation of Cannibal Holocaust. Kerman again makes an appearance (albeit a brief one), while Italian cult icon John Morghen (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) headlines a fairly ham fisted tale of an anthropology student who sets out to prove that cannibalism is a myth, only to find she’s very, very wrong. Directed with indifference by Lenzi (who clearly had no interest in theses films beyond a pay check), the film features more gratuitous animal killing and some remarkably sadistic scenes (two castrations and a woman hung with hooks through her breasts), which invariably ensured that the film would be “banned in 31 countries”.

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1980 also brought us Zombie Holocaust (aka Doctor Butcher M.D.) in which Marino Girolami opportunistically livened up his Zombie Flesh Eaters imitation by adding a mad doctor, cannibals and nudity to the mix, and Cannibal Apocalypse, where Vietnam vets John Saxon and John Morghen were driven to cannibalism in Vietnam and then go on the rampage in the USA.

Jess Franco entered the genre in 1980 with Cannibals (aka The White Cannibal Queen) and Devil Hunter (aka Man Hunter), but the crudity of the cannibal movie was unsuited to a director more at home with surreal, erotic gothic fantasies. Cannibals was the more interesting of the two – Franco’s intense close-ups and slow motion during the cannibalism scenes add a bizarre, almost dream-like edge to the proceedings, in a tale that mixes a one-armed Al Cliver and a naked Sabrina Siani as the blonde goddess worshipped by the ‘cannibal tribe’. Devil Hunter is a ridiculous mishmash with a kidnapped movie star, a bug-eyed, big-dicked monster and cannibals. Franco himself was dismissive of both films, and they are recommended only for the completist.

Cannibals

Similar to the Franco films (coming from the same producers and featuring footage from Cannibals) is the tedious Cannibal Terror, a French effort that sees a bunch of kidnappers hanging out in a cannibal-infested jungle. It’s pretty hard work to sit through even for the most ardent admirer of Eurotrash. Meanwhile, cannibalistic monks cropped up in the 1981 US movie Raw Force (later retitled) Kung Fu Cannibals but they were only one of the smorgasbord element in this exploitation trash and being a ‘religious order’ rather than a tribe merit just a brief mention here.

After this flurry of activity, the genre began to fizzle out, exploitation filmmakers moving on to the next big thing (i.e. knock offs of Conan and Mad Max). It wasn’t until 1985 that we saw a revival of the jungle cannibal film with Amazonia (aka White Slave), directed by Mario Gariazzo. A strange mix of revenge drama and cannibal film, the movie is a gender-reversal of Man from Deep River, with Elvire Audray as Catherine Miles, brought up by a cannibal tribe after her parents are murdered in the Amazon. Despite some gore and nudity, it’s a rather plodding affair. It should not be confused with Ruggero Deodato’s Cut and Run, also sometimes called Amazonia but which – despite the setting and some gruesome moments – was not a return to the cannibal genre for the director.

More fun was Massacre in Dinosaur Valley (aka Naked and Savage), a cheerfully trashy affair directed by Michele Massimo Tarantini, with the survivors of a plane crash – including nubile young models and Indiana Jones like palaeontologist Michael Sopkiw battling slave traders, nature and cannibal tribes (but not dinosaurs) in the Amazon. Gratuitous nudity, splashy gore, bad acting and a ludicrous series of events ensure that this one is a lot of fun.

Natura Contro, retitled Cannibal Holocaust II but unconnected to the earlier film, is possibly the most obscure of the films in the sub-genre. Made in 1988, it is the final film by Antonio Climati, best known for his uncompromising Mondo movies of the 1970s. It’s surprising then that this is fairly tame stuff by cannibal movie standards, telling the story of a group of people who head to the Amazon to find a missing professor. By 1988, both the Italian exploitation film and the cannibal genre were breathing their last, and the excesses of a decade earlier were no longer commercially viable – the mainstream audience for such films had dwindled considerably, while censorship had tightened up.

Natura Contro

It would be another fifteen years before we saw the return of the jungle holocaust film, and then it was hardly worth it. Bruno Mattei, a prolific hack since the 1970s, had someone managed to keep making films, and in 2003 knocked out a pair of ultra-low budget, almost unwatchably bad cannibal films. In the Land of the Cannibals (aka Cannibal Ferox 3) and Cannibal World (aka Cannibal Holocaust 2) were slow, clumsy and boring attempts to cash in on the cult reputation of Mattei (a couple of years later, he’d make two similarly dismal zombie films) and the reputation of the earlier cannibal movies (needless to say, these are not official sequels to either Holocaust or Ferox). These two films seemed to be the final nail in the genre’s coffin.

But with the reputation of Cannibal Holocaust continuing to increase, and a general return to ‘hard core horror’ in the new century with films like Saw and Hostel, the cannibal film has seen a slight revival. But although Deodato has talked about making a sequel to Cannibal Holocaust, the new films have been American productions, even though they are informed by the Italian films of the past.

Jonathan Hensleigh’s Welcome to the Jungle , made in 2007, channels Holocaust with its found footage format as a group of remarkably annoying treasure hunters head to New Guinea in search of the missing Michael Rockerfeller, hoping to cash in on his discovery. Instead, their bickering attracts the attention of local cannibal tribes, who stalk and slaughter them. There;s an interesting idea at play here, but the characters are all so utterly loathsome that you’ll struggle to make it to the point where they start getting killed.

The latest attempt to revive the genre comes from Eli Roth, who’s Green Inferno is about to be released. The film takes its title from Cannibal Holocaust (one of Roth’s favourite films) and the plot – student activists travel to the Amazon to protect a tribe but find themselves captured by cannibals – sounds like a copy of Cannibal Ferox. Having received positive reviews at festivals, we hope the film is able to capture the spirit of the original movies, if not their frenzied style.

Certainly, we are unlikely to see anyone making a film quite like Cannibal Holocaust again – there are laws in place to stop it, if nothing else. But we can now look back at this most controversial of horror sub-genres and see that they represent a time when cinema was without restraint. As such, they are more than simply films, they are historical time capsules, and for those with strong stomachs, well worth investigating.

Article by David Flint

Related: Cannibal Holocaust | Devil Hunter | The Man from Deep River | The Mountain of the Cannibal God

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Devil Hunter (aka The Devil Hunter, Chasseurs d’Hommes, Sexo Cannibal, Jungfrau under Kannibalen, The Man Hunter, Mandingo Manhunter) is a 1980 Spanish erotic horror film directed by ‘Clifford Brown’ [Jess Franco - read his obituary here]. It stars Ursula Buchfellner, Al Cliver and Antonio Mayans.

A Vietnam veteran heads to an island inhabited by cannibals to save a kidnapped model not only from her kidnappers, but also from the cannibals’ lurking devil god…

The film was briefly available in the UK as a pre-cert (and now very rare) VHS on the Cinehollywood label before being banned and placed on the DPP list of official so-called ‘video nasties’. It is probably in the top five most expensive nasties. It was finally passed fully uncut by the BBFC in 2008.

The demon’s bug-eyes were created with ping-pong balls that had tiny holes poked in them to allow the actor to see.

This movie is often confused with Jesús Franco’s similar movie from the same year, White Cannibal Queen (aka Cannibals).

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“This film will definitely give fans of exploitation at least some of the required elements. It really isn’t that gory or as shocking as most of the other entries into the cannibal cycle, but it certainly isn’t boring. It has enough quirks and unintentional humor to make it a worthy edition to anyone either collecting Jess Franco movies, or attempting to watch all of the video nasties. It remains a tantalizingly tasteless example of fascinating Franco.” Shock Till You Drop

“It sounds good, but keep in mind the thin film of slime, shocking scenarios, subcutaneous racism and plentiful nudity are all tempered by pathetic, woeful gore, and utter lack of tension, acres of tedium and cannibal-god action so grating you’ll want to tear the DVD out of its player and slash your TV-screen to ribbons before doing the same thing to yourself.” Kurt Dahlke, DVD Talk

Posted by WH

We are grateful to David Zuzelo’s Tomb It May Concern and Not This Time, Nayland Smith for some of the images above

Exposé (also released as House on Straw Hill to link it to Straw Dogs and Trauma)is a 1975 (released March 1976 by Target International Pictures) British horror/thriller starring Udo Kier, Linda Hayden and 1970s sex symbol Fiona Richmond. It sparked controversy due to graphic scenes of sex and violence and was heavily censored by the BBFC. In the 1980′s it featured on the DPP’s list of original banned ‘video nasties’. It was re-released in the UK  in 2006, with around thirty cuts.

A relatively rare example of a film where both the original and alternative titles are equally strong, Exposé is the only British film to have been banned and branded a video nasty; the commonly mistaken Xtro never actually made the list. Udo Kier (Blood For Dracula/Flesh For Frankenstein etc) plays Paul Martin, a tortured novelist struggling with that ‘difficult’ second novel.

