CANNIBALS (1980)

 

(a.k.a. MONDO CANNIBALE; a.k.a. WHITE CANNIBAL QUEEN; directors: Jésus“Jess” Franco─who co-wrote the screenplay, billed as A.L. Mariaux and Jeff Manner─and Francesco Prosperi, billed as Franco Prosperi. Co-screenwriter: an uncredited Jean Rollin.)

Storyline

A man whose daughter was taken by cannibals returns ten years later to their village to get her back, only to discover she is their queen.

Review

CANNIBALS is a bad film, said to be one of the worst of the titular genre─Franco, no fan of the cannibal works, acknowledged this in later interviews (he made one other long pig work, DEVIL HUNTER, 1980). He said he only made them because they were popular at the time.

Because CANNIBALS is a Franco flick, it should be noted that the nudity is occasional and non-sexual (for the most part) and mostly limited to constantly reused slow-motion scenes where the flesh-eaters gnaw on what appears to be rubbery steak and skin and a few seconds of animal intestines. At best it’s terrible, fetishistic microbudget food porn, and some of the tribe members look Caucasian beneath their makeup.

What makes CANNIBALS, also released as MONDO CANNIBALE 3 (with Franco credited as Clifford Brown, “supposedly an homage to the real Clifford Brown, a jazz trumpeter,” according to IMDb.com) so bad?

Almost everything, from, to its terrible dialogue to its languid pacing.  The actors, for the most part, are bad in their roles, but it’s hard to blame them.  The lines they had to say─I saw the English-dub version, where even the tribal members speak it─must’ve been terrible in the original Italian as well, judging from the sleep-walking-in-their-roles actors. (Franco later said that Sabrina Siani, who played Lana, Jeremy Taylor’s daughter and tribal queen, was one of the worst actresses he’d worked with; the worst was Romina Power.)

Other actors in the film: Al Cliver, a familiar face in the low-budget horror genre, played Jeremy Taylor; Lina Romay, billed as Candy Coster, played Ana (Romay is another familiar face, as well as Franco’s longtime girlfriend; she acted in over a hundred of Franco’s films)─like Cliver, Romay is one of the best players here, but they’re not given much to work with in CANNIBALS; Shirley Knight, billed as Shirley Night, played Barbara Shelton; Anouchka, billed as Anoushka, played “Lana as a child”; and Franco himself had a cameo as Mr. Martin.

At an hour and thirty minutes, this padded-out-with-recycled-cannibalism-and-extended- jungle-walk shots movie is not the worst film I have seen, but it is boring, with its threadbare budget showing (even for a low-cost film). Viewers who have seen CANNIBAL TERROR (1980, another Franco film) might recognize CANNIBALS‘s sets. Many of them were recycled from TERROR. If you’re interested in seeing a cannibal film, Ruggero Deodato’s CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (1980) and Umberto Lenzi’s CANNIBAL FEROX (1981) better represents the genre.