Anthropophagus

Quite Intestine

Anthropophagus
aka The Grim Reaper
aka Anthropophagus - The Beast 
aka The Savage Island
Directed by Joe D’Amato
Italy 1980
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Gut munching spoilers within.

Anthropophagus... which turns out to be a thriller rather than a horror movie, in my book... is one of those films that the kids in their early teens would talk about a lot in the school playground back in the 1980s, when they used to swap VHS and Betamax bootlegs of all these kinds of films and, it has to be said, the attempts at goriness in the movie are exactly the kind of thing that school kids tend to delight in. Now I’ve not seen it myself before now (we never had a VHS machine until a bit later and I wasn’t that much into films branded as horror movies anyway, at the time) but I find it mad that a film which was banned in the UK during the video nasty scare (and I can see why this one in particular would be) and which led to seizures, fines and imprisonment for owners, is now something which you can just walk into your local HMV or Fopp for and pick up a totally uncut, Blu Ray restoration with no fuss at all.

The film follows Julie, played by Tisa Farrow (sister of Mia but perhaps a lot less seemingly unhinged, this was her last movie) and she is going to a small, one town island in Greece to look after her friend’s blind teenager while they go on holiday. However, she is having trouble with her travel plans and runs into a group of friends touring the area. They agree to take her to her destination on their yacht, to take a look at this island themselves. When they get there, however, they find the place almost deserted because... a deranged madman played by George Eastman has been killing and eating the rest of the population. 

And, when their boat floats off (after a pregnant woman played by Serena Grande finds one of her friend’s head in a bucket, which she accidentally squashes with her foot... it makes sense in context, I assure you,,, and is dragged off by said madman to, it would seem, save for the next day’s dinner)... the majority of the friends have to spend the night and the next day trying to survive the lurking madman as he picks them off one by one. 

Now, it’s not a great film by any means. The camerawork for the first three quarters is almost completely hand held, reacting to the milieu but... it doesn’t make for the best compositions, although when it settles down a bit towards the end, there is some nice stuff happening. Such as when Julie smashes a big mirror leading to a secret chamber and the bits of glass left standing are all reflecting her face individually. The music is pretty awful for a lot of the film too... kinda turning into more what you would expect from an Italian horror movie towards the end but, yeah, a lot of it is pretty jaunty and in your face, calling attention to itself for all the wrong reasons. 

Now, the special effects are, to me, not very impressive, The head in the bucket looks completely fake, as do a lot of the gnawed up corpses found in George Eastman’s cavern/nest towards the end of the picture. The flesh biting also looks just a little too easy but the film does have two gory set pieces which have, rightly or wrongly, garnered it some kind of reputation in horror film circles (although, again, I’d hesitate to call this a horror movie... more a violent thriller). 

So the first of these is when George strangles the pregnant lady (played by Serena Grandi) and then pulls the unborn fetus out of her womb before he starts eating it (I believe a skinned rabbit was used for the special effect). The other thing which people seem to remember, probably because an alternative publicity painting version of it was splashed over a lot of posters and probably videocassette covers (ensuring it attracted the attention of the people in UK government to put it on the banned list), is when Eastman is killed by a pick axe blow into the stomach. As he slowly dies he gathers up his intestines and starts gnawing on them as one last meal before he expires. 

And... yeah, it’s not a great film but I did find it one of those more comforting watches. Because there are very few surprises and a lot of it is silent movie acting as people wander around dark places with a torch not saying much in many scenes. That  being said, there is one wonderful surprise early on. When a couple of the protagonists are investigating a noise in the wine cellar and the audience are expecting to get their first look at the killer (Eastman’s face is held back until about midway through the movie, which has been reliant on POV shots from his point of view to highlight his presence up until later), one of them is wounded by the hysterical blind girl popping up out of a barrel and stabbing for all her worth, in fear. So this was a pretty neat and unexpected moment but, yeah, like I said, don’t expect many surprises in this one, I would say.

At the end of the day, I actually had quite a good time with Anthropophagus but... it really is a switch your brain off romp for people who are used to violent Italian films being made during this period. There’s also a nice extra on the disc, which is a half an hour interview with George Eastman from 2017, where he talks about his good friend Joe D’Amato (although he’s very critical of him as a director... he thinks he could have really gone much further if he gave up control of the films and stayed just as a producer) and there are lot of interesting nuggets revealed about the shoot, why Eastman wrote it the way he did (he wanted to go to Greece and have a holiday with the director but, it turns out, his own scenes were shot in Italy), how he came to inadvertently be in three of Joe’s porn films and, also, some interesting info about people he’d worked with for Joe... such as Laura (Black Emanuelle) Gemser and her husband Gabriele Tinti. So that’s me done with this one and, I guess, I’ll now have to go and look at the pseudo-sequel Absurd and report back on that one soonest.