He escapes to the country and hires a secretary, Linda Hindstatt (Linda Hayden from The Blood on Satan’s Claw) to do his typing for him (it was 1975). Linda makes herself useful around the house, in the rare moments she isn’t masturbating and then on her first excursion out of the house (to masturbate) is raped by local youths played by Karl Howman from British sit-com Brush Strokes and legendary stuntman, Vic Armstrong. Having shot them, the tension is ramped up even more when Martin’s girlfriend, Suzanne, played by the famous British muckpot, Fiona Richmond, arrives and the sex and violence go into overdrive.

Anything with Udo Kier is worth a watch, however bad, and it’s a great shame he appears here dubbed within an inch of his life; he is, however, as enigmatic as ever. Linda Hayden looks stunning, though has since admitted she regrets making the film – it’s certainly ‘full-on’ in terms of the sex and violence but it’s difficult to imagine this was added at the editing stage, appearing, as she does, throughout.

Considering the vast amounts of sex and nudity, the story is still extremely engrossing, part Straw Dogs, part High Tension but still with a dash of black humour; the youths are named Smedley and Aston (the producer was Brian Smedley-Aston) and Howman sports a ‘I am a Vampyre’ T-shirt, a playful nod to Smedley-Aston’s Vampyres, Despite the credits ‘introducing’ Richmond, her acting masterclass did not lead to breakout mainstream fare but her sex scenes are plentiful, a treat if you can ignore her fluorescent orangeness. Naturally, the role did her top-shelf career no harm at all.

Cuts were required to the British version to achieve an ‘X’ rating, both the rape of Linda and the bloody demise of Suzanne proving too much for the censors. The book Martin dictates to his secretary ranks alongside Stephen King’s book within a book in Misery as one of the worst ever devised and perhaps everyone can take some solace that it is interrupted by sex and mayhem. The oddly heavy, oppressive atmosphere (possibly simply a by-product of Kier staring and sweating so much) and the lingering shots and pacing add to the tension. The film has had many attempted releases aborted over the years and this is a shame, it certainly, at least, demands a sprucing up. Bafflingly, it was remade by Martin Kemp in 2010 as Stalker and stars… Linda Hayden, clearly hating it so much, she tried twice, just to make sure.

Daz Lawrence and David Flint

The film elements for this sleazy 70s gem were long thought lost or destroyed but in 2013 the original camera negative was unearthed in a barn in rural England and painstakingly restored for its first official uncut release anywhere in the world by Severin Films on 11th June 2013. Director commentary and cast and crew interviews round out the package.

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The Mountain of the Cannibal God (Italian title: La montagna del dio cannibale) is a 1978 Italian cult movie starring Ursula Andress and Stacy Keach with English dialogue that was filmed in Sri Lanka. The film was also widely released as Slave of the Cannibal God and released in the UK as Prisoner of the Cannibal God. Despite being shown in cinemas in a cut version, it was banned in the UK until 2001 for its graphic violence and considered a “video nasty”.

Incredibly, not stopping the cannibal cycle of films which appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s in its tracks, The Mountain of the Cannibal God is one of the most head-scratching entries. Despite the cruelty inflicted upon animals in the film and the nudity, most famously that of Ursula Andress, underlying is an enjoyable but actually terribly ropey film which offers nothing in the way of tension, drama or soul. The plot is straightforward enough, Andress playing Susan Stevenson, the wife of an anthropologist who has been missing in the jungles of Guinea (check that sat nav, chaps), sets off to try and find him, with the aid of her annoying brother (Antonio Marsina) and scientist Edward Foster (Stacy Keach). The twist in the tale is that the siblings are actually searching for radioactive uranium hidden in remote caves – that’s if you don’t consider running into a tribe of peckish cannibals as a twist.

Keach was not adverse to taking roles that veered from, for example, Barrabas in Jesus of Nazareth to grimy British crime movie The Squeeze but exactly what Andress’s agent had assured her about the film is unclear – though years had passed since Dr No, an appearance just three years later in Clash of the Titans, surely proved her star had not completely diminished. The setting is anything but as classy as She. Regardless, the pair roam through the utterly unconvincingly dense forest, passing the same cheeseplants again and again, enough times that you too will soon forget why you thought all this was a good idea. 

On paper, the plot seems acceptable enough but it runs out of steam almost instantly, leaving us with unlovable characters and some tedious padding. The appearance of  the character Manolo (played by Claudio Cassinelli, who tragically died in a helipcopter crash in Martino’s Fists of Fury in 1986) makes little sense, other than to keep prodding Andress and Keach awake. Fortunately, we receive rather bigger jolts to keep us enthralled.

Though Martino has insisted that it was the producers of the film who insisted that footage of animals being slaughtered was inserted into the film, this excuse is used so often that it’s difficult to take seriously; was it really such a prizes project that a director of Martino’s standing and reputation would go along with any request? Thus, a large lizard is butchered, snakes skinned, a large spider trodden on and a cute fluffy thing, clearly with the same manager as Andress,  is strangled by a boa constrictor… very slowly.

That said, rather like ivory ornaments from yesterday, what’s done is done, it’s there and though ghoulish, it adds nothing, so poorly added to the rest of the film that it comes across as being just as, if not more gratuitous than, similar scenes in the far more challenging Cannibal Holocaust, Last Cannibal World and Cannibal Ferox. Keach bails out of the horror by falling off a waterfall, whilst Andress survives having a massive, drooling snake (do boa constrictors actually  drool? Answers by fax, please) drop on her, the wrestling scene being as convincing as a warm-up between Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks.

If the indignity of the script and the low budget weren’t enough, Andress still had to come to terms with the plentiful nudity she was expected to deliver – she didn’t disappoint. After finding her husband, dead and now looking like a toffee apple that’s been dropped on the carpet, her true motives are revealed but not before the cannibals capture her, treating her first as fondue and then as a Goddess. To prove their adulation, she is stripped and has her breasts anointed with orange mud (or maybe it’s honey) by cannibals who are similarly attired. The camera cuts to another cannibal girl, clearly enjoying herself whilst the frenzy of cannibals feasting and Ursula’s fondling reach a perplexing climax. To confirm you really are imagining it all, a dwarf cannibal is brained on the wall of a cave and one of his mates enthusiastically simulates congress with a large pig. Well done everyone.

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Martino is a terribly frustrating director, conjuring up wonderful gems like All the Colors of the Dark and Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key and, well, this. I appreciate we all have gas bills to pay but at what stage this wasn’t a catastrophe I can’t imagine. It is, still, well worth a watch, for all the bad stuff and the good – in particular the score from those prolific brothers, Guido and Maurizio De Angelis.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Related: Jungle Holocaust: Cannibal Tribes in Exploitation Cinema

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Cannibal Holocaust is a 1980 Italian cannibal film directed by Ruggero Deodato (House on the Edge of the Park) from a screenplay by Gianfranco Clerici, starring Carl Gabriel Yorke, Robert Kerman, Francesca Ciardi, Perry Pirkanen and Luca Giorgio Barbareschi. Cannibal Holocaust was filmed in the Amazonian rainforest with real indigenous tribes interacting with American and Italian actors and follows on from the director and scriptwriter’s Last Cannibal World (1976).

NB. Before scrolling down further please note that there are images in this posting that reflect the subject matter and content of this film and are therefore not suitable for younger horror fans. If in doubt, please click away now. Thank you.

Led by New York-based anthropologist Harold Monroe (Kerman), a team is assembled to search for a missing film crew who had ventured deep into the Amazonian rainforest to film a documentary about tribes still practising cannibalism. Assisted by local guides, Monroe ventures into the unknown and meets with members of the local Yacumo tribe who it seems were greatly upset by the film-makers whom he is seeking. Later meeting with the warring Yanomamö and Shamatari tribes, he gains the trust of the former by immersing himself in their culture, only to find the best they can do to help him find his friends is show him a pile of bones and some film cans.

After securing the tapes by taking part in a rather unpleasant cannibalistic ceremony, he returns to New York to view the tapes and try to piece together what has happened. We learn that the documentary, titled The Last Road To Hell, though veiled under the pretence of being a thoughtful study of ancient rites and culture, is an appalling catalogue of brutality on the part of the Americans to stage footage for maximum effect back home. As such, we see scenes of rape, amputation, the burning of an entire village and numerous scenes of animal cruelty, all with the intention of gaining an appropriate reaction from the tribes to make their film ever more sensational. The final reels show a sudden turn in events, after gang raping a female member of the tribe, they later find her ritually impaled as a punishment for ‘her’ crimes. However, she isn’t the only one to face trial, the cannibals seeking to avenge her fate by hunting down the film crew in merciless fashion. As the final reel finishes, Monroe wonders aloud, just “who the real cannibals are”?

