“I’m a human being, like you! I’m a man, not a fish!” - Ivan Rassimov

Il paese del sesso selvaggio (“The Country of Savage Sex”), better known as Man from Deep River (actually The Man from the Deep River on the print)  and Sacrifice! in North America or Deep River Savages in Europe, is a 1972 Italian exploitation film directed by Umberto Lenzi (Knife of Ice) It is perhaps best known for starting the cannibal sub-genre of Italian exploitation cinema during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The film stars Ivan Rassimov and Me Me Lai.

Lenzi was probably trying to imitate the content of notorious mondo cinema (‘shockumentaries’), which had gained considerable grindhouse popularity since Gualtiero Jacopetti and Paolo Cavara made Mondo Cane in 1962, even though this film is fictional. Like Man from Deep River, mondo films often focus on exotic customs and locations, graphic violence, and animal cruelty.

A photographer in the rain forest in Thailand is captured by wild natives, and after months of living with them, he marries the chief’s daughter and helps protect the village from a vicious cannibal tribe… The film was mainly inspired by A Man Called Horse, which also featured a white man who is incorporated into a tribe that originally held him captive.

A large amount of the film’s notoriety comes from its inclusion in the UK’s list of video nasties, films that the Department of Public Prosecutions (DPP) deemed to be ‘obscene‘. Though it was rejected for British cinema release and certification by the BBFC in 1975, the film was given a video release by Derann under the title Deep River Savages. When the DPP compiled the “video nasties” in 1983, Deep River Savages duly made its way onto the list. In 1984, the Video Recordings Act was instated by the right-wing Conservative British Government, and the film was banned from the UK in its entirety (largely due to the real animal killings).

In 2003, the film was again submitted to the BBFC; it was passed with a certificate of 18 after being cut by nearly four minutes to remove all animal cruelty. Ironically, despite all the controversy surrounding the film’s UK release, Man from Deep River was passed with a simple ‘R’ rating by the MPAA, and the US and Italian DVD releases are both uncut. Meanwhile, Lenzi directed a death-by-the-numbers giallo, Seven Blood-Stained Orchids, the same year.

Wikipedia | IMDb | Amazon.com

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“Rassimov does fine as the fish out of water but there isn’t much dialogue as the tribe members do not speak English. Jungle film fans will recognize Me Me Lai as Rassimov’s love interest. In addition to this film, Lai and Rassimov also starred together in Eaten Alive and Jungle Holocaust. Lai is not shy about taking her clothes off and does so often but that is pretty much what her role is limited to. I appreciate this movie as a new take on the jungle adventure for those of us who grew up with Tarzan but this is nothing like the mayhem we would see in later entries in the genre.” Josh Pasnak, Video Graveyard

“This is easily Lenzi’s best foray into the nasty business of cannibal movies. It’s less exploitative and more focused on a classic adventure tale than on a gore-soaked horror movie – and that’s fine with me because the cannibal genre always needed a bit of seriousness to be able to entertain me. It’s not without gore and blood, a chopped of hand – some nibbling on human flesh, a stab or two – but unfortunately most of the gruesome stuff is spent on killing animals.” Fred Anderson, Ninja Dixon

Buy Eaten Alive! Italian Cannibal and Zombie Movies from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Caltiki – The Immortal Monster (Italian: Caltiki – il mostro immortale) is a 1959 Italian science fiction horror film directed by Riccardo Freda. The plot concerns a team of archaeologists investigating Mayan ruins who come across a blob-like monster. They manage to destroy it with fire while keeping a sample of the monster. Meanwhile, a comet is due to pass close to Earth, the same comet which passed near the Earth at the time the Mayan civilization mysteriously collapsed. The film proposes the question “Is there a connection between the monster and the comet?”

Nominal director Riccardo Freda claims that he abandoned the film so that future director Mario Bava, who he knew would be a good director, had the chance to direct. Bava’s first screen credit as director was the 1960 classic Black Sunday.

Wikipedia | IMDb

Related : Beware! The Blob | Black Sunday | Quatermass and the Pit

“It’s not the plot that’s interesting but the blob looks fantastic! There’s some amusingly cheap miniature work, (despite the darkness of night-time scenes) including some toy tanks that wouldn’t even get into a Godzilla film. But the blob on the attack is sensational. It’s movements are fascinating, and the face-dissolving effects almost belong in Cabin Fever – goodness knows what shock effect they had on audiences 50 years ago.” Black Hole Reviews

“The second half of this movie gets somewhat tiresome when it begins concentrating on the bitter psychotic man injured by Caltiki, a grating, unpleasant character that was made even worse bu the harsh voice given to him by the substandard dubbing. However, there is always the great first half of the movie, with some incredibly atmospheric scenes in the Mayan temple, especially the incredible underwater sequence that takes place in the lake in the temple; this scene more than makes up for any of the movie’s flaws.” Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings

Post by Will Holland

The Blood of Fu Manchu, also known as Fu Manchu and the Kiss of Death, Kiss of Death, Kiss and Kill and Against All Odds, is a 1968 horror/adventure film based on the fictional Asian villain Fu Manchu, created by Sax Rohmer. It was the fourth film in a series, and was preceded by The Vengeance of Fu Manchu. The Castle of Fu Manchu followed in 1969. It was directed by the prolific Jesús Franco and produced by international film wheeler-dealer Harry Alan Towers for Udastex Films. It stars Christopher Lee as Fu Manchu, Richard Greene as Scotland Yard detective Nayland Smith, and Howard Marion-Crawford as Dr. Petrie. The movie was filmed in Spain and Brazil.

Shielded from prying eyes by the jungles of South America, that diabolical mastermind of the Orient, Fu Manchu, is plotting against his enemies once again. Rather than a straightforward plan, Fu has concocted a system of transmitting deadly snake venom (played by an unimpressed green worm, uncredited) to the lips of beautiful women from his harem who will them infect certain individuals in major cities by kissing them. Their initial blindness and then death will shock the world into surrender, or failing that, Fu will tip a full urn of the stuff into rivers, a bit less subtle but some people never learn.

This disappointing entry into a series of films featuring the stereotypical Oriental no-gooder with the minimal moustache strands, none of which in truth fully exploit Sax Rohmer’s books, is typical fodder from Spanish director, Jess Franco. It’s stylish and full of nudity and sadism but lacking a plot you can get your teeth into with performances from the actors to whom the description ‘wooden’ would be an insult to oak.

Also known as Kiss and Kill and, bizarrely, Against All Odds in America, Lee looks the part but his clipped delivery is either a dreadful Chinese accent or an internal struggle with his lines. It appears virtually the entire world is oblivious to Fu’s attempts to rule the planet and quite rightly so, the threat being so slight that barely a drop of blood is spilled in the whole film. Only the sleaze and cheese of the film make it worth watching, a shame as the franchise clearly had a lot of latent potential.

Reviewed by Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

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The Mountain of the Cannibal God (Italian title: La montagna del dio cannibale) is a 1978 Italian cult movie starring Ursula Andress and Stacy Keach with English dialogue that was filmed in Sri Lanka. The film was also widely released as Slave of the Cannibal God and released in the UK as Prisoner of the Cannibal God. Despite being shown in cinemas in a cut version, it was banned in the UK until 2001 for its graphic violence and considered a “video nasty”.

Incredibly, not stopping the cannibal cycle of films which appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s in its tracks, The Mountain of the Cannibal God is one of the most head-scratching entries. Despite the cruelty inflicted upon animals in the film and the nudity, most famously that of Ursula Andress, underlying is an enjoyable but actually terribly ropey film which offers nothing in the way of tension, drama or soul. The plot is straightforward enough, Andress playing Susan Stevenson, the wife of an anthropologist who has been missing in the jungles of Guinea (check that sat nav, chaps), sets off to try and find him, with the aid of her annoying brother (Antonio Marsina) and scientist Edward Foster (Stacy Keach). The twist in the tale is that the siblings are actually searching for radioactive uranium hidden in remote caves – that’s if you don’t consider running into a tribe of peckish cannibals as a twist.

Keach was not adverse to taking roles that veered from, for example, Barrabas in Jesus of Nazareth to grimy British crime movie The Squeeze but exactly what Andress’s agent had assured her about the film is unclear – though years had passed since Dr No, an appearance just three years later in Clash of the Titans, surely proved her star had not completely diminished. The setting is anything but as classy as She. Regardless, the pair roam through the utterly unconvincingly dense forest, passing the same cheeseplants again and again, enough times that you too will soon forget why you thought all this was a good idea. 

On paper, the plot seems acceptable enough but it runs out of steam almost instantly, leaving us with unlovable characters and some tedious padding. The appearance of  the character Manolo (played by Claudio Cassinelli, who tragically died in a helipcopter crash in Martino’s Fists of Fury in 1986) makes little sense, other than to keep prodding Andress and Keach awake. Fortunately, we receive rather bigger jolts to keep us enthralled.

Though Martino has insisted that it was the producers of the film who insisted that footage of animals being slaughtered was inserted into the film, this excuse is used so often that it’s difficult to take seriously; was it really such a prizes project that a director of Martino’s standing and reputation would go along with any request? Thus, a large lizard is butchered, snakes skinned, a large spider trodden on and a cute fluffy thing, clearly with the same manager as Andress,  is strangled by a boa constrictor… very slowly.

