Gut-Munching Goodness: Anthropophagus (1980)

Anthropophagus (AKA "Man-Eater", The Grim Reaper", "The Beast") (Italy, 1980)
Rating: **1/2
Starring: Tisa Farrow, Saverio Vallone and Serena Grandi

I first encountered this film when I was a wee lad; I'm just as big of a horror fan as I am right now back then, and I was just image hunting in the internet when I stumbled upon a "picture show" site featuring screencaps from gory horror movies. You could say this flick, listed there under its alternate title The Grim Reaper, was one of its showcases and the image of a deranged cannibal munching on his own guts burned itself into the folds of my brain ever since. It isn't until years alter when I finally understood what a slasher film is that I started looking to face the demon that scarred me once more and, when I finally got that chance, picture my morbid delight and curiosity.

Anthropophagus (1980) starts with a couple enjoying their time at a Greek island's beach; as the boy lie on the rocks to bask under the sun, his girl takes a fun dip around the water when she notices a seemingly abandoned lifeboat. She swims towards it in hopes of finding something or someone, unbeknownst to her that something was underneath the water stalking her this whole time, pulling her down to for a blood-gushing murder. The unseen assailant then surfaces, walking slowly to the sunbathing boy and buries a cleaver down into his head.

Cuts to some time later, a group of tourists sets sail to the same Greek island, only to find it eerily desolated as they venture deeper into town. Misfortune comes to them when their boat is set loose, mummified bodies are found and a traumatized blind girl attacks one of them out of sheer fright. The matter, unfortunately, is about to get worse when the doomed tourists learn that the island has been picked down to the last few remaining inhabitants by a deranged cannibal and man-beast has set his eyes, teeth and gullet on killing and eating the new arrivals... 

Despite its gruesome reputation as one of the viler Video Nasties of its time, Anthropophagus (1980) is a film that suffers from a lot of flawed factors that may divide its audiences; for one, the pacing is tediously draggy due to a lot of scenes here being nothing more than fillers padding for time. Majority of them involves people walking around dark places, random suicides for shlock factor and stretched-out chases that goes on a tad too long, so much so that any tension and suspense built feels overcooked, if not completely lost.

What the film did right, though, are a few genuinely good scares, as well as a gratifyingly execution of disgusting gore; some good nail-biters include a blind girl left in a room in the dark, unknown to her the killer's already inside and just waiting for the right moment to strike, and a nasty piece of work of unrelenting shock value wherein our maniac drives his hand into a pregnant woman's womb and pulls out her unborn child, while the helpless father watches dying from his own wounds. A rather tough scene to watch, even if the baby does look oddly misshapen. (Apparently, it was skinned rabbit meat.)

George Eastman plays our goon, a demented cannibal man who, after being stranded in the sea with his family for so long, goes crazy and murders them out of hunger. It's a workable background, though that doesn't explain how he managed to overpower and nearly murder an entire village, leaving only two survivors. (I mean, even if it's a small town, didn't anyone fight back?) Still, Eastman got the body language of a starved psychopath down to a tee, making his character a real threatening presence. He would eventually play another similar psycho in this movie's supposed "sequel", Absurd (1981), a gory Halloween (1978) clone, also by this film's director, Joe D'Amato.

As rewarding as it is for gore hounds, Anthropophagus (1980) is nowhere a masterpiece, but stands proud for being one of the more recognized Italian shockers, overlooking its very simple plot and a lot of useless scenes that is. Then again, if you're into gore, "bad" movie clichés, or just hardcore slasher fans like me, this one deserves at least a quick look. Now, was it worth my time hunting it down after all these years? Yes, yes it was. And now that I faced my demon, I shall take a gander to its sequel...

Bodycount:

1 female killed off camera, blood seen

1 male gets a cleaver to the head

1 male beheaded, head seen in a bucket

1 male had his throat ripped open

1 female hanged herself

1 female knifed on the belly (flashback)

1 boy presumably killed and eaten (flashback)

1 male knifed on the chest

1 pregnant female had insides mangled as her unborn fetus gets torn out from her womb

1 (unborn) baby aborted and eaten

1 female found with throat slit

1 blind female nearly scalped, throat bitten open

1 male gutted with pickaxe

Total: 13