Though, quite rightly, hailed as the benchmark and indeed the last word on the cannibal sub-genre, Cannibal Holocaust was far from the first venture into jungle brutality. The Richard Harris-starring A Man Called Horse (1970) had appeared a decade earlier and, even as a mainstream feature, alerted directors to the potential for shocking but fact-based films as serious money-makers, though earlier explorations in the pseudo-documentary field, classed as ‘mondo films’, beginning with Franco Prosperi and Gualtiero Jacopetti’s 1962 film Mondo Cane (A Dog’s World), had seen many film-makers cutting their teeth using sometimes outrageously exploitative footage.

It wasn’t until Umberto Lenzi’s 1972 film Man from Deep River, that the genre took off, with Italy firmly leading the way. Deodato’s own (excellent) Last Cannibal World (aka Ultimo Mondo Cannibale/Jungle Holocaust) appeared in 1976 to exceptional box-office results. Sergio Martino’s The Mountain of the Cannibal God even featured ex-James Bond bombshell Ursula Andress in the lead role, despite the graphic content, a sure sign of the bankability of the cannibal boom.

With the success of Last Cannibal World and the backing of German investors, Deodato and his producers, Franco Palaggi (whose credits also include working on A Fistful of Dollars) and Franco Di Nunzio (who also produced Deodato’s grimy, relentless House at the Edge of the Park) scouted South America for suitable locations, eventually settling on Leticia in southern-most Columbia, despite the remoteness meaning that getting there involved arduous trekking and boat trips. Armed with a screenplay by the prolific Italian writer Gianfranco Clerici (The New York Ripper, L’Anticristo, Last Cannibal World) they assembled a largely unknown cast but one which spoke English, both establishing a certain amount of credibility in terms of their background and making the film more saleable to foreign markets.

By far the most famous name was Robert Kerman who had made quite a name for himself in the adult film industry using the pseudonym R. Bolla. His most well-known role was in one of the most iconic films of the 1970s, Debbie Does Dallas, though his career in the field stretched well over 100 films. Continuing to act, though hampered by his hardcore career, he has since appeared in Cannibal Ferox, Airport ’79 and even a minor part in Sam Raimi’s Spiderman. The only other member of the cast to have had any sort of career not completely overshadowed by their role in Cannibal Holocaust is the Italian/Uruguayan Luca Barbareschi, who entered politics as part of Silvio Berlusconi’s government in 2008 and gained more notoriety in a filmed exchange with a journalist which resulted in the reporter being knocked out by Barbareschi.

Though Deodato has claimed that the shocking, visceral nature of the film and its dynamics are a commentary of events in Italy during the early 1970′s when the Red Brigade launched terrorist attacks in an attempt to bring about a revolutionary state through a destabilised country, this echoes slightly of many of his retrospective assertions about the film to paper over accusations over his allegedly tyrannical methods of direction. What is clear is his adoption of  Cinéma vérité techniques which used methods including provocation and staged scenarios in order to portray a ‘truth’ and realism to their films; these has already proved popular and successful in the mondo films of the 1960′s and 1971′s. The pops and crackles on the viewed footage (filmed on 16mm to add to the authenticity) in New York and the scratched frames add a genuinely convincing edge due to action.

Adding to the documentary feel is the oft-discussed violence and cruelty inflicted upon animals in the film, ranging from shrew-like fluffy creatures (actually a coati), a large spider, two monkeys (the lopping off of the head required two takes), a tethered wild pig and perhaps most notoriously, a turtle who suffers a protracted death for no other reason than to prompt revulsion and disgust from the audience. Deodato’s views have mellowed significantly over the years, indifference changing to ‘but the locals ate them afterwards’ to complete rejection, re-editing the film to excise the footage in 2011. Recollections from the cast, particularly Kerman who objected throughout the the animal deaths (and also Perry Pirkanen, who apparently cried after the turtle scene, a strange paradox considering his apparent on-screen glee). Viewed over 30 years later, these scenes are still amongst the strongest and most stomach-churning in the whole of the horror genre.

There have long been rumours that the sex scene between Yorke and Ciardi was not simulated, Ciardi already having been admonished by Deodato for her ‘prudishness’ in not wanting to bare her breasts. Real or not, it is another example of the blurring between fact and fiction which permeates the whole film. Deodato was also accused of under-paying his actors (and not paying the locals at all), as well as dictatorial behaviour throughout the shoot, upsetting and alienating most of the cast at one stage or another. The cast had a clause in their contract which stated that they were to give no interviews nor make any appearances regarding the film for a year after its release, so as to create the impression that they had indeed been slaughtered in the film. This backfired badly (or depending on your viewpoint, worked magnificently) as the authorities, convinced by the animal sequences and incredibly realistic gore, arrested Deodato on counts of not only obscenity but also murder.

In order to prove his innocence, the very much alive actors were gathered together to appear in a television program whilst many of the scenes had to be explained in great detail to convince the court that no-one was killed during the filming. The most iconic image in the film, that of the raped cannibal girl having been impaled on the wooden spike was revealed to be an actress sat on an obscured bicycle seat with a small piece of wood held between her teeth. It must be said that all the scenes of death and violence within the film remain as incredibly convincing and impressive as the day they were first screened.

The controversy did no harm to the film’s success, taking an alleged $5 million in the first ten days of release alone. Commercial video releases also did a roaring trade, the UK Go Video release being a mainstay of homely video libraries for 2-3 years before the video recordings act declared it prosecutable to rent or sell. It was also banned in many other countries, including Germany, Australia and New Zealand, but bucked the trend in Japan where it became the second biggest grossing film in the year of its release.

The film’s soundtrack was composed entirely by Italian composer Riz Ortolani, whom Deodato specifically requested because of Ortolani’s work in Mondo Cane, particularly the film’s main theme, “Ti guarderò nel cuore” (also known as “More”). Ortolani was (and still is) known for his rather romantic, sweeping scores, full of large string sections of plaintive melodies. His work on Cannibal Holocaust, perhaps surprisingly, is no different, the main theme being achingly beautiful, a reflection of the stunning settings but a counterpoint to the horrific violence portrayed. The score has become a classic of the genre and helped to elevate Ortolani to the upper echelons of Italian soundtrack composers, his work having since being used by directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Nicolas Winding Refn.

Though the cannibal sub-genre ran out of steam in the mid-80′s, the influence of Cannibal Holocaust is still felt today, the found-footage theme being used in the likes of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity, whilst also inspiring directors like Eli Roth — whose current project is the jungle-set Green Inferno — to forge their own careers.

Rather like many of the zombie films of the 1970′s and 1980′s, many films have passed themselves off as sequels to the original film but despite interest from Deodato in his own follow-up, set in an American city, slated to be titled simply Cannibals, this has yet to happen and the film remains as a stand-alone beacon of depravity, gut-churning set-pieces and one of the great achievements of horror cinema.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Wikipedia | IMDb | Ruggero Deodato

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The 1970s saw old taboos falling away in the cinema, and few horror film sub-genres benefited from the relaxation in censorship more than the cannibal film. In fact, this is a genre that scarcely existed prior to the Seventies. Sure, horror films had long hinted at cannibalism as a plot device – movies like Doctor X (1932) and others portrayed it as an element of psychosis without ever being overly explicit, and this would continue into the 1970s with films such as Cannibal Girls Frightmare and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – but no one had really explored the idea explicitly. Some things were just too tasteless, and cannibalism was something of a no-no with assorted censor boards around the world.

Yet the idea that remote tribes in the Amazon or on islands like Papua New Guinea were still practising cannibalism was a common one at the time, thanks to a conflation of suspicion, colonialist ideas, misunderstanding of tribal rituals (such as head hunting / shrinking) and old-fashioned racism. And, if we are to be fair, these beliefs were not entirely without validity, as some cultures still did practice cannibalism, albeit not as determinedly as was often made out. Certainly, the subject was exploited – 1956 roadshow movie Cannibal Island promised much in its sensationalist promotional art, even if the film itself was Gaw the Killer, an anthropological documentary from the 1931, re-edited and re-dubbed, that was notably lacking in anthropophagy, despite the best efforts of the narrator to suggest otherwise.

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Elsewhere, cartoons and comic books perpetuated the idea that any great white hunter who was captured by natives was bound to end up in a cooking pot, and Tarzan movies hinted that he bones the natives wore as decoration were not all from animals. 1954′s Cannibal Attack saw Johnny Weissmuller playing Johnny Weissmuller, fighting off enemy agents in a cannibal-filled jungle.

Hell Night director Tom De Simone’s terrible movie Terror in the Jungle (1968) had a small boy captured by a cannibal tribe and only saved by his ‘glowing’ blonde hair. Worship of blonde white people would be a theme in later, trashier cannibal movies too). Even the children’s big game hunting Adventure novel series by Willard Price had a Cannibal Adventure entry. But notably, none of these early efforts actually went the extra mile – the natives in these films may have been cannibals, but we had to take the filmmakers and writers word for that – no cannibalism actually took place on screen.