That said, rather like ivory ornaments from yesterday, what’s done is done, it’s there and though ghoulish, it adds nothing, so poorly added to the rest of the film that it comes across as being just as, if not more gratuitous than, similar scenes in the far more challenging Cannibal Holocaust, Last Cannibal World and Cannibal Ferox. Keach bails out of the horror by falling off a waterfall, whilst Andress survives having a massive, drooling snake (do boa constrictors actually  drool? Answers by fax, please) drop on her, the wrestling scene being as convincing as a warm-up between Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks.

If the indignity of the script and the low budget weren’t enough, Andress still had to come to terms with the plentiful nudity she was expected to deliver – she didn’t disappoint. After finding her husband, dead and now looking like a toffee apple that’s been dropped on the carpet, her true motives are revealed but not before the cannibals capture her, treating her first as fondue and then as a Goddess. To prove their adulation, she is stripped and has her breasts anointed with orange mud (or maybe it’s honey) by cannibals who are similarly attired. The camera cuts to another cannibal girl, clearly enjoying herself whilst the frenzy of cannibals feasting and Ursula’s fondling reach a perplexing climax. To confirm you really are imagining it all, a dwarf cannibal is brained on the wall of a cave and one of his mates enthusiastically simulates congress with a large pig. Well done everyone.

Buy The Mountain of the Cannibal God on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Martino is a terribly frustrating director, conjuring up wonderful gems like All the Colors of the Dark and Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key and, well, this. I appreciate we all have gas bills to pay but at what stage this wasn’t a catastrophe I can’t imagine. It is, still, well worth a watch, for all the bad stuff and the good – in particular the score from those prolific brothers, Guido and Maurizio De Angelis.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Related: Jungle Holocaust: Cannibal Tribes in Exploitation Cinema

Buy Eaten Alive! Italian Cannibal and Zombie Movies from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Green Inferno is a 2013 horror film co-scripted and directed by Hostel and Hostel II‘s Eli Roth. Inspired by the likes of Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal Ferox, this looks set to be a return to the world of the visceral for the director. The cast includes Daryl Sabara, Kirby Bliss Blanton, Lorenza Izzo, Ariel Levy, Aaron Burns, Magda Apanowicz and Sky Ferreira.

The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

A group of college students take their humanitarian protest from New York to the Amazon jungle, only to get kidnapped by the native tribe they came to save: a tribe that still practices the ancient rite of cannibalism, and has a healthy appetite for intruders.

“Despite its few missteps, The Green Inferno works as both a gut-punch horror film and a distressingly downbeat adventure story, one that features both simple horrific pleasures and a small dash of socio-political food-for-thought regarding who the real “savages” are when all is said and done. The Green Inferno is made for a specific type of genre fan, but it seems likely that they’ll appreciate Eli Roth’s gruesome love letter to a very small and distinct subset of hardcore nasty horror films.” Scott Weinberg, Fear Net

Posted by DF

Revenge of the Creature is the first sequel to Creature from the Black Lagoon. The film is notable for being the only 3D film to be released in 1955 and the only 3D sequel to a 3D film. The movie was released May 11, 1955, in the United States. It was followed by a sequel in 1956, The Creature Walks Among Us.

Directed by the helmer of the Black Lagoon, Jack Arnold, Revenge of the Creature sees the unlucky Gillman again being pestered in the remote lagoon in the Amazon (an unconvincing Florida) whilst minding his own business. Found and knocked (shot) unconscious, Gillman is taken to an oceanarium in Florida (handy) where he is both studied and exhibited to sensation-hungry crowds.

Magnet for monstrous disaster, John Agar (Tarantula, The Mole People, Attack of the Puppet People) playing Professor Clete Ferguson and pretty love interest Helen Dobson (Lori Nelson) split their time between careful study and 1950s slushy romance, taking their eye off the ball and allowing Gilly to break free of his chains and go on the rampage. The Creature has – naturally – also taken a liking to Helen and after escaping to the sea, soon returns looking for his human fancy piece. Eventually kidnapping her at a rockin’ lobster house, the action turns to the perennial match-up of man versus monster.

After the underrated Creature from the Black Lagoon, the sequel of the following year has far more of a B-movie feel, losing the tightness of the plot and the creepiness of the monster. The main failing is the stop/start jolts of action and absolutely NOTHING that bug the proceedings from the off – this even continues towards the climax, the film stifled by the monster only being able to be on land for a few minutes at a time.  Much of the action featuring the creature is terrific, if for no other reason than to marvel how the water bound actor playing Gillman (Ricoh Browning) managed to swim and move so gracefully, as well as holding his breath for often what seems like an age, whilst lugging such a huge suit along with him. Indeed, he came close to real tragedy, leaping off a pier with Nelson, only to land amongst a smack of jellyfish (this is the correct collective noun, I checked on your behalf). Dragged further down by his suit, he had to be rescued by two boys watching the action from a nearby boat.

The film, sadly, has achieved more fame for the first screen appearance of Clint Eastwood than for any other reason. Sporting a wafting quiff, he has a completely duff line about a missing mouse which he then finds in his pocket. Rather than finishing his career, as it would with most others, he went on to star in a few westerns and ended up as a director of some note.

There are some very obviously ‘filmed for 3D’ scenes with various objects looming out at the viewer but these do not disrupt the flow too much. The underwater sequences are breathtaking (literally) with many close-ups of the Gillman so we can admire the superb costume. The 1950s setting is to the film’s detriment; the early Universal efforts of the 1930s and 1940s have an almost timeless quality, whereas the ‘gee-whizz’ acting style and canoodling teens bring a safety and sheen to the film which cuts against any potential threat or suspense, though there are a couple of neat ‘false jump’ scenes that pre-empt the monster’s appearance. Unintentional humour appears when the monster escapes, a tannoy announcer declaring ‘Get out everybody, get away from the Gillman!’; so much for calmly head towards the exits…The terror is rammed home by a spinning newspaper headline – ‘Prehistoric monster on the loose!’

Universal is oddly uncaring to its horror sequels; though most have received a release of some sort, they lack the reverential attention paid to the first wave, which is very unfortunate as there is so much to enjoy. Though on a very different plateau to then original, Revenge of the Creature is good fun and shows off one of film’s most iconic monsters in a pleasingly kitsch setting.

Daz Lawrence

Buy all three Creature from the Black Lagoon films on DVD from Amazon.com

Cannibal Holocaust is a 1980 Italian cannibal film directed by Ruggero Deodato (House on the Edge of the Park) from a screenplay by Gianfranco Clerici, starring Carl Gabriel Yorke, Robert Kerman, Francesca Ciardi, Perry Pirkanen and Luca Giorgio Barbareschi. Cannibal Holocaust was filmed in the Amazonian rainforest with real indigenous tribes interacting with American and Italian actors and follows on from the director and scriptwriter’s Last Cannibal World (1976).

NB. Before scrolling down further please note that there are images in this posting that reflect the subject matter and content of this film and are therefore not suitable for younger horror fans. If in doubt, please click away now. Thank you.

Led by New York-based anthropologist Harold Monroe (Kerman), a team is assembled to search for a missing film crew who had ventured deep into the Amazonian rainforest to film a documentary about tribes still practising cannibalism. Assisted by local guides, Monroe ventures into the unknown and meets with members of the local Yacumo tribe who it seems were greatly upset by the film-makers whom he is seeking. Later meeting with the warring Yanomamö and Shamatari tribes, he gains the trust of the former by immersing himself in their culture, only to find the best they can do to help him find his friends is show him a pile of bones and some film cans.

After securing the tapes by taking part in a rather unpleasant cannibalistic ceremony, he returns to New York to view the tapes and try to piece together what has happened. We learn that the documentary, titled The Last Road To Hell, though veiled under the pretence of being a thoughtful study of ancient rites and culture, is an appalling catalogue of brutality on the part of the Americans to stage footage for maximum effect back home. As such, we see scenes of rape, amputation, the burning of an entire village and numerous scenes of animal cruelty, all with the intention of gaining an appropriate reaction from the tribes to make their film ever more sensational. The final reels show a sudden turn in events, after gang raping a female member of the tribe, they later find her ritually impaled as a punishment for ‘her’ crimes. However, she isn’t the only one to face trial, the cannibals seeking to avenge her fate by hunting down the film crew in merciless fashion. As the final reel finishes, Monroe wonders aloud, just “who the real cannibals are”?

Though, quite rightly, hailed as the benchmark and indeed the last word on the cannibal sub-genre, Cannibal Holocaust was far from the first venture into jungle brutality. The Richard Harris-starring A Man Called Horse (1970) had appeared a decade earlier and, even as a mainstream feature, alerted directors to the potential for shocking but fact-based films as serious money-makers, though earlier explorations in the pseudo-documentary field, classed as ‘mondo films’, beginning with Franco Prosperi and Gualtiero Jacopetti’s 1962 film Mondo Cane (A Dog’s World), had seen many film-makers cutting their teeth using sometimes outrageously exploitative footage.

It wasn’t until Umberto Lenzi’s 1972 film Man from Deep River, that the genre took off, with Italy firmly leading the way. Deodato’s own (excellent) Last Cannibal World (aka Ultimo Mondo Cannibale/Jungle Holocaust) appeared in 1976 to exceptional box-office results. Sergio Martino’s The Mountain of the Cannibal God even featured ex-James Bond bombshell Ursula Andress in the lead role, despite the graphic content, a sure sign of the bankability of the cannibal boom.

