CANNIBAL FEROX (1981) Blu-ray
Director: Umberto Lenzi
Shameless Screen Entertainment

Sillier than CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST yet chock full of extreme imagery, Umberto Lenzi's CANNIBAL FEROX is another Video Nasty to make its Blu-ray bow in the UK.

New York police Lieutenant Rizzo (Robert Kerman, EATEN ALIVE) is investigating the murder of a junkie in the apartment of tour guide Myrna Stenn (Fiamma Maglione, wife of co-producer Mino Loy and co-composer of the soundtrack with Roberto Donati). Although the audience has seen the victim shot by a mobster (John Bartha, EYEBALL) and his enforcer Paul (Kerman's CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST co-star Perry Pirkanen), Rizzo suspects Myrna's coke-snorting boyfriend Mike (Giovanni Lombardo Radice, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD) whose whereabouts are currently unknown. Meanwhile, NYU grad student Gloria Davis (Lorraine de Selle, HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE PARK), her brother Rudy (Danilo Mattei, ANIMA PERSA), and "hot-pussied little whore" Pat (Zora Kerowa, NEW YORK RIPPER) are trekking through Panaguya, Columbia in search of a native village called Manyoaca to disprove accounts of cannibalism for her thesis that posits cannibalism as a colonial myth to justify the cruel treatment of native populations. No sooner do they break down in the middle of nowhere than they run into Mike and his wounded partner Joe (Walter Lucchini, IRONMASTER) who claim to have been attacked by cannibals while panning for emeralds. The quintet plan to make for the Amazon River in search of help but Joe cannot travel for long periods of time. When Rudy stumbles upon the village, he sees some evidence of carnage that seems to support Mike's story but also notices that all of the young natives are gone and the elders and children seem more frightened of them. Mike is eager for them to escape to the river before the village's young men return and kill them, but Rudy and Gloria refuse to leave Joe behind. Realizing that he is dying, Joe tells the siblings the truth about what happened to rile up the villagers who soon capture the Americans with the goal to MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY…

Although definitely made to cash-in on the international success and Italian domestic notoriety of Ruggero Deodato's CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST – which also has its white victims paying for their own atrocities against the natives – CANNIBAL FERROX it is not interested in indicting media sensationalism or armchair academic arrogance so much as piling on the guts and sex. Were it as soberly acted and filmed as CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, CANNIBAL FEROX would be as grim as the American title MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY sounds but Radice's over-the-top villainy earns his character a fittingly grisly fate compared to the more pathetic victims he played in other films or the other victims here (particularly Kerowa's Pat who is at first turned on by violence but horrified with her own potential sadism before she is captured). Most interpretations of the ending suggest Gloria cynically keeps the fates of her fellow captives secret in order to further her theory that cannibalism as an organized practice does not exist – and it is in this respect that Eli Roth's THE GREEN INFERNO is more a remake of Lenzi's film despite his worship of Deodato – however, her emotionally-shattered demeanor in the final scene might also suggest her belief that violence breeds violence, and they have driven the Indios to primitive behaviors. Kerman also appeared in Lenzi's EATEN ALIVE the year before, a cannibal flick that featured Ivan Rassimov as a Jim Jones-esque cult leader and stock footage from JUNGLE HOLOCAUST. The cast also includes Venantino Venantini (who put a drill through Radice's skull in CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD) as a police officer tailing Myrna to get to Mike. As a nod to Lenzi's earlier cannibal film MAN FROM DEEP RIVER, the film was retitled WOMAN FROM DEEP RIVER in Australia. The score is the work of Maglione and partner Roberto Donati (APACHE WOMAN) and was arranged and conducted by Carlo Maria Cordio (ABSURD) who would go on to contribute synthesizer scores to Italian genre films throughout the eighties and early nineties.