In the 1960s, the Mondo documentary would also take an interest in bizarre tribal rituals, and these mostly Italian films would subsequently come to inform the style of the cannibal films that emerged later. Certainly, later shockumentaries such as Savage Man, Savage Beast, This Violent World and Shocking Africa were closely related to contemporary films like Man from Deep River and Last Cannibal World, with their lurid mix of anthropological studies and sensationalism.

One such mondo movie was the 1974 Italian/Japanese Nuova Guinea, l’isola dei cannibali. Tribal scenes from this production – which also includes footage of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip on a Royal visit to the island (!) – were inserted into the zombie film Hell of the Living Dead (1981) to add verisimilitude. It was  later opportunistically released on DVD in the USA as The Real Cannibal Holocaust.

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The cannibal film as we know it now began in 1972, with Il paese del sesso selvaggio, also known as Deep River Savages, The Man from Deep River and Sacrifice!  It was directed by Umberto Lenzi, who would spend the next decade playing catch-up in a genre he pretty much invented with scriptwriters Francesco Barilli and Massimo D’Avak. This film essentially set many of the templates for the genre – graphic violence, extensive nudity, real animal slaughter and the culture clash between ‘civilised’ Westerners and ‘primitive’ tribes.

The film is, essentially, a rip-off of American western A Man Called Horse, with Italian exploitation icon Ivan Rassimov as a British photographer who finds himself stranded in the jungles of Thailand and captured by a native tribe. Eventually, after undergoing assorted humiliations and initiation rituals, he is accepted within the community, who are at war with a fierce, more primitive cannibal tribe.

Co-starring Mei Mei Lai (who would become one of the sub-genre’s stock players), the film is set up more as an adventure story than a horror film, but the look and feel of the story would subsequently inform other cannibal movies, and the scene where the cannibal tribe kill and eat a native certainly sets the scene for what is to come.

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Made in 1976, Ruggero Deodato’s Ultimo mondo cannibale (Last Cannibal World; Cannibal; Jungle Holocaust) also had the feel of an old-school jungle adventure, though Deodato expanded on what Lenzi had started – this tale of an explorer (played by Massimo Foschi) who is captured by a cannibal tribe features a remarkable amount of nudity (Foschi is kept naked in a cage for much of the film, teased and tormented by the tribe) and sex – including an animalistic sex scene between Foschi and Mei Mei Lai (Rassimov also co-stars). It also featured more graphic gore and real animal killing – the latter would become the achilles heel of the genre, something that even its admirers would find hard to defend. Even if the slaughtered animals were eaten by the filmmakers, showing such scenes for entertainment still left a bad taste with many, and over and above the sex and violence, would be the major cause of censorship for these films.

The Last Cannibal World proved to be a popular hit around the world (it even played UK cinemas after BBFC cuts) and sparked a mini-boom in cannibal film production. In 1977, Joe D’Amato continued his bizarre mutation of the Black Emanuelle series – which, under his guidance, had evolved from soft porn travelogue to featuring white slavery, rape, snuff movies, hardcore sex and even bestiality – with Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (aka Trap Them and Kill Them), a strange and uniquely 1970s mixture of of softcore sex and hardcore gore, as Laura Gemser goes in search of a lost cannibal tribe. Quite what audiences expecting sexy thrills thought when they were confronted with graphic castration scenes is anyone’s guess, but the film played successfully across Europe and America, albeit often in a cut form.

D’Amato returned to the genre in 1978 with Papaya – Love Goddess of the Cannibals, with Sirpa Lane which, despite its title features no cannibals, in a film that again mixed gore and softcore yet still managed to be rather dull.

Also in 1978, we had the only cannibal film with a big name cast. Mountain of the Cannibal God (aka Slave of the Cannibal God; Prisoner of the Cannibal God) saw former Bond girl Ursula Andress stripped and fondled by a cannibal tribe as she and Stacey Keach search for her missing husband. The starry cast didn’t mean that director Sergio Martino wasn’t going to include some particularly unnecessary animal cruelty and a bizarre (faked) scene of a man fucking a pig though, as well as graphic gore. At heart an old fashioned jungle adventure spiced up with 1970s sex ‘n’ violence, the most remarkable part of the film is how Martino managed to persuade Andress to appear completely naked. Perhaps she just wanted to show off how good her body was 16 years after Dr No!

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That same year saw an Indonesian entry in the genre with Primitives, also known as Savage Terror. This was essentially a rehash of The Last Cannibal World, but with less gore and no nudity, which resulted in a rather plodding jungle drama. This one is definitely for genre completists only, and proved to be a major disappointment when released on VHS to a cannibal-hungry public by Go Video in the UK as a follow-up to Cannibal Holocaust.

Ahh yes, Cannibal Holocaust. The Citizen Kane of cannibal movies, and the genre’s only undisputed masterpiece, the film would also become the most notorious film in the genre, shocking audiences and censors alike and even now seen as being about as extreme as cinema can go.

The film began life as just another cannibal film, Deodato hired to make something to follow up The Last Cannibal World. But with the relative freedom granted to him (all his backers wanted was a gory cannibal film), he came up with a movie that critiqued the sensationalism of the Mondo movie makers and the audience’s lust for blood, with his tale of an exploitative documentary crew who set out to film cannibal tribes but through their own arrogance and cruelty bring about their own demise.

Deodato’s film effectively invents the Found Footage style of filmmaking, his fake documentary approach being so effective that he found himself facing a trial, accused of actually murdering his actors! Given that the film mixes real animal killing with worryingly effective scenes of violence, all shot in shaky, hand-held style, it’s perhaps no surprise that people thought it was real – even into the 1990s, the film was reported as being a ‘snuff movie’ by the British press.

But there is more going on here than mere sensationalism and sadism – Deodato’s film fizzes with a righteous anger and passion, and makes absolutely no concession to moral restraint. There’s a level of intensity here that is beyond fiction – certainly, the story of the film’s production and reception would make for a remarkable movie in its own right. Almost imprisoned and seeing his film banned in Italy and elsewhere (in Britain, it was one of the first video nasties), Deodato was suitably chastened, and never made anything like it again.

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Yet despite the bans, the legal issues and the outrage, Cannibal Holocaust was enough of a sensation to spawn imitators. Umberto Lenzi returned to the genre he’s more or less invented in 1980 with Eaten Alive (Magiati Vivi; The Emerald Jungle; Doomed to Die), which managed to mix cannibal tribes, nudity and gore with a story that exploits the recent Guyana massacre led by Jim Jones. This tale of a fanatical religious cult leader had an cannibal movie all-star cast – Ivan Rassimov, Mei Mei Lai and Robert Kerman (aka porn star R. Bolla) who had starred in Cannibal Holocaust were joined by Janet Agren and Mel Ferrer in what is a textbook example of a cheap knock-off. Not only does the film cash in on earlier movies and recent news events, it actually ‘cannibalises’ whole scenes from other films, Lenzi’s own Man from Deep River amongst them. Yet despite this, it’s fairly entertaining stuff.

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Lenzi followed this with Cannibal Ferox (aka Make Them Die Slowly; Let Them Die Slowly), a more blatant imitation of Cannibal Holocaust. Kerman again makes an appearance (albeit a brief one), while Italian cult icon John Morghen (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) headlines a fairly ham fisted tale of an anthropology student who sets out to prove that cannibalism is a myth, only to find she’s very, very wrong. Directed with indifference by Lenzi (who clearly had no interest in theses films beyond a pay check), the film features more gratuitous animal killing and some remarkably sadistic scenes (two castrations and a woman hung with hooks through her breasts), which invariably ensured that the film would be “banned in 31 countries”.

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1980 also brought us Zombie Holocaust (aka Doctor Butcher M.D.) in which Marino Girolami opportunistically livened up his Zombie Flesh Eaters imitation by adding a mad doctor, cannibals and nudity to the mix, and Cannibal Apocalypse, where Vietnam vets John Saxon and John Morghen were driven to cannibalism in Vietnam and then go on the rampage in the USA.

Jess Franco entered the genre in 1980 with Cannibals (aka The White Cannibal Queen) and Devil Hunter (aka Man Hunter), but the crudity of the cannibal movie was unsuited to a director more at home with surreal, erotic gothic fantasies. Cannibals was the more interesting of the two – Franco’s intense close-ups and slow motion during the cannibalism scenes add a bizarre, almost dream-like edge to the proceedings, in a tale that mixes a one-armed Al Cliver and a naked Sabrina Siani as the blonde goddess worshipped by the ‘cannibal tribe’. Devil Hunter is a ridiculous mishmash with a kidnapped movie star, a bug-eyed, big-dicked monster and cannibals. Franco himself was dismissive of both films, and they are recommended only for the completist.