With the success of Last Cannibal World and the backing of German investors, Deodato and his producers, Franco Palaggi (whose credits also include working on A Fistful of Dollars) and Franco Di Nunzio (who also produced Deodato’s grimy, relentless House at the Edge of the Park) scouted South America for suitable locations, eventually settling on Leticia in southern-most Columbia, despite the remoteness meaning that getting there involved arduous trekking and boat trips. Armed with a screenplay by the prolific Italian writer Gianfranco Clerici (The New York Ripper, L’Anticristo, Last Cannibal World) they assembled a largely unknown cast but one which spoke English, both establishing a certain amount of credibility in terms of their background and making the film more saleable to foreign markets.

By far the most famous name was Robert Kerman who had made quite a name for himself in the adult film industry using the pseudonym R. Bolla. His most well-known role was in one of the most iconic films of the 1970s, Debbie Does Dallas, though his career in the field stretched well over 100 films. Continuing to act, though hampered by his hardcore career, he has since appeared in Cannibal Ferox, Airport ’79 and even a minor part in Sam Raimi’s Spiderman. The only other member of the cast to have had any sort of career not completely overshadowed by their role in Cannibal Holocaust is the Italian/Uruguayan Luca Barbareschi, who entered politics as part of Silvio Berlusconi’s government in 2008 and gained more notoriety in a filmed exchange with a journalist which resulted in the reporter being knocked out by Barbareschi.

Though Deodato has claimed that the shocking, visceral nature of the film and its dynamics are a commentary of events in Italy during the early 1970′s when the Red Brigade launched terrorist attacks in an attempt to bring about a revolutionary state through a destabilised country, this echoes slightly of many of his retrospective assertions about the film to paper over accusations over his allegedly tyrannical methods of direction. What is clear is his adoption of  Cinéma vérité techniques which used methods including provocation and staged scenarios in order to portray a ‘truth’ and realism to their films; these has already proved popular and successful in the mondo films of the 1960′s and 1971′s. The pops and crackles on the viewed footage (filmed on 16mm to add to the authenticity) in New York and the scratched frames add a genuinely convincing edge due to action.

Adding to the documentary feel is the oft-discussed violence and cruelty inflicted upon animals in the film, ranging from shrew-like fluffy creatures (actually a coati), a large spider, two monkeys (the lopping off of the head required two takes), a tethered wild pig and perhaps most notoriously, a turtle who suffers a protracted death for no other reason than to prompt revulsion and disgust from the audience. Deodato’s views have mellowed significantly over the years, indifference changing to ‘but the locals ate them afterwards’ to complete rejection, re-editing the film to excise the footage in 2011. Recollections from the cast, particularly Kerman who objected throughout the the animal deaths (and also Perry Pirkanen, who apparently cried after the turtle scene, a strange paradox considering his apparent on-screen glee). Viewed over 30 years later, these scenes are still amongst the strongest and most stomach-churning in the whole of the horror genre.

There have long been rumours that the sex scene between Yorke and Ciardi was not simulated, Ciardi already having been admonished by Deodato for her ‘prudishness’ in not wanting to bare her breasts. Real or not, it is another example of the blurring between fact and fiction which permeates the whole film. Deodato was also accused of under-paying his actors (and not paying the locals at all), as well as dictatorial behaviour throughout the shoot, upsetting and alienating most of the cast at one stage or another. The cast had a clause in their contract which stated that they were to give no interviews nor make any appearances regarding the film for a year after its release, so as to create the impression that they had indeed been slaughtered in the film. This backfired badly (or depending on your viewpoint, worked magnificently) as the authorities, convinced by the animal sequences and incredibly realistic gore, arrested Deodato on counts of not only obscenity but also murder.

In order to prove his innocence, the very much alive actors were gathered together to appear in a television program whilst many of the scenes had to be explained in great detail to convince the court that no-one was killed during the filming. The most iconic image in the film, that of the raped cannibal girl having been impaled on the wooden spike was revealed to be an actress sat on an obscured bicycle seat with a small piece of wood held between her teeth. It must be said that all the scenes of death and violence within the film remain as incredibly convincing and impressive as the day they were first screened.

The controversy did no harm to the film’s success, taking an alleged $5 million in the first ten days of release alone. Commercial video releases also did a roaring trade, the UK Go Video release being a mainstay of homely video libraries for 2-3 years before the video recordings act declared it prosecutable to rent or sell. It was also banned in many other countries, including Germany, Australia and New Zealand, but bucked the trend in Japan where it became the second biggest grossing film in the year of its release.

The film’s soundtrack was composed entirely by Italian composer Riz Ortolani, whom Deodato specifically requested because of Ortolani’s work in Mondo Cane, particularly the film’s main theme, “Ti guarderò nel cuore” (also known as “More”). Ortolani was (and still is) known for his rather romantic, sweeping scores, full of large string sections of plaintive melodies. His work on Cannibal Holocaust, perhaps surprisingly, is no different, the main theme being achingly beautiful, a reflection of the stunning settings but a counterpoint to the horrific violence portrayed. The score has become a classic of the genre and helped to elevate Ortolani to the upper echelons of Italian soundtrack composers, his work having since being used by directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Nicolas Winding Refn.

Though the cannibal sub-genre ran out of steam in the mid-80′s, the influence of Cannibal Holocaust is still felt today, the found-footage theme being used in the likes of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity, whilst also inspiring directors like Eli Roth — whose current project is the jungle-set Green Inferno — to forge their own careers.

Rather like many of the zombie films of the 1970′s and 1980′s, many films have passed themselves off as sequels to the original film but despite interest from Deodato in his own follow-up, set in an American city, slated to be titled simply Cannibals, this has yet to happen and the film remains as a stand-alone beacon of depravity, gut-churning set-pieces and one of the great achievements of horror cinema.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Wikipedia | IMDb | Ruggero Deodato

Buy Cannibal Holocaust uncut on DVD from Amazon.com

Buy Cannibal Holocaust and the Savage Cinema of Ruggero Deodato FAB Press book from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

The Mighty Gorga is a U.S. science fiction/fantasy film. Released in 1969, the film was the brainchild of David L. Hewitt, who stars, produces, directs and wrote the screenplay. The storyline concerns a couple hunting for a giant gorilla (The Mighty Gorga, natch) in Africa for financial gain. Filmed on a minuscule budget, it has become notorious for its poor special effects.

Financially crippled circus owner, Mark Remington (Anthony Eisley, The Wasp Woman, Dracula vs. Frankenstein) sees the answers to his money woes in an almost mythical African beast, Gorga, a giant gorilla whom he sets off to capture. Once in the jungle, the hunter (Tonga Jack (!) played by B-movie standby Kent Taylor, Phantom from 10,000 Leagues, The Crawling Hand) who reported the sighting is missing in action and Remington sets off with his daughter, April (Megan Timothy) to find him and hopefully the big monkey. Accidentally stumbling upon a secret prehistoric world, which consists of four plants, a few giant mushrooms and some suspicious-looking giant purple eggs, they find themselves fending off first a dinosaur, then the fabled Gorga. Discovering a local tribe (and Tonga Jack who has made himself at home) they find treasure in the caves around the village but an erupting volcano and a far more human presence who has been following the trail to the gems, threaten both Gorga’s world and their own.

The stupefyingly unconvincing gorilla costume – blinking eyes would at least have been a start – and even more tragic dinosaur are huge fun but despite the obviously joyous limitations, Hewitt elects to minimise their time onscreen, instead plodding around one of cinema’s sparsest jungles with a dislikeable male and female couple in an attempt to justify what should be comedy gold. Eisley, who does more for the tobacco industry during the running time than any amount of TV advertising (try a drinking game every time he lights up and you’ll be unconscious after half an hour) is a rotten hero but worse is yet to come as we have to suffer him slowly arriving in Africa (shot of a plane taking off, in case you’re struggling with the concept), then visiting a zoo, giving him just enough time for some casual racism whilst the cast shiftily check their watches and shuffle their feet.

Rather like a competitive dad, Hewitt saves the best role for himself, that of the gorilla, the lowest point of primate design in film. This is quickly beaten by a handheld T. Rex, which waggles threateningly backwards and forwards but sadly completely out of sync with the projected human actors who are looking in a completely different direction. Attempts are made at a love connection between April and Gorga when she thoughtfully removes a splinter from his finger. It doesn’t progress to a second date.

Shoehorned in are some shots of wild animals (in a clearly different environment), a volcano which would decimate everything in sight but doesn’t even bring the actors out in a sweat and, more jarringly, footage of a relatively decent dinosaur borrowed from peplum pic Goliath and the Dragon, only serving to exaggerate the woefulness of the other beasts. Released on DVD by Something Weird Video as a double bill with One Million AC/DC, The Mighty Gorga is too long to be genuine fun and not consistently bad enough to be so bad it’s good. The last laugh is Hewitt’s; rather than being laughed out of town, he went on to provide the special effects for the likes of Shocker; Kindred; Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.

Daz Lawrence

Flying Monkeys is a 2013 made-for-television film produced by and for the Syfy Channel. The film is the first directed by Robert Grasmere, being better known as a special effects supervisor on films such as Prince of Darkness, Predator 2 and The Mothman Prophecies and stars Electra Avellan (Death Proof/Planet Terror), Vincent Ventresca (Mammoth, Morphman) and Maika Monroe (Bad Blood…The Hunger).

