Cannibal Terror

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Year:	1980
Country of origin:	Spain / France
Director:	Alain Deruelle
Genre:	Pitiful cannibal offering
Starring:	Silvia Solar, Gérard Lemaire, Pamela Stanford, Olivier Mathot
Rating:	1/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083185/
Tagline:	Gut Munching Gore Hounds!
Favourite line:	None worth mentioning

A late French entrant into the by then dwindling cannibal subgenre is a torpid, lifeless affair.

The plot:
In an unspecified country, two crooked sorts plan a kidnapping. Taking a young woman, they go undercover in the house of a friend, which just happens to be in the middle of the jungle. Paying the friend back by raping his wife, she gets her own back by tying the culprit to a tree, and leaving him for the local cannibals, who also seem keen to sample the flesh of his associate.
Meantime, the family of the kidnapped girl appear on the scene and effect a rescue.
Then it ends.

Exploitation movies, intermittently, branch out and explore new subgenres. We’ve had zombies, we’ve had Nunsploitation, we’ve had Nazisploitation and, perhaps most notoriously, there’s the cannibal movies.
Famed for their outrageous levels of gore – though this is usually more by repute than anything that actually appears on screen – as well as for real-life animal cruelty scenes – in lieu of a special effects budget, the directors would turn to cutting up turtles and pigs for our ‘entertainment’ – most of these hail from Italy.
Here we have an exception.
French in origin, though with some Spanish crossover, this really came just as the subgenre was fading and, it has to be said, is by far the worst of this particular niche I’ve ever endured.
Firstly, let’s deal with the glaring flaws.
1 – the ‘tribesmen’ are clearly a bunch of Gringo’s daubed in war paint. They have beer guts, some have Western style tattoos, and all are quite plainly Caucasian.
2 – If this is a jungle, then the street I live on in suburban Wolverhampton is The Ghetto.
The lawn of the house the crims hide in is well tended, and the ‘bush’ is no more wild than Wren’s Nest.
3 – Nothing happens. For ages and ages. Then something pathetic happens. Then nothing happens. For ages and ages.
4 – The gore is very poor. Though quite splatterific, the actual delivery is so feeble a first year film student could surely do better. The victim is pinned down. The sword is raised. Then we get a really dodgy cut scene and, quite clearly, they slice into a pig’s carcass they got from the local butchers. In one scene, it’s meant to be a woman they are disembowelling. Now then, I know humans are a varied species, but I’m yet to see a woman with thick, luscious pink hairs all over her belly.
Now that I think about it, though, sounds bloody delightful.
Beyond these obvious errors, we get endless scenes of people wandering through the ‘jungle’ aimlessly, an intro that takes so long to play out you’ll feel like eating yourself just to end the frustration and a denouement so protracted and pointless you’ll just be thankful you watched the majority of it on fast forward.
Utter, utter shit, and a new entrant in my top ten worst films of all time.