Cannibals

Similar to the Franco films (coming from the same producers and featuring footage from Cannibals) is the tedious Cannibal Terror, a French effort that sees a bunch of kidnappers hanging out in a cannibal-infested jungle. It’s pretty hard work to sit through even for the most ardent admirer of Eurotrash. Meanwhile, cannibalistic monks cropped up in the 1981 US movie Raw Force (later retitled) Kung Fu Cannibals but they were only one of the smorgasbord element in this exploitation trash and being a ‘religious order’ rather than a tribe merit just a brief mention here.

After this flurry of activity, the genre began to fizzle out, exploitation filmmakers moving on to the next big thing (i.e. knock offs of Conan and Mad Max). It wasn’t until 1985 that we saw a revival of the jungle cannibal film with Amazonia (aka White Slave), directed by Mario Gariazzo. A strange mix of revenge drama and cannibal film, the movie is a gender-reversal of Man from Deep River, with Elvire Audray as Catherine Miles, brought up by a cannibal tribe after her parents are murdered in the Amazon. Despite some gore and nudity, it’s a rather plodding affair. It should not be confused with Ruggero Deodato’s Cut and Run, also sometimes called Amazonia but which – despite the setting and some gruesome moments – was not a return to the cannibal genre for the director.

More fun was Massacre in Dinosaur Valley (aka Naked and Savage), a cheerfully trashy affair directed by Michele Massimo Tarantini, with the survivors of a plane crash – including nubile young models and Indiana Jones like palaeontologist Michael Sopkiw battling slave traders, nature and cannibal tribes (but not dinosaurs) in the Amazon. Gratuitous nudity, splashy gore, bad acting and a ludicrous series of events ensure that this one is a lot of fun.

Natura Contro, retitled Cannibal Holocaust II but unconnected to the earlier film, is possibly the most obscure of the films in the sub-genre. Made in 1988, it is the final film by Antonio Climati, best known for his uncompromising Mondo movies of the 1970s. It’s surprising then that this is fairly tame stuff by cannibal movie standards, telling the story of a group of people who head to the Amazon to find a missing professor. By 1988, both the Italian exploitation film and the cannibal genre were breathing their last, and the excesses of a decade earlier were no longer commercially viable – the mainstream audience for such films had dwindled considerably, while censorship had tightened up.

Natura Contro

It would be another fifteen years before we saw the return of the jungle holocaust film, and then it was hardly worth it. Bruno Mattei, a prolific hack since the 1970s, had someone managed to keep making films, and in 2003 knocked out a pair of ultra-low budget, almost unwatchably bad cannibal films. In the Land of the Cannibals (aka Cannibal Ferox 3) and Cannibal World (aka Cannibal Holocaust 2) were slow, clumsy and boring attempts to cash in on the cult reputation of Mattei (a couple of years later, he’d make two similarly dismal zombie films) and the reputation of the earlier cannibal movies (needless to say, these are not official sequels to either Holocaust or Ferox). These two films seemed to be the final nail in the genre’s coffin.

But with the reputation of Cannibal Holocaust continuing to increase, and a general return to ‘hard core horror’ in the new century with films like Saw and Hostel, the cannibal film has seen a slight revival. But although Deodato has talked about making a sequel to Cannibal Holocaust, the new films have been American productions, even though they are informed by the Italian films of the past.

Jonathan Hensleigh’s Welcome to the Jungle , made in 2007, channels Holocaust with its found footage format as a group of remarkably annoying treasure hunters head to New Guinea in search of the missing Michael Rockerfeller, hoping to cash in on his discovery. Instead, their bickering attracts the attention of local cannibal tribes, who stalk and slaughter them. There;s an interesting idea at play here, but the characters are all so utterly loathsome that you’ll struggle to make it to the point where they start getting killed.

The latest attempt to revive the genre comes from Eli Roth, who’s Green Inferno is about to be released. The film takes its title from Cannibal Holocaust (one of Roth’s favourite films) and the plot – student activists travel to the Amazon to protect a tribe but find themselves captured by cannibals – sounds like a copy of Cannibal Ferox. Having received positive reviews at festivals, we hope the film is able to capture the spirit of the original movies, if not their frenzied style.

Certainly, we are unlikely to see anyone making a film quite like Cannibal Holocaust again – there are laws in place to stop it, if nothing else. But we can now look back at this most controversial of horror sub-genres and see that they represent a time when cinema was without restraint. As such, they are more than simply films, they are historical time capsules, and for those with strong stomachs, well worth investigating.

Article by David Flint

Related: Cannibal Holocaust | Devil Hunter | The Man from Deep River | The Mountain of the Cannibal God

Offline reading:

Buy Eaten Alive! Italian Cannibal and Zombie Movies from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

The film world in Britain during the early 80s was grim. Most of the grand cinema palaces of yesteryear were, if not already transformed into Bingo halls, falling apart, offering a less-than-enticing combination of bad projection, uncomfortable, dirty seats and programmes which required the audience to sit through endless amounts of commercials and unwatchable travelogues before finally being allowed to see the main feature. With unemployment at an all-time high, people were more inclined to stay home and save their money, watching any of the three TV channels available until closedown before midnight.

But as the decade began, an alternative appeared that would chance viewing habits forever. The video recorder. Although they’d been on the market for a few years, it was in 1980 that the VCR first began to be more than just a rich man’s toy. Although still relatively costly to buy, many electrical stores offered reasonable monthly rental schemes for VCR’s. Seemingly overnight, every household in the country had a video recorder next to the TV and an expensive family night out at the pictures suddenly seemed less attractive when you could choose from a multitude of feature films for the same price and watch in the comfort of your own home, as the number of films available to buy or rent exploded.

Most major distributors looked upon home video with suspicion, and were reluctant to release their biggest titles onto this new format when there was still money to be made from theatrical reissues, and so the rental shops which began to spring up on the high street were, for the most part, filled with low budget, independent films from a multitude of small distributors who appeared to cash in on the video boom. And it quickly became clear that there was a substantial audience for the material which the British Board of Film Censors had long fought to protect us from. The more lurid the cover art, the more sex and violence promised by the blurb, the more the public wanted it. Labels like Go Video, Astra, Intervision and Vipco emerged to release films from all over the world, with horror being the most reliable genre. Big hits were made out of films which had barely ever seen the light of a movie screen in the UK and directors such as Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci became as bankable in the video world as Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorcese. The video rental top ten was regularly packed with movies like I Spit On Your Grave, The Driller Killer and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Some of these were films which the BBFC had banned outright, heavily cut or which stood little chance of being passed if submitted for approval. But there was no compulsory censorship of video, so images that were forbidden in the cinema could be enjoyed in their full gory glory at home. Video labels were buying up whatever salacious sounding titles that they could find and releasing them without even considering submitting them to the BBFC. And the British public could not get enough of it. Every street corner, it seemed, had a video shop. Even off-licenses and petrol stations got in on the action.

But this frivolous phase of freedom would not last.

It wasn’t long before rumours started spreading about the open availability of films showing extreme, explicit violence, torture and mutilation. Films too extreme even for an ‘X’ certificate were openly available to anyone, even children. The public could use the slow motion and pause buttons to get maximum perverse pleasure from their video sadism. Worse still, it seemed that Cannibal Holocaust and SS Experiment Camp had replaced balloon benders and clowns as a staple of children’s parties. Not innocent mind was safe from the onslaught of the Video Nasties, a term first used in the trade that would be a household word by 1982.

Once the press had their teeth into the story, there was no stopping them. “Ban the Sadist Videos!” screamed The Daily Mail, outlining the dangers that the uncensored world of home entertainment presented to the country’s moral fabric. Various politicians and pressure groups (not least Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers and Listeners Association) were quick to take up the cause. Teachers groups expressed concern about the effect on impressionable children, and church groups were quick to complain too. Faced with such pressure, the Director of Public Prosecutions agreed to the first obscenity charges to be brought against horror videos, and soon police forces up and down the country were carrying out random raids on shops, clearing the shelves of potentially obscene material.

As the whole concept of horror movies being obscene was so new, worried video shop owners had no idea which films they would be prosecuted for, so in an effort to clarify the situation the Department of Public Prosecutions issued a list of  “nasties”, based on titles which had been successfully prosecuted or which were awaiting trial. The list would vary in length over the next few years, before settling on 39 movies. In addition to the official Nasties list various local councils had their own selection of condemned videos to muddy the situation a little more. Shops found stocking the forbidden films during police raids – and police raids were a weekly occurrence – faced prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act.