Released unrated theatrically through Terry Levene's Aquarius Releasing under the title MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY and then on cassette by Thriller Video (one of the unrated titles on which Elvira did not do hosting segments along with the Euro horrors DR. BUTCHER M.D., SEVEN DOORS TO DEATH, and BURIED ALIVE), Grindhouse Releasing first brought CANNIBAL FEROX back into the mainstream in 1998 with a Box Office Spectaculars laserdisc that featured a letterboxed transfer with a brand new Dolby Surround mix in English as well as the Italian mono track and an occasionally combative audio commentary by Lenzi and star Radice. Radice expresses his hatred for the film early on as well as painting a vivid picture of Leticia, drug dealers, substandard lodgings and food, and the share suffering with his castmates. Lenzi focuses on the particulars of the production and anecdotes. Both react with distaste to the animal violence, but Radice blames Lenzi for having shot it while Lenzi blames the requirements of the producers. Image's 2000 Grindhouse DVD featured a non-anamorphic 1.85:1 port of the laserdisc master with a short Lenzi on-camera interview added to the ported over trailers and still galleries (Grindhouse reissued this version on their own in 2006) while anamorphic transfers in 1.66:1 and 1.78:1 appeared on overseas DVDs. In 2015, Grindhouse issued the film on a three-disc Blu-ray/CD soundtrack set from a "gore-geous" 2K restoration of the original camera negative with two encodes of the film – the export cut (92:59) and a version that reintegrates two bits of rediscovered footage from the pig killing scene and the piranha scene (93:19), porting over the laser and DVD extras while also including the feature-length survey of cannibal films "Eaten Alive! The Rise and Fall of the Italian Cannibal Film" (85:33) – available for UK viewers on the 88 Films disc of ZOMBI HOLOCAUST – and a second Blu-ray featuring new cast and crew interviews.

A Video Nasty in the UK, CANNIBAL FEROX was cut by six minutes when Vipco issued it on fullscreen DVD, while Shameless' Blu-ray was only subject to two minutes of cuts to the animal violence while the human violence remains intact. Unlike their MOUNTAIN OF THE CANNIBAL GOD release, Shameless has conceded that the cuts were legally required rather than taking a disingenuous-seeming moral stance. Shameless has decided to undertake their own 2K scan and restoration of the original 16mm camera negative, and a restoration demo (3:30) reveals the heavy green bias of the faded negative and the digital work done to clean up the film. On its own, this restoration looks fair to good; however, a direct comparison with the Grindhouse edition reveals that Shameless' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.78:1 widescreen presentation still carries a sickly yellow cast which has the effect of making the image look flatter and a tad duller until the blood flows. The English LPCM 2.0 mono track is fairly clean with clear dialogue and scoring, although owners of the Grindhouse edition will prefer that edition's stereo remix.

Shameless has not ported over any of the Grindhouse extras, but the ones they produced would make a nice supplement to that edition, especially since “A Taste of the Jungle” (21:49) is possibly the very last interview conducted with Lenzi before his death earlier this year, and it is a fitting summation of his career. He describes Italy's genre cinema funded by international sales as making possible the auteur works of Antonioni and Fellini, and that his work as a genre director required him to "change with the times." He expresses disdain for his westerns while revealing that his favorite genre as director and novelist is the giallo. Although he turned down CANNIBAL FEROX after making EATEN ALIVE!, he is proud of the effort and castigates Radice, de Selle, and Kerowa for trashing a film that made them famous. In “Hell in the Jungle" (33:16), Radice recalls that he was tired of playing the "whipping boy" characters when he was offered the role of Joe in the film. He hated the script but needed the money so he negotiated to play Mike with a higher salary. He recalls the hellish conditions of the jungle and his friendships with de Selle, Kerowa, along with producer Loy and his wife Maglione. His relationship with Lenzi, on the other hand, was negative and he describes it here in a somewhat toned down fashion compared to earlier interviews in light of the other man's death. He decries the animal violence and reveals that effects supervisor Gino de Rossi did the actual pig stabbing, and that his own prosthetics for the gore scenes were unpleasant enough for him to physically attack de Rossi. Besides the restoration demo, the disc also includes a Lenzi Photo Gallery and start-up trailers for CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST and THE MOUNTAIN OF THE CANNIBAL GOD, although strangely none for CANNIBAL FEROX itself. The cover is reversible and a vomit bag is included for novelty value. (Eric Cotenas)

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