I WANT MORE CANNIBAL GIRLS!
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Like rock stars who take up Golf or turn their golden years into a West End musical, horror fiends eventually get assimilated into the mainstream. Vampires, once a potent symbol of sexual decadence, are now twinkly emo-boys with ‘issues’, Zombies are figures of fun as well as abject terror and Freddy’s shady background as a predator of children is forgotten each Halloween as parents stock up on rubber Kruger gloves in Poundland.
Cannibals however, always hit a blood flecked glass ceiling. While Zombies are still at one supernatural remove from us, the Cannibal cannot blame his urge to feast of human flesh on being a reanimated cadavar. Cannibals are us, stripped of all civilizing influences and reduced to the basest of animal behaviour.
For a lover of sleazy trash and grim exploitation like myself, this makes the classic cannibal flicks of the 70s and early 80s that rare thing, old B-movies that are hard to filter through a hipster haze of irony. Defending the cannibal requires you excise all those excuses about art and to desist from knowing winks. Being a Cannibal fan means stepping up and declaring a love for all the worst excesses of filmmaking, from the dubious morality of the Italian jungle epics to the Grindhouse sleaze of Cannibal Girls.
The thing I admire most about the Cannibal movie then is this. The Cannibal movie above all other genre styles is the one that is most purely produced to induce shock and disgust. Ruggero Deodato made Cannibal Holocaust in order to extract as much cash from the morbidly curious as possible. That a film that seems to balance on a knife edge between trash and art was created is a lucky accident, because first and foremost the film is a cynical money maker and the mercenary nature of its production is what makes it all the more exciting.
While Cannibal Girls is lot easier to swallow that the likes of Holocaust and Ferox, it’s lust for human meat will always see it painted with a dubious reputation that I can only hope the new UK DVD will enhance because sometimes horror movies need have that edge to succeed.