When their day in court came most video shop owners pleaded no contest to the charges of issuing obscene material for gain in order to avoid a lengthy prison sentence – this meant that many movies were condemned as Obscene without ever going before a jury, or even being watched by magistrates. Some distributors stopped distributing their horror titles in order to avoid the wrath of the DPP. One distributor was sent to jail for marketing Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, despite the fact that it was not the uncut version he was distributing (as much as the retailers, the distributors often had no idea of which version of a film they’d released and, of course, had no way to know that horror films would suddenly fall foul of the OPA). London based Palace Pictures pointed out the absurdity of travelling up and down the country to defend The Evil Dead – which was released on video in the BBFC X-rated cut version – against various local charges of obscenity, so had the case centralised to a court in the East end of London — where the film was found not guilty. This, however, did not prevent other police forces from continuing to seize the film. An acquittal under the OPA did not necessarily set a national precedent, and local sensibilities would continue to come into play (though notably, a single conviction DID seem to set some sort of precedent, conveniently).

The British Board of Film Censors, who had seen their income drop to rock bottom during the video boom, were quick to back up the dangers of an unregulated system of distribution. The BBFC were soon appointed by Parliament to govern the classification of all films to be released on video in the UK. The 1984 Video Recordings Act ensured that Britain would never again fall prey to the immoral whims of smut peddling distributors hungry to make a quick buck. Over the course of the next few years, all unclassified videos would be removed from the shelves of British video stores. By 1988, it was illegal to sell an unclassified tape.

Of course, it was not only horror and sex films that were released without BBFC certificates but films from all genres, including children’s films. Many smaller, well established shops had to remove the majority of their stock , forcing a large number out of business. Many distributors could not afford the high price of BBFC classification for their films — particularly if the censors then demanded cuts, as was often the case. By this time, the major Hollywood producers had woken up to the money to be made from video, and the public increasingly had the chance to take home a recent blockbuster instead of an obscure 1970′s horror film. Most small labels simply vanished. The VRA ensured that it was no longer the little guy making the money from the video industry.

Amazingly, as the hysteria died down, BBFC head James Ferman still felt compelled to overprotect the public from the dangers of violent imagery. Even though they were never on any Video Nasties lists he refused to grant BBFC certificates to numerous films, including The Exorcist, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Straw Dogs. He had various forbidden images such as nunchakus (chain sticks) and blood on breasts, which he considered to be a trigger image for rapists. Although the Video Recordings Act was brought in to combat violent video, he was even stricter on sexual images – female genitalia was forbidden, as was any sex act involving more than two people. “Instructional” drug use and criminal activity would be cut, to prevent ‘copycat’ crime. And of course, most horror films had to be cut. As a result a strong black market grew throughout the UK for pirate videos of uncut horror or sex videos, and a huge underground fan base emerged, with fanzines, books and film festivals keeping the Nasties alive.

Strangely, the British public didn’t seem to mind the nanny mentality, happy to believe that censorship of material freely available in the rest of Europe was for their own good. This belief was encouraged by the tabloids, who were only too keen to stoke up public hysteria by linking headline-grabbing crimes to video violence, be it the Hungerford massacre and Rambo, or the Jamie Bulger case and Child’s Play 3.

However, times change, even in Britain, and with a new millennium came a new maturity. The public no longer seemed overly worried by horror videos – possibly because new bête noires like the internet and video games have taken their place. Once Ferman resigned from the BBFC at the end of 1998, UK film censorship turned over a new leaf.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Straw Dogs, The Exorcist and The Story of O – all considered threats to public safety by Ferman – quickly received uncut certificates. When challenged at appeal over their refusal to pass The Last House on the Left uncut, the BBFC were publicly forced to admit that there was no legal reason for them to arbitrarily cut films that were once banned as Video Nasties – something they had always claimed was a legal requirement they had no control over – and subsequently a lot of the Nasties have now been passed uncut… some with a 15 certificate! With one or two exceptions, Ferman’s immediate successor Robin Duval managed to erase the strict censorship regime which emanated from the Nasties scare and now it is relatively rare for a horror movie to be cut or banned to protect the impressionable minds of the British public.

There are, of course, still exceptions – most recently The Bunny Game has been banned outright, while The Human Centipede 2 was initially banned before finally being released with extensive cuts. But by and large, it is now acknowledged that horror films are not a threat to civilisation. We perhaps shouldn’t be too complacent, given British history and the current moral panic that is once again gripping the country (this time aimed at internet porn, but always likely to mutate as the moralists look to assert control), but it seems unlikely that we’ll ever see a return to the dark days of the 1980s again.

David Flint

This is a historical listing of all films that were deemed to be ‘video nasties’ in the UK. Read the story of the ‘video nasties’ here.

When horror films began to be seized by police under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, it was something new – previously, only sexual material was thought to be ‘obscene’ (“taken as a whole, the work has a tendency to ‘deprave and corrupt’ ‘ – that is, make morally bad – a significant proportion of those likely to see it.”). In order to ‘help’ the video trade – which of course had no idea which horror films would suddenly be considered ‘obscene’ – the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) drew up lists of titles that had either been successfully prosecuted or had prosecutions pending, starting on June 30th 1983 and ending o December 1st 1985. This list would change according to convictions or acquittals, and peaked at 62 titles. The final list that existed by the time the Video Recordings Act 1984 came into force featured 39 films, and this final list is the one used by most cult movie collectors as ‘definitive’.

Naturally, most shops began clearing their shelves of the films on the list – even those that were never successfully prosecuted – and so all these movies are amongst the most collectable VHS releases.

The final 39 official ‘video nasties’:

Absurd (uncut)

Buy as Horrible on DVD from Amazon.com

Anthropophagous The Beast

Buy Anthropophagous the Beast on DVD from Amazon.com

Axe (aka California Axe Massacre)

Buy Axe on DVD from Amazon.com

The Beast in Heat (SS Hell Camp)

Buy SS Hell Camp on DVD from Amazon.com

Blood Bath (1971)

Blood Feast

Buy on Blu-ray from Amazon.com

Blood Rites (aka The Ghastly Ones)

Buy on DVD from Amazon.com

Bloody Moon

Buy on DVD from Amazon.com

The Burning (uncut)

Buy on Blu-ray + DVD combo from Amazon.com

Cannibal Apocalypse 

Buy on DVD from Amazon.com

Cannibal Ferox (uncut)

Buy on DVD from Amazon.com

Cannibal Holocaust

Buy on DVD from Amazon.com

Buy Cannibal Holocaust and the Savage Cinema of Ruggero Deodato book from Amazon.co.uk

Cannibal Man

Buy on DVD from Amazon.com

Devil Hunter

Buy on DVD from Amazon.com

Don’t Go in the Woods

Buy on DVD from Amazon.com

Driller Killer

Buy The Driller Killer on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Evilspeak (uncut)

Buy on Blu-ray from Amazon.com

Exposé (House on Straw Hill)

Buy uncut Blu-ray + DVD combo from Amazon.com

Faces of Death

Buy 30th Anniversary Edition on DVD from Amazon.com

Fight for Your Life

Buy on DVD from Amazon.com

Forest of Fear (aka Bloodeaters)

Buy on DVD from Amazon.com

Flesh for Frankenstein

Buy on DVD from Amazon.com

The Gestapo’s Last Orgy

Buy SS triple-bill on DVD from Amazon.com

The House by the Cemetery

Buy on Blu-ray from Amazon.com

House on the Edge of the Park

Buy on Instant Video from Amazon.com

I Spit on Your Grave

Buy I Spit on Your Grave uncut with commentary by Meir Zarchi on DVD from Amazon.com

Island of Death

The Last House on the Left

Buy on DVD from Amazon.com

Love Camp 7

Buy on DVD from Amazon.com

Madhouse

Buy on DVD from Amazon.com

Mardi Gras Massacre

Nightmares in a Damaged Brain

Night of the Bloody Apes

Night of the Demon

Snuff

SS Experiment Camp

Buy SS Experiment Camp + SS Girls + SS Hell Camp triple-bill DVD from Amazon.com

Tenebrae

The Werewolf and the Yeti

Zombie Flesh Eaters

Buy Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide on Nucleus DVD from Amazon.co.uk

The remaining films that were removed from the ‘nasties’ list over the 18 month period were (dates removed from the list included where known):

The Beyond (removed April 1985)

The Bogey Man

Cannibal Terror (removed September 1985)

Contamination

Dead and Buried (removed June 1985)

Death Trap (removed December 1985)

Deep River Savages (removed September 1985)

Delirium (removed May 1985)

Don’t Go Near the Park

Don’t Look in the Basement (removed December 1985)

The Evil Dead (removed September 1985)

Buy uncut The Evil Dead trilogy on Blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk

Frozen Scream (removed October 1984)

Funhouse

I Miss You Hugs and Kisses (removed October 1984)

Inferno (removed September 1985)

Killer Nun

The Living Dead (aka The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue – removed April 1985)

Nightmare Maker (removed December 1985)

Possession (removed October 1984)

Pranks (removed September 1985)

Prisoner of the Cannibal God (removed May 1985)

Revenge of the Bogey Man

The Slayer (removed April 1985)

Terror Eyes (removed June 1985)

Toolbox Murders (removed May 1985)

Unhinged (removed December 1985)

Visiting Hours (removed November 1984)

The Witch Who Came from the Sea (removed June 1985)

Women Behind Bars (removed October 1984)

Zombie Creeping Flesh

It’s impossible to list all the films seized by individual police forces, of course – Manchester, under the grip of fanatical Christian police chief James Anderton (later immortalised in music as “God’s Cop” by the Happy Mondays), operated a list in excess of the DPPs (including a blanket ban on the softcore Electric Blue series, Werewolf Woman, Dawn of the Mummy, Massacre Mansion, Night of the Seagulls, Mother’s Day, Rosemary’s Killer and Superstition), while other films confiscated by police forces included Maniac, The Hills Have Eyes, Xtro, The Thing, Friday the 13th, Madman, Basket Case, Emmanuelle 2, Children of the Corn (which had been further cut by distributors EMI after gaining BBFC certification), Suffer Little Children (seized by police before it was even released and while negotiations over cuts were taking place with the BBFC) as well as numerous softcore and hardcore adult movies.