Aboard a small aircraft, exotic-animal smugglers are returning to base with their latest haul of contraband. Unfortunately for them, stowed away is an extremely upset flying monkey, Making short work of two of the smugglers, the pilot manages to land the plane and quickly sells on the feisty beast (which has now returned to standard monkey shape) to a small-town pet shop owner who has no qualms about what he sells or where it comes from. Elsewhere in the town, inevitably situated in Kansas, high school graduate Joan (Monroe) has been left to celebrate alone by her father who has a track record of finding other things to do at his daughter’s expense. In a bid to make amends, he purchases the cute little monkey we met earlier, because nothing says sorry quite like a caged primate. Jealous of the attention the monkey is getting, Joan’s boyfriend indulges in the pleasures of the school prom queen, only for them both to be torn to pieces by the flying monkey little Skippy turns into at nightfall.

Skippy starts making ever-more regular journeys out at night, fuelled by blood-lust and it isn’t long before locals, hunters and know-it-all’s are gathered together to save the town from an embarrassing demise. Sadly for them, shooting the beast only causes the creature to multiply Hydra-like and a mystical weapon is required to slay Skippy and his ever-growing offspring…

Syfy movies tend to veer from better than you’d expect (though still impossible to recommend whole-heartedly) to down-right awful and surprisingly this lands in the first camp. Despite a host of actors who make their living appearing in similar schlock, the story is told with an impressive disregard for sense and reason and doesn’t hang around trying to weave story arcs and tension or other trivial matters. The real saving grace is the extremely passable CGI effects which are made all the more acceptable by virtue of the fact that the monkeys only do their killing at night, hiding a multitude of sins. A nice change from the endless parade of sharks, it’s a harmless excuse to bring to centre-stage some of cinema’s creepiest creatures some 75 years after they first appeared. One word of warning – the line “no more monkey business” is uttered.

Daz Lawrence

The 1970s saw old taboos falling away in the cinema, and few horror film sub-genres benefited from the relaxation in censorship more than the cannibal film. In fact, this is a genre that scarcely existed prior to the Seventies. Sure, horror films had long hinted at cannibalism as a plot device – movies like Doctor X (1932) and others portrayed it as an element of psychosis without ever being overly explicit, and this would continue into the 1970s with films such as Cannibal Girls Frightmare and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – but no one had really explored the idea explicitly. Some things were just too tasteless, and cannibalism was something of a no-no with assorted censor boards around the world.

Yet the idea that remote tribes in the Amazon or on islands like Papua New Guinea were still practising cannibalism was a common one at the time, thanks to a conflation of suspicion, colonialist ideas, misunderstanding of tribal rituals (such as head hunting / shrinking) and old-fashioned racism. And, if we are to be fair, these beliefs were not entirely without validity, as some cultures still did practice cannibalism, albeit not as determinedly as was often made out. Certainly, the subject was exploited – 1956 roadshow movie Cannibal Island promised much in its sensationalist promotional art, even if the film itself was Gaw the Killer, an anthropological documentary from the 1931, re-edited and re-dubbed, that was notably lacking in anthropophagy, despite the best efforts of the narrator to suggest otherwise.

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Elsewhere, cartoons and comic books perpetuated the idea that any great white hunter who was captured by natives was bound to end up in a cooking pot, and Tarzan movies hinted that he bones the natives wore as decoration were not all from animals. 1954′s Cannibal Attack saw Johnny Weissmuller playing Johnny Weissmuller, fighting off enemy agents in a cannibal-filled jungle.

Hell Night director Tom De Simone’s terrible movie Terror in the Jungle (1968) had a small boy captured by a cannibal tribe and only saved by his ‘glowing’ blonde hair. Worship of blonde white people would be a theme in later, trashier cannibal movies too). Even the children’s big game hunting Adventure novel series by Willard Price had a Cannibal Adventure entry. But notably, none of these early efforts actually went the extra mile – the natives in these films may have been cannibals, but we had to take the filmmakers and writers word for that – no cannibalism actually took place on screen.

In the 1960s, the Mondo documentary would also take an interest in bizarre tribal rituals, and these mostly Italian films would subsequently come to inform the style of the cannibal films that emerged later. Certainly, later shockumentaries such as Savage Man, Savage Beast, This Violent World and Shocking Africa were closely related to contemporary films like Man from Deep River and Last Cannibal World, with their lurid mix of anthropological studies and sensationalism.

One such mondo movie was the 1974 Italian/Japanese Nuova Guinea, l’isola dei cannibali. Tribal scenes from this production – which also includes footage of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip on a Royal visit to the island (!) – were inserted into the zombie film Hell of the Living Dead (1981) to add verisimilitude. It was  later opportunistically released on DVD in the USA as The Real Cannibal Holocaust.

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The cannibal film as we know it now began in 1972, with Il paese del sesso selvaggio, also known as Deep River Savages, The Man from Deep River and Sacrifice!  It was directed by Umberto Lenzi, who would spend the next decade playing catch-up in a genre he pretty much invented with scriptwriters Francesco Barilli and Massimo D’Avak. This film essentially set many of the templates for the genre – graphic violence, extensive nudity, real animal slaughter and the culture clash between ‘civilised’ Westerners and ‘primitive’ tribes.

The film is, essentially, a rip-off of American western A Man Called Horse, with Italian exploitation icon Ivan Rassimov as a British photographer who finds himself stranded in the jungles of Thailand and captured by a native tribe. Eventually, after undergoing assorted humiliations and initiation rituals, he is accepted within the community, who are at war with a fierce, more primitive cannibal tribe.

Co-starring Mei Mei Lai (who would become one of the sub-genre’s stock players), the film is set up more as an adventure story than a horror film, but the look and feel of the story would subsequently inform other cannibal movies, and the scene where the cannibal tribe kill and eat a native certainly sets the scene for what is to come.

Buy The Man from Deep River + Warlock Moon + Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat on DVD from Amazon.com

Made in 1976, Ruggero Deodato’s Ultimo mondo cannibale (Last Cannibal World; Cannibal; Jungle Holocaust) also had the feel of an old-school jungle adventure, though Deodato expanded on what Lenzi had started – this tale of an explorer (played by Massimo Foschi) who is captured by a cannibal tribe features a remarkable amount of nudity (Foschi is kept naked in a cage for much of the film, teased and tormented by the tribe) and sex – including an animalistic sex scene between Foschi and Mei Mei Lai (Rassimov also co-stars). It also featured more graphic gore and real animal killing – the latter would become the achilles heel of the genre, something that even its admirers would find hard to defend. Even if the slaughtered animals were eaten by the filmmakers, showing such scenes for entertainment still left a bad taste with many, and over and above the sex and violence, would be the major cause of censorship for these films.

The Last Cannibal World proved to be a popular hit around the world (it even played UK cinemas after BBFC cuts) and sparked a mini-boom in cannibal film production. In 1977, Joe D’Amato continued his bizarre mutation of the Black Emanuelle series – which, under his guidance, had evolved from soft porn travelogue to featuring white slavery, rape, snuff movies, hardcore sex and even bestiality – with Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (aka Trap Them and Kill Them), a strange and uniquely 1970s mixture of of softcore sex and hardcore gore, as Laura Gemser goes in search of a lost cannibal tribe. Quite what audiences expecting sexy thrills thought when they were confronted with graphic castration scenes is anyone’s guess, but the film played successfully across Europe and America, albeit often in a cut form.

D’Amato returned to the genre in 1978 with Papaya – Love Goddess of the Cannibals, with Sirpa Lane which, despite its title features no cannibals, in a film that again mixed gore and softcore yet still managed to be rather dull.

Also in 1978, we had the only cannibal film with a big name cast. Mountain of the Cannibal God (aka Slave of the Cannibal God; Prisoner of the Cannibal God) saw former Bond girl Ursula Andress stripped and fondled by a cannibal tribe as she and Stacey Keach search for her missing husband. The starry cast didn’t mean that director Sergio Martino wasn’t going to include some particularly unnecessary animal cruelty and a bizarre (faked) scene of a man fucking a pig though, as well as graphic gore. At heart an old fashioned jungle adventure spiced up with 1970s sex ‘n’ violence, the most remarkable part of the film is how Martino managed to persuade Andress to appear completely naked. Perhaps she just wanted to show off how good her body was 16 years after Dr No!

Buy The Mountain of the Cannibal God on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

That same year saw an Indonesian entry in the genre with Primitives, also known as Savage Terror. This was essentially a rehash of The Last Cannibal World, but with less gore and no nudity, which resulted in a rather plodding jungle drama. This one is definitely for genre completists only, and proved to be a major disappointment when released on VHS to a cannibal-hungry public by Go Video in the UK as a follow-up to Cannibal Holocaust.

Ahh yes, Cannibal Holocaust. The Citizen Kane of cannibal movies, and the genre’s only undisputed masterpiece, the film would also become the most notorious film in the genre, shocking audiences and censors alike and even now seen as being about as extreme as cinema can go.

The film began life as just another cannibal film, Deodato hired to make something to follow up The Last Cannibal World. But with the relative freedom granted to him (all his backers wanted was a gory cannibal film), he came up with a movie that critiqued the sensationalism of the Mondo movie makers and the audience’s lust for blood, with his tale of an exploitative documentary crew who set out to film cannibal tribes but through their own arrogance and cruelty bring about their own demise.

