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7
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5 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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Guest
Review by Rod
Barnett |
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Given
a title that has very little relation to its content,
Cannibal
Man
is not the gut-munching splatterfest you might
expect. Instead it's a thoughtful, intelligent
and deliberately paced study of one man's descent
into madness and is much better served by the
alternate title Week Of The Killer. The
film bears more resemblance to Polanski's Repulsion
than the gross-out cannibal movies that stampeded
through exploitation theaters in the late '70s
and early '80s. Rather than those movies I was
surprised to find myself thinking of a line from
Alfred Hitchcock's 1943 film Shadow
of a Doubt. In that movie a serial murderer
of rich old ladies asks what the pleasant facades
of middle class homes hide and what ugly things
you might see if the fronts were ripped off those
houses. In the Hitchcock story the killer is a
man from modest means whose maniacal disgust with
idle rich women drives his desire to kill. Here
we have killer driven by fear committing a string
of atrocities but silently watched through that
fake calm front his house affords. But behind
the walls of this poor man's home death piles
up all because our anti-hero believes (probably
correctly) that someone like him won't be afforded
justice.
Marcos
(Vincente Parra) is a man on the fringes of Spanish
urban life. He works in a slaughterhouse and shares
a rundown house with his older brother. Their
home is in an area of the city in which expensive
high rise apartment buildings are springing up
and pushing out the older residents. This house
is one of the last of the older dwellings in the
neighborhood and looking up at the new complexes
Marcos knows his place in the world as a poor
man every day. He's dating the very lovely Paula
(Emma Cohen) but she knows her father won't approve
of Marcos and has kept their romance a secret.
One night while on a date together they are insulted
and assaulted by a cab driver. This older fellow
is offended by their public displays of affection
and in the ensuing altercation Marcos brains the
man over the head to protect Paula. The next day’s
newspaper reveals that the cab driver died from
the blow. Paula thinks they should go to the police,
explain what happened and try to put it behind
them. But Marcos insists that he will never be
believed and when he realizes Paula will go to
police with or without him, he strangles her.
Clearly puzzled by his own actions, he places
her body in his bedroom and carries on with his
life.
Marcos'
brother has been out of town on a job. When he
returns a day early and discovers Paula's corpse
he is stunned and tries to convince Marcos to
go to the cops. The siblings argue and when things
are done Marcos is laying his brother's body in
his bedroom as well. At this point things become
complicated as his brother's fiancée Carmen shows
up looking for her future husband. A forceful
woman with a dim view of men she can’t be stopped
from searching the house and soon her body is
added to the pile.
Marcos
continues to go about his usual life, working,
eating in a local restaurant and fielding the
flirtatious advances from beautiful waitress Rosa.
He seems to be trying to figure a way out of his
problem but the next day Carmen's father shows
up in a fury looking for his missing daughter.
Once again Marcos resorts to violence and now
he has four bodies in his bedroom. Finally he
gets an idea about how to deal with this situation.
He begins dismembering the bodies and taking the
pieces to the slaughter house each day inside
a duffel bag. There he feeds the parts into the
machinery that processes the beef, neatly getting
rid of the evidence.
Over the course of these few
days Marcos keeps meeting one of his neighbors
from the nearest high rise apartment building.
Nestor (Eusebio Poncela) is a polite but talkative
man who lives on his own. He goes out of his way
to befriend Marcos and by the time he casually
says of his neighbor's unspoken problems, "You
should bury them," you suspect he knows
the bedroom's terrible secret. It slowly becomes
clear that Nestor is a homosexual and it's his
own outcast position in Spanish society that leads
him to overlook Marcos' crime. Nestor might even
be looking for help from his new friend but it
only becomes clear what kind as the men become
closer. As the smell from the rotting bodies gets
to be difficult to conceal, Marcos' problem may
have grown too large to escape detection. Soon
the missing people are going to cause the police
to investigate and Marcos has to make a decision.
One of
the best surprises of this very good film is the
restraint with which the gruesome tale is told.
Even though this a story about a man who kills
half a dozen people there is never a feeling of
sleaze or exploitation. While there are some bloody
moments the film is light on violence. Much more
interested in studying its main character's mental
deterioration than shocking an audience it works
its magic in drawing a portrait of a desperate
man pushed by fear into horrible crimes. It's
a testament to writer/director Eloy de la Iglesia's
skill that we find Marcos more sympathetic as
the story goes on instead of less. His acts are
terrible —
the most heinous act a human can do —
but his reasons are understandable.
He knows he'll never be get justice in the repressive
culture of Franco's Spain. The film shows several
scenes of daily life around him that make his
place in society clear —
he has no real future the
moment he struck that cab driver.
This
is a dark, sad film that ultimately becomes about
two men from opposite ends of society who are
outsiders for different reasons. Neither man can
really help the other. But they can at least find
a friend —
someone to talk to —
before they succumb to the
inevitable end the world has condemned them to.
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Blue Underground has re-released Cannibal
Man
to DVD but those hoping for an improvement on
the old Anchor bay disc are in for a disappointment.
While the film looks very good letterboxed and
enhanced for 16X9 TVs, there is still only the
English dub for an audio option. Now I have to
admit the dub is very good — professional and
literate — but I would've liked the chance to
hear it in the original tongue, with subtitles.
I guess I should be happy to get to see this one
at all since it's not really a crime film and
not really a horror film, either. These kind of
hard-to-classify movies rarely get treated this
well when they're 35 years old. Not that it's
treated that well... There's only one extra
— if you can count the trailer an extra. If ever
an obscure film cried out for modern scholarly
appraisal, this is it. Not for most audiences
but if you have an open mind and know what you're
getting into, you might get caught up in this
brilliant tale of madness.
12/01/07
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