Buy The Art of the Nasty book from Amazon.co.uk

Most notoriously – and evidence of the incredible ignorance of the police carrying out these pointless raids – were the seizures of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (allegedly mistaken for Cannibal Apocalypse!), Lee Marvin war film The Big Red One, Burt Reynolds comedy The Last Little Whorehouse in Texas, Disney movie The Devil and Max Devlin (after a mischief-making complaint from anti-censorship journalist Liam T. Sanford) and An Unmarried Woman!

David Flint, Horrorpedia

Read the story of the ‘video nasties’ here | ‘Nasty’ episode of The Young Ones BBC comedy series

Video Nasty is a six part British comic book series, which began publication in March 2014.

The story takes place in 1983, and is a mix of police mystery and horror, set against the back drop of the Video Nasty hysteria that was sweeping the UK at the time. When a man is murdered with a Nazi dagger, the press, politicians and police Chief Constable are keen to place the blame for the killing on fans of ‘video nasties’. However, the man in charge of the investigation is not so sure…

The story weaves fact and fiction together, with characters based on real life people (including infamous Manchester Chief Constable James Anderton) and events, and presents the often hysterical claims made about violent video while upholding them to ridicule.

The book is written by Mario Covone and illustrated by Vasilis Logios. Each issue has cover art by Graham Humphreys, the artist responsible for the original Palace Video artwork for The Evil Dead.

The six editions are available individually or as a complete set, both in print and as e-books. There is also a hardback version, and special edition available in VHS-style clamshell box.

“This is good stuff so far – I ploughed through both issues quickly and was left wanting more, which is always a good sign” David Flint, Strange Things Are Happening

www.mariocovone.com

DF

Cannibal Holocaust is a 1980 Italian cannibal film directed by Ruggero Deodato (House on the Edge of the Park) from a screenplay by Gianfranco Clerici, starring Carl Gabriel Yorke, Robert Kerman, Francesca Ciardi, Perry Pirkanen and Luca Giorgio Barbareschi. Cannibal Holocaust was filmed in the Amazonian rainforest with real indigenous tribes interacting with American and Italian actors and follows on from the director and scriptwriter’s Last Cannibal World (1976).

Led by New York-based anthropologist Harold Monroe (Kerman), a team is assembled to search for a missing film crew who had ventured deep into the Amazonian rainforest to film a documentary about tribes still practising cannibalism. Assisted by local guides, Monroe ventures into the unknown and meets with members of the local Yacumo tribe who it seems were greatly upset by the film-makers whom he is seeking. Later meeting with the warring Yanomamö and Shamatari tribes, he gains the trust of the former by immersing himself in their culture, only to find the best they can do to help him find his friends is show him a pile of bones and some film cans.

After securing the tapes by taking part in a rather unpleasant cannibalistic ceremony, he returns to New York to view the tapes and try to piece together what has happened. We learn that the documentary, titled The Last Road To Hell, though veiled under the pretence of being a thoughtful study of ancient rites and culture, is an appalling catalogue of brutality on the part of the Americans to stage footage for maximum effect back home. As such, we see scenes of rape, amputation, the burning of an entire village and numerous scenes of animal cruelty, all with the intention of gaining an appropriate reaction from the tribes to make their film ever more sensational. The final reels show a sudden turn in events, after gang raping a female member of the tribe, they later find her ritually impaled as a punishment for ‘her’ crimes. However, she isn’t the only one to face trial, the cannibals seeking to avenge her fate by hunting down the film crew in merciless fashion. As the final reel finishes, Monroe wonders aloud, just “who the real cannibals are”?

Though, quite rightly, hailed as the benchmark and indeed the last word on the cannibal sub-genre, Cannibal Holocaust was far from the first venture into jungle brutality. The Richard Harris-starring A Man Called Horse (1970) had appeared a decade earlier and, even as a mainstream feature, alerted directors to the potential for shocking but fact-based films as serious money-makers, though earlier explorations in the pseudo-documentary field, classed as ‘mondo films’, beginning with Franco Prosperi and Gualtiero Jacopetti’s 1962 film Mondo Cane (A Dog’s World), had seen many film-makers cutting their teeth using sometimes outrageously exploitative footage.

It wasn’t until Umberto Lenzi’s 1972 film Man from Deep River, that the genre took off, with Italy firmly leading the way. Deodato’s own (excellent) Last Cannibal World (aka Ultimo Mondo Cannibale/Jungle Holocaust) appeared in 1976 to exceptional box-office results. Sergio Martino’s The Mountain of the Cannibal God even featured ex-James Bond bombshell Ursula Andress in the lead role, despite the graphic content, a sure sign of the bankability of the cannibal boom.

With the success of Last Cannibal World and the backing of German investors, Deodato and his producers, Franco Palaggi (whose credits also include working on A Fistful of Dollars) and Franco Di Nunzio (who also produced Deodato’s grimy, relentless House at the Edge of the Park) scouted South America for suitable locations, eventually settling on Leticia in southern-most Columbia, despite the remoteness meaning that getting there involved arduous trekking and boat trips. Armed with a screenplay by the prolific Italian writer Gianfranco Clerici (The New York Ripper, L’Anticristo, Last Cannibal World) they assembled a largely unknown cast but one which spoke English, both establishing a certain amount of credibility in terms of their background and making the film more saleable to foreign markets.

By far the most famous name was Robert Kerman who had made quite a name for himself in the adult film industry using the pseudonym R. Bolla. His most well-known role was in one of the most iconic films of the 1970s, Debbie Does Dallas, though his career in the field stretched well over 100 films. Continuing to act, though hampered by his hardcore career, he has since appeared in Cannibal Ferox, Airport ’79 and even a minor part in Sam Raimi’s Spiderman. The only other member of the cast to have had any sort of career not completely overshadowed by their role in Cannibal Holocaust is the Italian/Uruguayan Luca Barbareschi, who entered politics as part of Silvio Berlusconi’s government in 2008 and gained more notoriety in a filmed exchange with a journalist which resulted in the reporter being knocked out by Barbareschi.

Though Deodato has claimed that the shocking, visceral nature of the film and its dynamics are a commentary of events in Italy during the early 1970′s when the Red Brigade launched terrorist attacks in an attempt to bring about a revolutionary state through a destabilised country, this echoes slightly of many of his retrospective assertions about the film to paper over accusations over his allegedly tyrannical methods of direction. What is clear is his adoption of  Cinéma vérité techniques which used methods including provocation and staged scenarios in order to portray a ‘truth’ and realism to their films; these has already proved popular and successful in the mondo films of the 1960′s and 1971′s. The pops and crackles on the viewed footage (filmed on 16mm to add to the authenticity) in New York and the scratched frames add a genuinely convincing edge due to action.

Adding to the documentary feel is the oft-discussed violence and cruelty inflicted upon animals in the film, ranging from shrew-like fluffy creatures (actually a coati), a large spider, two monkeys (the lopping off of the head required two takes), a tethered wild pig and perhaps most notoriously, a turtle who suffers a protracted death for no other reason than to prompt revulsion and disgust from the audience. Deodato’s views have mellowed significantly over the years, indifference changing to ‘but the locals ate them afterwards’ to complete rejection, re-editing the film to excise the footage in 2011. Recollections from the cast, particularly Kerman who objected throughout the the animal deaths (and also Perry Pirkanen, who apparently cried after the turtle scene, a strange paradox considering his apparent on-screen glee). Viewed over 30 years later, these scenes are still amongst the strongest and most stomach-churning in the whole of the horror genre.

