Cannibal Apocalypse

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Year:	1980
Country of origin:	Italy / Spain
Director:	Antonio Margheriti
Genre:	Intelligent exploitation piece
Starring:	John Saxon,  Elizabeth Turner, Giovanni Lombardo Radice, Cinzia De Carolis
Rating:	4/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080379/
Tagline:	In the jungle, or in the city, still they must EAT!
Favourite line:	"All you have to do is piss on it, remember?"

A cannibal movie that dares to be a little bit different.

The plot:
In Vietnam, a platoon of American soldiers take out a Viet Cong village – you know they are Viet Cong, for they wear black pyjamas and pointy hats made out of bamboo – to rescue some American soldiers taken prisoner. Killing the villagers in a rather cavalier manner (inadvertently funny, some of these bits, as members of the VC spiral through the air, explosions propelling them skyward rather dramatically) only to find that their countrymen seem to have been blighted by an infection that has turned them into cannibals and, rather foolishly, Our Hero Norman Hopper (John Saxon) manages to get himself all bitey-biteyed.
Skip forward a few years, and Norman is trying to live a normal civvies life, but keeps having strange dreams of death and bloodshed.
When one of the infected prisoners, Bukowski, contacts him, Norm agrees to meet him, but just too late, as Bukowski has gone on the rampage in a local supermarket, and is eating those he has killed.
Before you can shake a big, knobbly piece of gristle in the air, Norm, Bukowski and two other infected sorts are on the run, their plan simple: get back to South East Asia where, like at any good Chinese buffet, they can eat all they like….

A cut above, this, you know.
Eschewing the standard jungle location, this is a clever combination of two cinematic tropes: the Vietnam movie, and the cannibal film.
If it were made now, this would be considered a mash-up, so credit is due for being well ahead of the game.
With a decent lead actor in John ‘Enter the Dragon, A Nightmare On Elm Street’ Saxon – though quite how they landed him is still open to debate. He insists he was tricked into it, thinking he was making the next Apocalypse Now. A bit hard to swallow, John, pun most definitely intended, especially as one scene he features in involves the rather graphic segmentation of a victim’s leg into convenient bite sized portions – and a reasonable budget for the genre – there are, like, proper police cars and extras and shoot outs and stuff, man – this is a cannibal movie with some proper brains. Fnar, fnar.
At its core, this is an anti-war tract, the subtext dealing with the same subject matter as both Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter; the abandonment of armed forces personnel once the military has no further use for them.
Intelligent, reasonably effectively delivered and with enough splatter to keep the drones watching on in slack-jawed wonder, liked this rather a lot.