Deodato’s film effectively invents the Found Footage style of filmmaking, his fake documentary approach being so effective that he found himself facing a trial, accused of actually murdering his actors! Given that the film mixes real animal killing with worryingly effective scenes of violence, all shot in shaky, hand-held style, it’s perhaps no surprise that people thought it was real – even into the 1990s, the film was reported as being a ‘snuff movie’ by the British press.

But there is more going on here than mere sensationalism and sadism – Deodato’s film fizzes with a righteous anger and passion, and makes absolutely no concession to moral restraint. There’s a level of intensity here that is beyond fiction – certainly, the story of the film’s production and reception would make for a remarkable movie in its own right. Almost imprisoned and seeing his film banned in Italy and elsewhere (in Britain, it was one of the first video nasties), Deodato was suitably chastened, and never made anything like it again.

Buy Cannibal Holocaust on DVD from Amazon.com

But despite the bans, the legal issues and the outrage, Cannibal Holocaust was enough of a sensation to spawn imitators. Umberto Lenzi returned to the genre he’s more or less invented in 1980 with Eaten Alive (Magiati Vivi; The Emerald Jungle; Doomed to Die), which managed to mix cannibal tribes, nudity and gore with a story that exploits the recent Guyana massacre led by Jim Jones. This tale of a fanatical religious cult leader had an cannibal movie all-star cast – Ivan Rassimov, Mei Mei Lai and Robert Kerman (aka porn star R. Bolla) who had starred in Cannibal Holocaust were joined by Janet Agren and Mel Ferrer in what is a textbook example of a cheap knock-off. Not only does the film cash in on earlier movies and recent news events, it actually ‘cannibalises’ whole scenes from other films, Lenzi’s own Man from Deep River amongst them. Yet despite this, it’s fairly entertaining stuff.

Buy Eaten Alive on DVD from Amazon.com

Lenzi followed this with Cannibal Ferox (aka Make Them Die Slowly; Let Them Die Slowly), a more blatant imitation of Cannibal Holocaust. Kerman again makes an appearance (albeit a brief one), while Italian cult icon John Morghen (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) headlines a fairly ham fisted tale of an anthropology student who sets out to prove that cannibalism is a myth, only to find she’s very, very wrong. Directed with indifference by Lenzi (who clearly had no interest in theses films beyond a pay check), the film features more gratuitous animal killing and some remarkably sadistic scenes (two castrations and a woman hung with hooks through her breasts), which invariably ensured that the film would be “banned in 31 countries”.

Buy Cannibal Ferox on DVD from Amazon.com

1980 also brought us Zombie Holocaust (aka Doctor Butcher M.D.) in which Marino Girolami opportunistically livened up his Zombie Flesh Eaters imitation by adding a mad doctor, cannibals and nudity to the mix, and Cannibal Apocalypse, where Vietnam vets John Saxon and John Morghen were driven to cannibalism in Vietnam and then go on the rampage in the USA.

Jess Franco entered the genre in 1980 with Cannibals (aka The White Cannibal Queen) and Devil Hunter (aka Man Hunter), but the crudity of the cannibal movie was unsuited to a director more at home with surreal, erotic gothic fantasies. Cannibals was the more interesting of the two – Franco’s intense close-ups and slow motion during the cannibalism scenes add a bizarre, almost dream-like edge to the proceedings, in a tale that mixes a one-armed Al Cliver and a naked Sabrina Siani as the blonde goddess worshipped by the ‘cannibal tribe’. Devil Hunter is a ridiculous mishmash with a kidnapped movie star, a bug-eyed, big-dicked monster and cannibals. Franco himself was dismissive of both films, and they are recommended only for the completist.

Cannibals

Similar to the Franco films (coming from the same producers and featuring footage from Cannibals) is the tedious Cannibal Terror, a French effort that sees a bunch of kidnappers hanging out in a cannibal-infested jungle. It’s pretty hard work to sit through even for the most ardent admirer of Eurotrash. Meanwhile, cannibalistic monks cropped up in the 1981 US movie Raw Force (later retitled) Kung Fu Cannibals but they were only one of the smorgasbord element in this exploitation trash and being a ‘religious order’ rather than a tribe merit just a brief mention here.

After this flurry of activity, the genre began to fizzle out, exploitation filmmakers moving on to the next big thing (i.e. knock offs of Conan and Mad Max). It wasn’t until 1985 that we saw a revival of the jungle cannibal film with Amazonia (aka White Slave), directed by Mario Gariazzo. A strange mix of revenge drama and cannibal film, the movie is a gender-reversal of Man from Deep River, with Elvire Audray as Catherine Miles, brought up by a cannibal tribe after her parents are murdered in the Amazon. Despite some gore and nudity, it’s a rather plodding affair. It should not be confused with Ruggero Deodato’s Cut and Run, also sometimes called Amazonia but which – despite the setting and some gruesome moments – was not a return to the cannibal genre for the director.

More fun was Massacre in Dinosaur Valley (aka Naked and Savage), a cheerfully trashy affair directed by Michele Massimo Tarantini, with the survivors of a plane crash – including nubile young models and Indiana Jones like palaeontologist Michael Sopkiw battling slave traders, nature and cannibal tribes (but not dinosaurs) in the Amazon. Gratuitous nudity, splashy gore, bad acting and a ludicrous series of events ensure that this one is a lot of fun.

Natura Contro, retitled Cannibal Holocaust II but unconnected to the earlier film, is possibly the most obscure of the films in the sub-genre. Made in 1988, it is the final film by Antonio Climati, best known for his uncompromising Mondo movies of the 1970s. It’s surprising then that this is fairly tame stuff by cannibal movie standards, telling the story of a group of people who head to the Amazon to find a missing professor. By 1988, both the Italian exploitation film and the cannibal genre were breathing their last, and the excesses of a decade earlier were no longer commercially viable – the mainstream audience for such films had dwindled considerably, while censorship had tightened up.

Natura Contro

It would be another fifteen years before we saw the return of the jungle holocaust film, and then it was hardly worth it. Bruno Mattei, a prolific hack since the 1970s, had someone managed to keep making films, and in 2003 knocked out a pair of ultra-low budget, almost unwatchably bad cannibal films. In the Land of the Cannibals (aka Cannibal Ferox 3) and Cannibal World (aka Cannibal Holocaust 2) were slow, clumsy and boring attempts to cash in on the cult reputation of Mattei (a couple of years later, he’d make two similarly dismal zombie films) and the reputation of the earlier cannibal movies (needless to say, these are not official sequels to either Holocaust or Ferox). These two films seemed to be the final nail in the genre’s coffin.

But with the reputation of Cannibal Holocaust continuing to increase, and a general return to ‘hard core horror’ in the new century with films like Saw and Hostel, the cannibal film has seen a slight revival. But although Deodato has talked about making a sequel to Cannibal Holocaust, the new films have been American productions, even though they are informed by the Italian films of the past.

Jonathan Hensleigh’s Welcome to the Jungle , made in 2007, channels Holocaust with its found footage format as a group of remarkably annoying treasure hunters head to New Guinea in search of the missing Michael Rockerfeller, hoping to cash in on his discovery. Instead, their bickering attracts the attention of local cannibal tribes, who stalk and slaughter them. There;s an interesting idea at play here, but the characters are all so utterly loathsome that you’ll struggle to make it to the point where they start getting killed.

The latest attempt to revive the genre comes from Eli Roth, who’s Green Inferno is about to be released. The film takes its title from Cannibal Holocaust (one of Roth’s favourite films) and the plot – student activists travel to the Amazon to protect a tribe but find themselves captured by cannibals – sounds like a copy of Cannibal Ferox. Having received positive reviews at festivals, we hope the film is able to capture the spirit of the original movies, if not their frenzied style.

Certainly, we are unlikely to see anyone making a film quite like Cannibal Holocaust again – there are laws in place to stop it, if nothing else. But we can now look back at this most controversial of horror sub-genres and see that they represent a time when cinema was without restraint. As such, they are more than simply films, they are historical time capsules, and for those with strong stomachs, well worth investigating.

Article by David Flint

Related: Cannibal Holocaust | Devil Hunter | The Man from Deep River | The Mountain of the Cannibal God

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Buy Eaten Alive! Italian Cannibal and Zombie Movies from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

Cannibal Ferox, also known as Make Them Die Slowly, is a 1981 Italian exploitation film written and directed by Umberto Lenzi. Upon its release, the film’s US distributor claimed it was “the most violent film ever made”. Cannibal Ferox was also claimed to be “banned in 31 countries”, some of which lifted their bans only recently. It can be considered one of the ‘unholy trinity’ of superior Italian cannibal films, alongside Jungle Holocaust and Cannibal Holocaust.

ferōx m, f, n (genitive ferōcis); third declension

1. wild, bold, gallant
2. warlike
3. defiant, arrogant

In the jungles of the Amazon, brother and sister, Rudy (Danilo Mattei, Anglicised as Bryan Redford) and Gloria (Lorraine De Selle, (Emanuelle in America, House on the Edge of the Park) and their friend Pat (Zora Kerova, appearing here as Pat Johnson, also seen in the likes of The New York Ripper and Anthropophagous) are on a mission to prove Gloria’s assertion that cannibalism is a Western myth. Alas, their jeep breaks down and they encounter drug dealers on the run from New York; Mike (Giovanni Lombardo Radice, aka John Morghen, House on the Edge of the Park, City of the Living Dead) and Joe (Walter Lucchini). It transpires that the pair’s busman’s holiday has developed to bothering the local tribes for cocaine and jewels, not to mention enraging them further by torturing and killing their local guide whilst Mike was high on drugs. This ‘misunderstanding’ has led to the cannibals attacking and leaving Joe badly injured. Regardless, Mike continues to push his fellow travellers to the limit, seducing Pat and killing a native girl for kicks. The locals take exception to this and begin to hunt down the Americans in an avalanche of cruelty from hooks slicing through breasts to castration to good old-fashioned brain chomping. Only one person survives but what state will they be in when the horror is over?