There have long been rumours that the sex scene between Yorke and Ciardi was not simulated, Ciardi already having been admonished by Deodato for her ‘prudishness’ in not wanting to bare her breasts. Real or not, it is another example of the blurring between fact and fiction which permeates the whole film. Deodato was also accused of under-paying his actors (and not paying the locals at all), as well as dictatorial behaviour throughout the shoot, upsetting and alienating most of the cast at one stage or another. The cast had a clause in their contract which stated that they were to give no interviews nor make any appearances regarding the film for a year after its release, so as to create the impression that they had indeed been slaughtered in the film. This backfired badly (or depending on your viewpoint, worked magnificently) as the authorities, convinced by the animal sequences and incredibly realistic gore, arrested Deodato on counts of not only obscenity but also murder.

In order to prove his innocence, the very much alive actors were gathered together to appear in a television program whilst many of the scenes had to be explained in great detail to convince the court that no-one was killed during the filming. The most iconic image in the film, that of the raped cannibal girl having been impaled on the wooden spike was revealed to be an actress sat on an obscured bicycle seat with a small piece of wood held between her teeth. It must be said that all the scenes of death and violence within the film remain as incredibly convincing and impressive as the day they were first screened.

The controversy did no harm to the film’s success, taking an alleged $5 million in the first ten days of release alone. Commercial video releases also did a roaring trade, the UK Go Video release being a mainstay of homely video libraries for 2-3 years before the video recordings act declared it prosecutable to rent or sell. It was also banned in many other countries, including Germany, Australia and New Zealand, but bucked the trend in Japan where it became the second biggest grossing film in the year of its release.

The film’s soundtrack was composed entirely by Italian composer Riz Ortolani, whom Deodato specifically requested because of Ortolani’s work in Mondo Cane, particularly the film’s main theme, “Ti guarderò nel cuore” (also known as “More”). Ortolani was (and still is) known for his rather romantic, sweeping scores, full of large string sections of plaintive melodies. His work on Cannibal Holocaust, perhaps surprisingly, is no different, the main theme being achingly beautiful, a reflection of the stunning settings but a counterpoint to the horrific violence portrayed. The score has become a classic of the genre and helped to elevate Ortolani to the upper echelons of Italian soundtrack composers, his work having since being used by directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Nicolas Winding Refn.

Though the cannibal sub-genre ran out of steam in the mid-80′s, the influence of Cannibal Holocaust is still felt today, the found-footage theme being used in the likes of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity, whilst also inspiring directors like Eli Roth — whose current project is the jungle-set Green Inferno — to forge their own careers.

Rather like many of the zombie films of the 1970′s and 1980′s, many films have passed themselves off as sequels to the original film but despite interest from Deodato in his own follow-up, set in an American city, slated to be titled simply Cannibals, this has yet to happen and the film remains as a stand-alone beacon of depravity, gut-churning set-pieces and one of the great achievements of horror cinema.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Wikipedia | IMDb | Ruggero Deodato

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Cannibal Ferox, also known as Make Them Die Slowly, is a 1981 Italian exploitation film written and directed by Umberto Lenzi. Upon its release, the film’s US distributor claimed it was “the most violent film ever made”. Cannibal Ferox was also claimed to be “banned in 31 countries”, some of which lifted their bans only recently. It can be considered one of the ‘unholy trinity’ of superior Italian cannibal films, alongside Jungle Holocaust and Cannibal Holocaust.

ferōx m, f, n (genitive ferōcis); third declension

1. wild, bold, gallant
2. warlike
3. defiant, arrogant

In the jungles of the Amazon, brother and sister, Rudy (Danilo Mattei, Anglicised as Bryan Redford) and Gloria (Lorraine De Selle, (Emanuelle in America, House on the Edge of the Park) and their friend Pat (Zora Kerova, appearing here as Pat Johnson, also seen in the likes of The New York Ripper and Anthropophagous) are on a mission to prove Gloria’s assertion that cannibalism is a Western myth. Alas, their jeep breaks down and they encounter drug dealers on the run from New York; Mike (Giovanni Lombardo Radice, aka John Morghen, House on the Edge of the Park, City of the Living Dead) and Joe (Walter Lucchini). It transpires that the pair’s busman’s holiday has developed to bothering the local tribes for cocaine and jewels, not to mention enraging them further by torturing and killing their local guide whilst Mike was high on drugs. This ‘misunderstanding’ has led to the cannibals attacking and leaving Joe badly injured. Regardless, Mike continues to push his fellow travellers to the limit, seducing Pat and killing a native girl for kicks. The locals take exception to this and begin to hunt down the Americans in an avalanche of cruelty from hooks slicing through breasts to castration to good old-fashioned brain chomping. Only one person survives but what state will they be in when the horror is over?

Director Umberto Lenzi (Almost Human, Nightmare City), a stalwart of Italy’s genre films, bookended the cannibal film era, beginning with Man from Deep River in 1972 and essentially closing it here in 1981 (though had helmed the tamer Eaten Alive in 1980). Ferox, incidentally, was re-titled Woman from Deep River on its Australian release. Ferox was pretty much the last word and left the genre with no body part or animal left to mush up. Though remaining one of the most debated films of the sub-genre, there can be little argument that Ferox lacks the cerebral qualities of Holocausts both Jungle and Cannibal, quickly dispensing with the unnecessary introduction to the characters and moving swiftly on to breathtaking scenes of brutality and depravity. Though fully deserving of their demise, the intruders in the jungle are wildly dislikeable (though Radice steals the entire film with his wide-eyed performance – his seduction of Pat includes the touching tribute of her being “a hot-pussy whore”) and it’s difficult not to root for the natives.

As with Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust, accusations of cruelty being meted out on the local fauna were undeniable – a monkey and a pig in particular coming in for some rough treatment. Radice was less than impressed, refusing to take part in the slaughter of innocent animals. It is alleged that Lenzi attempted to convince the actor to join in the killings by asserting that “Robert De Niro would do it” – Radice responded that ”De Niro would kick your ass all the way back to Rome”. Though now dismissive of his part in the film, it is to Radice’s credit that he really throws himself into the role, acting his co-stars out of the rather sparse jungle. It would be reasonable to say that their predicament is far from a jolly holiday, but De Selle and Kerova are incredibly annoying, simpering and gibbering all the way through. Robert Kerman (also known as R. Bolla when appearing in porno films) also appears, briefly, securing his place in exploitation movie history by starring in both Ferox and Cannibal Holocaust.

Whether flimsy of plot or moral fibre, the effects are superb, the work of Gino De Rossi, an effects designer who had begun his career on the likes of Return of White Fang and Napoli Spara! but progressed through the grime of Zombie Flesh Eaters and City of the Living Dead to work on mainstream films such as Casino Royale (2006). The music is regularly credited to Budy Maglione – in fact, it is the work of two people; Roberto Donati and Maria Fiamma Maglione. Donati had worked through the 1960′s in several different pop and R’n'B bands as a singer and guitarist but branched out into soundtracks a decade later. His works include scores to Assault with a Deadly Weapon (1976), Eaten Alive (1980) and Daughter of the Jungle (1982). The brassy, flares-wearing New York theme seems more at home on a poliziotteschi but the main Ferox theme is a doom synth classic – a poor relative of Fabio Frizzi’s glorious melodies but still a fondly regarded one.

Filmed in the jungles of Leticia, the southernmost city in Colombia, the film somehow lacks the feeling of the characters actually being very far away from civilisation – you rather suspect there’s a Pizza Hut just around the corner. Ironically, Radice wasn’t the only person onset to express his disappointment with the film – Lenzi too felt it was one of his lesser works, only a ‘minor film’ – however, his best years were already behind him and this was one of only a few efforts by the director in the 1980′s, all of them being shadows of his former genius.

Ferox is a silly film but it is difficult to have sympathy with anyone finding serious fault with a cannibal film – people get chopped up, animals get a rough deal, we are left with a tacked-on philosophical message – ’twas ever thus and no-one is pretending this is Ben Hur. It is, however, hugely entertaining, perhaps not always for the intended reasons but this is a trivial matter. Ferox is rightly hailed as a milestone in exploitation cinema.

The ‘Banned in 31 Countries’ tagline is an odd one, not least because it is likely to be far higher. The film inevitably suffered at the hands of the censors over the years – the various British release incarnations are listed below, courtesy of the indispensable Melon Farmers website.

Replay first released an uncut version in August 1982. In September 1982 the BBFC unofficially approved an ’18′ video version cut by 6:51s . It was listed as a video nasty in July 1983 and both the cut and uncut versions were successfully prosecuted. The uncut version stayed listed throughout the panic so became a one of the collectable DPP 39′s. However the cut version was eventually removed from the list.

This 18 version pre-cut by 6:51s was submitted to the BBFC in 2000 who insisted on another 6s of cuts for animal cruelty.

Current UK status: Passed 18 with extensive cuts

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia