28th May 2015, 11:42 PM
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 | Cultist on the Rampage | | Join Date: May 2011 Location: Leeds, UK | |
CANNIBAL FEROX – Not very often that I revert back to the old 'classics', but I haven't had much cash to spare on new titles recently and the larder is empty. I approach this kind of stuff with trepidation – let's face it, most of the former DPP hotties look a bit stale these days. And my abiding memory of 'Cannibal Ferox' was that it was boring, but sometimes gory or sleazy. Having seen it just now I won't run a mile from that judgement, but there are mitigating points in its favour. First, just the cheap, foetid atmosphere. I'm glad the version I saw today looked rubbish, and I do wonder about HD's ability to sanitise what should live on as flea ridden and grimy... the visual desecration of a work can sometimes amp up its atmospheric weight to a drastic degree, as any VHS fan boy will tell you. But the cheapness and the foetidness in this case aren't really about the look, more about the feel. The emotional structure – laid on thick, as if the audience were thick. Animals eating animals, cut to reaction shots - “That's horrible!” “Poor iguana!” It's a kind of pornography that vaults over into the viewer's delirious masochism. So there's that, and also the strange, punchy language of Italo-exploitation cinematography, zoom ridden and a bit angular. Violence is the medium AND the message. Forgot I really loved the music. Most of it, anyway. Some of the cues were really baffling ie I'm sure one of the more anodyne safari style passages soundtracked a mongoose being eaten alive or something – it was probably amazing. Maybe not, I was high on wine at the time, who cares? Anyway, I dug that grindy prog-disco sleaze cop show funk stuff, and the more stygian organ riffs which reminded me of the CH soundtrack. More than anything, what stuck in my mind this time were the moments of elliptical bizarreness – scenes which just seemed really strange. And there were quite a few. I won't recount them all, much to your relief. But just stuff like... Lorraine De Selle about to heave after witnessing a butterfly being ravaged, only to be offered a mongoose... John Morghen's epic castration seguing into De Selle's panicked face and floaty “cannibals never existed... never” thought bubble vox echo seguing still further into salvation army tromboniste spectacular... De Selle and Kerova singing sweetly in a pit, awaiting death, having just had a bit of meat on a rope thrust at them - “don't eat it, it might be my brother”... etc etc. Then of course there's the violence, and I have to say that the Radice head trim still looks pretty smart even to these grizzled eyes. Yeah, at times I did float off a bit, but something about 'Cannibal Ferox' felt alright this evening. More fractured and feverish than a mere dull plod with some guts thrown in. It's from Lenzi after all, who sometimes strikes me as a bit of a frustrated surrealist. I was going to end this review with the sentence “On an entirely different note, it's still not a very good excuse to kill a load of animals, though”, but I'm a bit too drunk to pull it off.
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. Recommended to HK fans and other gourmands of non mainstream cinema...so that's everyone on here covered haha. Nice booklet with this, letting me know that Image have released The Executioner and Exorcist Master (1993), another two that I've been after! 
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