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Review
by
Brian Lindsey
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4
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7 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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A
couple of years ago I reviewed two French jungle
adventure/exploitation movies, Diamonds
of Kilimandjaro and Golden
Temple Amazons, both of which sucked pretty
hard. Although purported to be works of Jess Franco,
the controversial director had little or nothing
to do with those Eurociné films —
his accreditation was purely a marketing gimmick.
Not so with 1980's Cannibals
(AKA White Cannibal Queen, alias Barbarian
Goddess), a jungle/exploitation pic from the
same French producer which Franco actually did
direct. So how does the real thing stack up against
"Faux Franco"?
Turns
out it sucks only marginally less.
Euro-Cult
stalwart Al Cliver (Zombie,
Laure) plays Dr. Jeremy
Taylor, a researcher traveling up a remote tributary
of the Amazon said to be inhabited by savage cannibals.
He stupidly agreed to bring along his wife and
young daughter, who stupidly insisted on coming
along. They haven't gotten very far up upriver
(which looks an awful lot like the sea coast
of Spain) when their boat is attacked by bloodthirsty
natives. Taylor watches helplessly as his spouse
(Pamela Stanford of Sexy
Sisters) is butchered and devoured alive;
he and his daughter are taken as captives to the
cannibals' village. There the chief declares the
young girl a sacred "white goddess"
—
adopting her into the tribe —
while Taylor has one of his arms chopped off and
eaten. Before the rest of him can be consumed,
however, he escapes into the jungle and eventually
makes his way back to civilization.
Taylor
winds up in a New York hospital with amnesia,
where he eventually recovers his health and memory
with the aid of caring Ana, a foxy doctor or nurse
—
or something, this isn't
made clear —
played by Franco muse Lina
Romay. (Billed as "Candy Coster", she's
very cute here in a late-'70s Charlie's Angels
'do.) Apparently this is supposed to have
taken years —
10 years in fact, although it would seem only
long enough for our hero to have grown a beard.
Once recuperated, Taylor approaches the head of
the Shelton Foundation, heiress Barbara Shelton
(Shirley Knight), about financing an expedition
to return to the jungle and search for his daughter.
She and her snooty boyfriend Charles (Olivier
Mathot, Revenge
in the House of Usher) not only blow him off
but insult him as well, dismissing his story of
how he lost his family and arm as "fantasy"
and "tall tales". Taylor presses ahead
anyway, traveling to the Amazon with Ana in hopes
of securing a guide. But he has very little money.
(Just like this production.)
As luck would have it, Taylor
runs into Charles and Barbara, who've come to
South America on a junket with some of their jetsetter
friends. Promising to let bygones be bygones they
agree to bankroll the search provided their group
gets to go along, just for the "fun"
and "adventure" of it. A grim Taylor
warns them that it'll be a dangerous trek, certainly
"no tea party". His prediction comes
true when they enter cannibal country, as one
by one the members of the expedition are picked
off and butchered. The bloodthirsty savages, led
by Caucasian-hating Yakaké (Antonio Mayans, alias
"Robert Foster"), are determined to
kill or capture them all. Prisoners are summarily
eaten, alive and uncooked. Will Taylor survive
long enough to see his now grown daughter (Sabrina
Siani), who has been living among the cannibals
all these years?
You're guaranteed not to give
a damn, since your reaction will either be (A)
massively bummed for having sat through this mess,
or (B) simple amusement at how cheesy and stupid
it is. The painfully bad English dubbing is often
hilarious, not just for the goofy, strangely cadenced
dialog but the bizarre, inappropriate accents
some of the characters are saddled with. (Director
Jess Franco, appearing as a Portuguese trader,
sounds like a Texas cowpoke!) Brief snippets of
inserted stock footage try to help pass off a
national park in Spain as the Amazon rain forest,
without success. Playing the cannibals are an
odd-looking assortment of garishly-painted Spanish
gypsies, supremely unconvincing "natives"
to say the least. (South American aborigines do
not have facial hair, much less Ambrose Burnside-style
mutton chops.) Also unconvincing is Cliver's fake
amputated arm stump, which bounces around like
an overstuffed summer sausage with his real limb
clearly strapped down to his torso. The protracted
gore/feasting scenes are all in slow motion and
tight close-up, victims screaming endlessly on
the soundtrack as the actors playing the cannibals
gnaw at hunks of raw steak... Mildly effective
at first, this technique becomes funny the second
time it's trotted out and downright annoying by
the third.
As he
relates in the interview on the DVD, Franco had
no love for the cannibal genre (then popularized
by such infamous pics as Cannibal
Holocaust) but agreed to do such a movie because
it would allow him to play around with three of
his favorite film elements: adventure, horror
and exotic locales. The resulting
Cannibals fails in all of these departments
—
conspicuously cheap and
badly staged at every level.
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Blue Underground's recently released Cannibals
DVD offers a fine-looking anamorphic (1.66:1)
transfer of the film, perhaps the best I've yet
seen for a Eurociné production from this
period. Print damage is virtually nil; colors
are generally strong although they tend to fluctuate
a bit due to the different film stocks used. The
clean English mono audio track sounds fine.
For
extras you get the rather long French trailer
(which is subtitled in English) and another interview
featurette typical of Blue Underground's Jess
Franco titles. In Franco Holocaust (20
min.) the elderly filmmaker holds court on his
distaste for the super-gory cannibal flicks of
Ruggero Deodato and their imitators, outlining
his attempt to do something different with the
genre. He praises Al Cliver for being a thoroughly
professional — if also dull and wooden — actor,
as well as the enthusiasm of the gypsy extras.
Describing Sabrina
Siani as one of the "most stupid" people
he ever had the displeasure to work with, Franco
tells a hilarious anecdote about the time spent
on location by Siani's mother, a birdbrained "stage
parent" of the worst order. 11/25/07
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