Director Umberto Lenzi (Almost Human, Nightmare City), a stalwart of Italy’s genre films, bookended the cannibal film era, beginning with Man from Deep River in 1972 and essentially closing it here in 1981 (though had helmed the tamer Eaten Alive in 1980). Ferox, incidentally, was re-titled Woman from Deep River on its Australian release. Ferox was pretty much the last word and left the genre with no body part or animal left to mush up. Though remaining one of the most debated films of the sub-genre, there can be little argument that Ferox lacks the cerebral qualities of Holocausts both Jungle and Cannibal, quickly dispensing with the unnecessary introduction to the characters and moving swiftly on to breathtaking scenes of brutality and depravity. Though fully deserving of their demise, the intruders in the jungle are wildly dislikeable (though Radice steals the entire film with his wide-eyed performance – his seduction of Pat includes the touching tribute of her being “a hot-pussy whore”) and it’s difficult not to root for the natives.

As with Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust, accusations of cruelty being meted out on the local fauna were undeniable – a monkey and a pig in particular coming in for some rough treatment. Radice was less than impressed, refusing to take part in the slaughter of innocent animals. It is alleged that Lenzi attempted to convince the actor to join in the killings by asserting that “Robert De Niro would do it” – Radice responded that “De Niro would kick your ass all the way back to Rome”. Though now dismissive of his part in the film, it is to Radice’s credit that he really throws himself into the role, acting his co-stars out of the rather sparse jungle. It would be reasonable to say that their predicament is far from a jolly holiday, but De Selle and Kerova are incredibly annoying, simpering and gibbering all the way through. Robert Kerman (also known as R. Bolla when appearing in porno films) also appears, briefly, securing his place in exploitation movie history by starring in both Ferox and Cannibal Holocaust.

Whether flimsy of plot or moral fibre, the effects are superb, the work of Gino De Rossi, an effects designer who had begun his career on the likes of Return of White Fang and Napoli Spara! but progressed through the grime of Zombie Flesh Eaters and City of the Living Dead to work on mainstream films such as Casino Royale (2006). The music is regularly credited to Budy Maglione – in fact, it is the work of two people; Roberto Donati and Maria Fiamma Maglione. Donati had worked through the 1960′s in several different pop and R’n’B bands as a singer and guitarist but branched out into soundtracks a decade later. His works include scores to Assault with a Deadly Weapon (1976), Eaten Alive (1980) and Daughter of the Jungle (1982). The brassy, flares-wearing New York theme seems more at home on a poliziotteschi but the main Ferox theme is a doom synth classic – a poor relative of Fabio Frizzi’s glorious melodies but still a fondly regarded one.

Filmed in the jungles of Leticia, the southernmost city in Colombia, the film somehow lacks the feeling of the characters actually being very far away from civilisation – you rather suspect there’s a Pizza Hut just around the corner. Ironically, Radice wasn’t the only person onset to express his disappointment with the film – Lenzi too felt it was one of his lesser works, only a ‘minor film’ – however, his best years were already behind him and this was one of only a few efforts by the director in the 1980′s, all of them being shadows of his former genius.

Ferox is a silly film but it is difficult to have sympathy with anyone finding serious fault with a cannibal film – people get chopped up, animals get a rough deal, we are left with a tacked-on philosophical message – ’twas ever thus and no-one is pretending this is Ben Hur. It is, however, hugely entertaining, perhaps not always for the intended reasons but this is a trivial matter. Ferox is rightly hailed as a milestone in exploitation cinema.

The ‘Banned in 31 Countries’ tagline is an odd one, not least because it is likely to be far higher. The film inevitably suffered at the hands of the censors over the years – the various British release incarnations are listed below, courtesy of the indispensable Melon Farmers website.

Replay first released an uncut version in August 1982. In September 1982 the BBFC unofficially approved an ’18′ video version cut by 6:51s . It was listed as a video nasty in July 1983 and both the cut and uncut versions were successfully prosecuted. The uncut version stayed listed throughout the panic so became a one of the collectable DPP 39′s. However the cut version was eventually removed from the list.

This 18 version pre-cut by 6:51s was submitted to the BBFC in 2000 who insisted on another 6s of cuts for animal cruelty.

Current UK status: Passed 18 with extensive cuts

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals – released in the USA as Trap Them and Kill Them – is a 1977 Italian erotic horror film, directed by Joe D’Amato (Aristide Massaccesi). The film is part of a loose series of Black Emanuelle films that emerged in the second half of the 1970s, mostly starring Laura Gemser and directed by D’Amato,

Following the global success of the softcore sex film Emmanuelle in 1974, many film producers around the world climbed on the bandwagon. Possibly because the Emmanuelle producers had the world’s worst lawyers, or possibly because copyright was rather more lax at the time, many of these films managed to use the Emmanuelle name by simply changing the spelling – in the case of Black Emanuelle and its sequels, this involved dropping one ‘M’.

While the original Black Emanuelle, made in 1975, was simply a softcore travelogue very much in the tradition of the original film, but with Laura Gemser – actually Eurasian rather than black, but that seemed close enough for 1970s audiences – in the title role. Interestingly, the same year she made Black Emanuelle, she also appeared in Emmanuelle 2. This version of the character was a photo journalist, who found herself getting into all manner of erotic adventures.

Under the guidance of D’Amato – who took over the series after Black Emanuelle 2 – the films rapidly became more and more outlandish and shocking. By 1977 – a year in which no less than four entries in the series were released, Emanuelle was investigating snuff movie rings in Emanuelle in America, violence against women in Emanuelle Around the World and even became a nun in Sister Emanuelle! These films pushed the limits of good taste – Emanuelle in America has graphic fake snuff movie footage, brief hardcore, while some versions of Emmanuelle Around the World had violent sex scenes and also hardcore inserts. It was no surprise, therefore, that D’Amato would combine the series with the newly popular cannibal films spawned by Ruggero Deodato’s Last Cannibal World. We should perhaps be grateful that he wasn’t pursuing the outrage a year earlier, or we might have had a Naziploitation Emanuelle film!

In Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, Emanuelle, while working undercover at a hospital, stumbles upon a girl who seems to have been raised by a tribe of cannibals in the Amazon (this discovery is made shockingly when a nurse is attacked and has her right breast bitten off!). She decides to make an expedition to the jungle to find the tribe, taking a professor (played by Gemser’s real life husband and regular co-star Gabriele Tinti) and Susan Scott along, among others. After much erotic romping with both sexes, Emanuelle and her party are captured by the cannibals…

It’s hard to see who this was aimed at. The film has plenty of softcore sex, but it’s likely that the audience lured by the Emanuelle name would be repulsed by the graphic gore (which included graphic castration and some very poor optically created dismemberment), while horror fans would have assumed the film to simply be soft porn. However, the film has since gained a cult following, and is now seen as one of the highlights of the Black Emanuelle series. The film is now seen as a precursor to D’Amato’s sex-horror zombie films Erotic Nights of the Living Dead and Porno Holocaust.

The main theme of the soundtrack, by Nico Fidenco, was released as a seven inch single.

Buy Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals on DVD from Amazon.com

Buy Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals on DVD from Amazon.co.uk

DF

IMDb

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Cannibal Terror (original title: Terreur Cannibale) is a 1980 French/Spanish horror film. It was directed by porn specialist Alain Deruelle [as A.W. Steeve], Olivier Mathot and Julio Pérez Tabernero (Sexy Cat; Las alegres vampiras de Vögel; Hot Panties) from a screenplay by Tabernero and H.L. Rostaine. Jesus Franco was also apparently an uncredited co-writer. It stars Silvia Solar (Eyeball; Devil’s Kiss), Pamela Stanford (Lorna the Exorcist; Sexy Sisters), Burt Altman [Bertrand Altmann] (Zombie Lake; Devil Hunter), Stan Hamilton, Gérard Lemaire, Olivier Mathot (Revenge in the House of Usher; Maniac Killer), Antonio Mayans and Sabrina Siani (Ator, the Fighting Eagle; Conquest).

The film is notable for the fact that it shares an amount of footage with Mondo Cannibale (also known as Cannibals and White Cannibal Queen,1980). While many sources suggest that Franco’s footage was ‘borrowed’ for Cannibal Terror, a closer examination reveals that there are more connections than this between the two films. Both films share a number of locations, cast, and even dubbing actors. Some connections that suggest more than a mere ‘borrowing’ of footage are:

Sabrina Siani is the White Cannibal Queen of Mondo Cannibale, and also appears (as a fully clothed adult) in a bar scene in Cannibal Terror. Several shots of the dancing cannibal tribe in their village are common to both films, and several shots appear only in one or the other. One actor with a very distinctive face is seen in Cannibal Terror in no less than three roles (two cannibals and one border guard) and is also quite visible as one of the cannibals devouring Al Cliver’s wife in Mondo Cannibale.

In addition are the obvious cast parallels of Olivier Mathot, Antonio Mayans, both of whom have starring roles in both films. Porn star Pamela Stanford plays Manuella in Cannibal Terror, and has the brief role of the unfortunate Mrs. Jeremy Taylor in Cannibals.

Plot teaser:

After botching a kidnapping, two criminals hide with their victim in a friends house in the jungle. After one of them rapes the friend’s wife, they’re left to be eaten by a nearby cannibal tribe…

Reviews:

“Cannibal Terror is awful, to be sure, even more so than other Eurocine efforts may have led you to expect. That’s not to say that it isn’t fun, and I found myself enjoying it a bit in spite of [or is that because of?] the criticisms above. While I can’t recommend it as horror, those looking for the next great bad movie may want to check it out. The Severin disc is excellent, and highly recommended for those looking to complete their Video Nasties collection.” Wtf-Film

Buy Cannibal Terror on Severin DVD from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

“The Pyrenees Mountains standing in for the Amazonian jungle. The flagrantly Caucasian “Indians” and their tiki bar village. The gore effects so pitiful that the camera itself often seems to be ashamed to look at them. The ludicrously inappropriate score, which makes the city theme from Make Them Die Slowly seem like the epitome of taste and sound judgement. The steadfast failure of the script to make any sense at all at any level. Yes, Cannibal Terror truly is the Zombie Lake of cannibal movies, and as such, I score it as a film not to be missed.” 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting

“You wonder when the cannibals are coming. They take the kidnapped girl to the jungle (somewhere in a conservatory in Paris, from the looks of it), when they finally encounter the cannibals – the least convincing cannibals in film – caucasians, make-up that stops at their neck, side-burns, comb-overs, potbellies. They dance. They eat pig entrails. They dance again. They threaten. They dance again. Not much happens after that.” Down Among the “Z” Movies

“What follows is repetitive mind numbing padding. People walk around the jungle and then walk around some more. The cannibals peek through the trees watching them walk around. The girl’s parents, along with some cops also… walk around. After an indefinite amount of walking around, the cannibals make themselves known and capture Roberto and his girlfriend and harbor the little girl.” Strictly Splatter

Wikipedia | IMDb

Indigenous is a 2014 found footage horror film directed by Alistair Orr (Expiration). It stars Zachary Soetenga, Lindsey McKeon (Supernatural TV series; Shredder), Sofia Pernas, Pierson Fode (DragWorms).

Official synopsis:

A group of five young friends travel from Los Angeles to exotic Panama for a week of partying in lush tropical paradise. Befriending a beautiful local woman in their hotel bar, they learn of a secret jungle hike to a pristine waterfall nearby. The woman cautions them strongly against the hike, warning that other gringos in search of the legendary waterfall had mysteriously disappeared into the jungle, never to be seen or heard from again.

Ignoring her warnings, the group convinces the woman to guide them to the picturesque waterfall, thinking that they have nothing to fear with a local as their guide. What begins as a fun outing quickly turns terrifying when their guide mysteriously vanishes after a romantic tryst at the falls. As night closes in, the friends realize too late the truth behind her warnings—horrific, bloodthirsty, flesh-eating creatures are now stalking them. The mangled survivors rush to jungle caves for shelter, only to realize they’ve entered the monsters’ lair…

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Virus – l’inferno dei morti viventi is an Italian zombie film, made in 1980 by prolific hack Bruno Mattei, under his ‘Vincent Dawn’ pseudonym.

As with most of the Italian zombie films of the era, the film was less an imitation of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead than of Lucio Fulci’s attempt to cash in on that movie. Zombi 2 / Zombie / Zombie Flesh Eaters proved to be a huge box office hit – outstripping Romero’s film in several territories, including the UK where it opened before the retitled Zombies – Dawn of the Dead – and inspired several rip-offs, of which Virus was one of the first.

The film is a mish-mash of ideas lifted from various popular sources – there is a SWAT team (as in Dawn of the Dead) who are sent for no good reason to Papua New Guinea – i.e. cannibal country – where they are joined by a plucky and sexy journalist (Margit Evelyn Newton) as they try to get past the hordes of flesh eating zombies that have suddenly and inexplicably appeared. Their destination is top secret research facility Hope Center #1, where a chemical accident has caused the dead to return to life and lust after the flesh of the living. This, it turns out, is the result of Operation Sweet Death, a cunning but somewhat flawed plan to end world hunger by turning Third World populations into cannibals.

Virus began  treatment by José María Cunillés later turned into a full screenplay by Claudio Fragasso and his wife Rossella Drudi. Dara Films in Spain and Beatrice Films in Rome collaborated to option the script, which was ridiculously ambitious in scope if not plot. Mattei was brought on board due to his experience with low budget exploitation, and attempted to bring the project under control. Exteriors were shot in Spain, but proved to be mostly unusable; rather than re-shoot or rewrite, Dara chose to simply dump the footage and carry on with the rest of the movie. Inevitably, this resulted in a somewhat incoherent plot.

Mattei suggested stock footage from Barbet Schroeder’s 1972 film La Vallée be used, with sets built to match this footage. How successful this matching proves to be is open to debate. Other stock footage – notably of the United Nations – was also included, with close -up shots of a ‘third world leader’ obviously inserted.

The movie has a Goblin score, which might seem impressive if it wasn’t for the fact that all the music was lifted from Dawn of the Dead and Contamination. This caused legal problems that delayed the film’s distribution.

The film was released – in a version that had cuts to both gore and narrative – into UK cinemas in 1981. Titled Zombie Creeping Flesh, it clearly aimed to cash in on the popularity of Zombie Flesh Eaters, but was not a success. Most people saw the film on video, where it was released in a shortened version and proved moderately popular. In the US, the film slipped out virtually unnoticed, playing as Night of the Zombies. Later DVD editions retitled the film as Hell of the Living Dead, a literal translation of the Italian title.

The combination of messy narrative, shoddy pacing, poor dialogue, sloppy special effects and Mattei’s usual disinterested direction ensures that Virus is a fairly dreadful film. Yet conversely, it’s oddly entertaining, the sheer awfulness of the film giving it the car-crash fascination of the Good Bad Movie. It’s certainly more fun than most of the other Zombie Flesh Eaters imitators or pseudo sequels, and if you can forget about trying to make sense of the narrative, is amusingly trashy, with enough gore – including a show-stopping scene at the end – and nudity to keep exploitation fans happy.

David Flint, Horrorpedia

Related: Peter and the Test Tube Babies – Zombie Creeping Flesh | zombies on Horrorpedia

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Noble Johnson (April 18, 1881 – January 9, 1978) was an African-American actor and film producer. He was one of the first black actors in Hollywood to achieve any meaningful level of fame and successfully navigated the transition from silent movies to talkies.

Born in Marshall, Missouri 18th April 1881, Noble was a boyhood friend of Lon Chaney Sr and both became well-known for their ability to immerse themselves into roles, playing a wide variety of characters, often ‘bit-parts’ who still made a big impression. The Johnsons were a well-known black family in the city and their father was an expert horse-trainer. Johnson left school at 15 and travelled with his father riding horses until 1898 when he became a cowboy and had a succession of jobs in ranching, horse training, and later in mining in 1909, as well as finding time to be a boxer and an athlete.

Noble Johnson became the first major black actor, and though achieving fame, inevitably found himself often cruelly typecast. His imposing 6’2″ frame and comparatively light-coloured skin meant that he appeared as innumerable tribal characters, servants, Russians, Asians, Polynesians, monsters, Arab Princes, Native Americans and the Devil himself! This chameleon-like ability was aided by the quality of early film-stock and make-up.

Early successful silent appearances included the Rudolph Valentino break-out smash war epic, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), as The Bronze Man in Cecil B. DeMille’s first Biblical colossus, The Ten Commandments (1923), The Indian Prince in Douglas Fairbanks’ swashbuckling, The Thief of Baghdad (1924) and Pre-Code sensation, Dante’s Inferno (also 1924), which featured completely nude actresses and scenes so dazzling they were reused in the 1935 remake, and nearly 60 years later in Ken Russell’s Altered States. A sign of the times is that although playing the somewhat critical part of The Devil, Johnson appeared uncredited. Johnson also appeared in a minor role alongside his friend, Chaney, in Tod Browning’s 1928 film, West of Zanzibar.

By the time he had made the leap to talkies, the roles, though perhaps more developed, still focussed more on Johnson’s appearance than his talent – interestingly, his appearance in The Mysterious Dr Fu Manchu (1929) was alongside another actor who struggled to escape typecasting, Warner Oland, best known as his many appearances as Charlie Chan and also the cause of everyone’s problems in 1935’s Werewolf of London. Further indignity followed when he starred as ‘Janos the Black One’ in the first film adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue; like many Poe-based films, the plot skirts timidly around the source material,

Four films that followed helped elevate Johnson to more significant roles in the industry and to the attention of horror film lovers; The Most Dangerous Game (1932), The Mummy (1932), King Kong and Son of Kong (both 1933). As the sinister Cossack, Ivan, in the seminal The Most Dangerous Game, he was subject to something which may now seem extraordinary – he was ‘whited-up’ – naturally the opposite of being blacked-up. Appearing opposite Karloff in The Mummy he played the elegant Nubian, by turns, obedient and merciless. In both Kongs, Johnson appeared a the Tribal Leader of Skull Island – fun, iconic but let’s face it, hardly a progression morally or otherwise. He played The Zombie in the Bob Hope horror-comedy The Ghost Breakers in 1940.

Johnson essentially drew a veil over his career in 1950, shortly after appearing alongside John Wayne in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon as Chief Red Shirt, though he popped up in the 1966 TV movie, Lost Island of Kioga… as a hostile Indian. Truly, we had come no further. Johnson also helped to found the first Black-American film company, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, in existence until 1921. He died at the grand old age of 96 in 1978.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Watchers III (also Watchers 3 on publicity) is the 1994 second sequel to the horror film Watchers directed by Jeremy Stanford (Stepmonster) from a screenplay by Michael Palmer (Carnosaur 2), loosely based on the novel Watchers by Dean R. Koontz . It stars Wings Hauser (The Carpenter; Bedroom Eyes II; Tales from the Hood), Gregory Scott Cummins, Daryl Keith Roach, John Linton, Lolita Ronalds, Ider Cifuentes Martin, Frank Novak. Executive produced by Roger Corman, the exteriors were shot on location in Peru.

The film was followed by a further entry in this minor franchise in 1998, Watchers: Reborn.

Plot teaser:

A top secret experiment spawns two highly intelligent life-forms: Einstein, a golden retriever with an IQ of 175; and the Outsider, a deformed monstrosity that exists to kill and to avenge its creators. When the Outsider escapes into the jungles of South America, the government sends in Ferguson (Wings Hauser) and some ex-military convicts to catch the beast. But what starts out as a high-speed chase ends in carnage. Only Einstein knows the Outsider’s motives, and only the canine can outsmart the creature…

Reviews:

A low-rent Predator rip-off that also manages to ride on the tail of the ridiculous Watchers franchise — so we have more inane scenes of the supposed ultra-intelligent golden retriever dog barking warnings about ‘The Outsider’ or how to diffuse a bomb — but, strangely, the isolation of the authentic jungle settings, the timely gore moments, and Wings Hauser’s overly ‘sincere’ leadership role, make this a more agreeable time-waster than its predecessors. Plus, the hilariously daft monster harks back to Corman’s earliest 50s cheapo efforts.

Adrian J Smith, Horrorpedia

“Wings tries his best in this, and it’s plenty entertaining. He continues to reaffirm his status as a DTVC Hall of Famer through his efforts in crap like this. Between his scenes with the dog, to his dialog in funny-that’s-supposed-to-be-cool military speak (you know, “Checkmate this is Goose Down, do you read me?”), he delivers. I totally give him an A for effort. The problem is, you can get the same satisfaction out of seeing him guest star on an episode of Walker: Texas Ranger or something, and you’re in and out the door in half the time.” Direct to Video Connoisseur

“Enhanced by rugged jungle locations, and well directed by Jeremy Stanford, this is better-than-usual work for Corman. Michael Palmer’s script … is totally derivative of other actioners, but makes for a gpgood advebture that is marred only by a beast-creature that sometimes looks more ludicrous than hideous.” John Stanley, Creature Features

Choice dialogue:

“Are you an idiot? Or are you just fuckin’ stupid?”

“They took his head. They took his goddam head!”

Wikipedia | IMDb

‘He hunted humans for the sheer sport of killing… and made his island paradise into a Hell on Earth!’

Bloodlust! (also known as Bloodlust and Blood Lust) is a horror/thriller film co-written, co-produced and directed by Ralph Brooke.

Filmed in 1959 and released on September 13, 1961, the feature was picked up by Crown International Pictures. Crown later re-released it in 1970 as a double feature with Blood Mania. The film’s cinematography was by Richard E. Cunha (director of Giant from the Unknown, She Demons, Missile to the Moon, and Frankenstein’s Daughter).

Plot teaser:

Two couples (Robert Reed, June Kenney, Joan Lora, and Eugene Persson) are on a boating trip when they come across an uncharted island. The four investigate and find themselves in the clutches of Dr. Albert Balleau (Wilton Graff – Pillow of Death; Valley of the Zombies; Who Killed Doc Robbin), whose hobby is hunting both animals and humans.

After learning about the terrible secrets of the island from the doctor’s wife (Lilyan Chauvin) and her boyfriend (Walter Brooke) as well as an investigation, the group tries to escape only to be thwarted by Dr. Balleau and his henchmen.

Balleau’s wife and her lover are slain and stuffed, while the men are forced to participate in a The Most Dangerous Game-style hunt, with their girlfriends soon joining them. The hunt includes Balleau’s sailor henchmen, the danger of quicksand, leeches and hidden traps, as well as Balleau’s deadly skill…

Buy Film Chest Restored Version on DVD from Amazon.com

Reviews:

“Bloodlust! is no big deal, really, but it is reasonably well made for a quickie drive-in horror film, and it should reward those who come to it with a forgiving attitude. Wilton Graff does a respectable job as the villain, and in particular makes the most of the speech in which he tells how a stint as a sniper during World War II left him addicted to the thrill of hunting humans. Robert Reed makes for a rather dull hero, but he is counterbalanced to some extent by June Kenney’s Betty, who is atypically strong and resourceful for a B-movie heroine of this vintage. Watch especially for the scene in which she uses her judo skills to toss one of Balleau’s men into a vat of acid— not only is it an unexpected show of force, but it leads to a very hard-hitting gore effect by contemporary standards.” 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting

” …delivers satisfying late night chiller charm that is surprisingly daring for an overlooked sixties schlocker unjustly derided as a campy disappointment if it is even remembered at all.” Culture Crypt

“With the exception of a few hardy souls interested in seeing “Mike Brady” star in a horror film, Brooke’s Bloodlust! has no real target audience, no real entertainment value, and ultimately, no real reason to even be seen.” Examiner.com

The movie was released on DVD as a double feature with Atom Age Vampire on March 20, 2001, and later released on DVD as another double feature in 2002 with The Amazing Transparent Man.

‘The weird jungle of cobra plants that feed on women – and rip women apart!’

Voodoo Island is a 1957 horror film directed by Reginald Le Borg and written by Richard H. Landau. The cast includes Boris Karloff, Elisha Cook Jr. (Rosemary’s Baby; The Night Stalker) and Rhodes Reason. The film is set in the South Pacific and was filmed on Kauai, Hawaii back to back with Jungle Heat.

Hotel entrepreneur Howard Carlton (Owen Cunningham) is planning a new hotel/resort on a distant Pacific Island. A survey team that had been sent out earlier disappeared except for Mitchell (Glenn Dixon, Supervixens) who returned in a zombie-like state. In order to make sure nothing suspicious is going on, arch-sceptic Philip Knight (Karloff, Frankenstein, The Mummy), an investigative reporter, is dispatched to investigate. Anything but subtle, Knight takes along a party of five, including the catatonic Mitchell, his assistant Sara Adams (Beverley Tyler), resort manager Martin Schuler (Elisha Cook, Rosemary’s Baby, Messiah of Evil) and various other interested parties. Alas, before the journey begins, Mitchell drops dead, leaving behind only a voodoo effigy as a clue.

Wearing his best baseball cap, Knight and his party arrive at the island, despite the bad omens of a broken ship and their food supplies going off, essentially stranding them on the island. It’s not just a human threat the need to concern themselves with, a carnivorous plant devours one of their group, whilst the rest find themselves captured by fancy dress-clad locals and are further alarmed at the sight of their miniature likenesses, complete with pins in them. Knight is relatively unruffled but when he finds Schuler in a trance (shortly before he wanders carelessly off a bridge), he is forced to admit he believes in what he previously dismissed as hokum but is it too late for the survivors to escape Voodoo Island?

Is this Karloff’s lowest ebb? It must be close, the great actor appearing in an American film for the first time in four years after a brief diversion appearing on television, he’s admittedly given little to work with in terms of an utterly threadbare script but his stoic, clipped delivery is more radio announcer than dismissive explorer and the over-all effect is one of neither hero or villain but insufferable bore. The film itself seems at least a decade out of date in many ways, the pocket-money special effects of the draught excluder killer plant and clearly minute shooting area only tempered by a genuinely courageous attempt to include a gay character in a Hollywood film, the character of Claire (later lunch for for the shrub) played by Jean Engstrom, playing an openly lesbian role.

With hardly any voodoo in the film, indeed there seems to be a good degree of confusion as to what it may consist of, the film is little more than a brief safari, filmed on location but looking far more back garden in scope. The excellently-named Reginald Le Borg also directed The Mummy’s Ghost, whilst writer Richard Landau had no such excuse, having written the screenplays to The Quatermass Xperiment and much-forgotten live-action Disney effort, The Black Hole. Of much more interest is the score by Les Baxter, the master of exotica, in the middle of his Tiki-scapes but at the beginning of his film score career, later to include the likes of The Fall of the House of Usher, The Dunwich Horror and the America cut of Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath. In common with much of this film, it’s not his greatest work and features some particularly annoying theremin to denote someone being cursed.

After being released theatrically by United Artists in 1957, the film was briefly re-titled Silent Death for its 1962 theatrical re-release. Future Batman, Adam West, has an uncredited role. It would be the 1960’s before Karloff’s career really took off again, despite the best efforts of all concerned here.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia