Cannibal Mercenary

Cannibal Mercenary

Thailand - 1983

Director - Hong Lu Wong

I found this poster/DVD cover(?) for the super absurd Thai film Cannibal Mercenary at Ioffer.com. I have a copy of this film simply titled Mercenary, on a bad bootleg VHS tape I got from a video store I worked in years and years ago. I think Cannibal Apocalypse would be a more apt comparison but it does lift large elements of the plot from Apocalypse Now.
Anyway, I thought this would make a good opener for my month of Vietnam War themed posts. Why am I devoting a month to it? Well because I'm going to be in Vietnam the entire month! I've wanted to visit since I began studying the country and the war many years ago. Now I finally got my chance so I'm taking it.

For more 'Nam related posts I've done in the past (it's a long standing interest as I mentioned) click Namsploitation and Vietnam Vets labels.
And finally, if you leave any comments in the next month don't despair they will get approved when I return.

Deodato's Cut and Run and The Barbarians

Cut and Run

Italy - 1985

Director - Ruggero Deodato

New World Video, 1986, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 27 minutes

Director Ruggero Deodato is most famous of course for Cannibal Holocaust, his contribution to cannibal cinema and the fake documentary which many, including The Blair Witch Project copied to such success. But like many Italian exploitation directors of his time he was willing to do just about anything, including coat-tailing popular themes. His House At The Edge of The Park is a direct spin-off of Wes Craven's Last House On The Left, though more viscerally brutal, and Camping Terror AKA Body Count was a sad attempt to cash in on the slasher genre already waning by the time it came out..

But that's one of the things we should love about exploitation film, its attempts to replicate success. Here we have Cut and Run (aka Inferno in diretta) another cannibal film, this time stacked with exploitation workhorses Michael Berryman and Richard Lynch. The theme here attempts to deepen the intrigue of Deodato's prior cannibal films by drawing the jungle and the modern world together more closely, namely via some strange things called sympathetic characters, plot and narcotics. Much of Cut and Run is standard 80's intrigue, but nevertheless quite entertaining. This VHS tape unfortunately takes after its namesake and has at least three minutes cut. One nice thing about it however is the cover art by Chris Consani. I have been unable to find any sources that explicitly credit him with this art, but the signatures match, so I'm satisfied. Nor does Consani have website, Googling his name results in page after page of paintings of Humphrey Bogart, Elvis, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe playing pool. Well rendered, but, I just don't get the appeal. In any case, this is the only movie related artwork I can atribute to Consani, but there are several different versions.
The following two are UK sleeves from It's Only a Movie.co.uk and feature what appear to be alternate versions of the Consani artwork:

 

 The above version, while not quite as intimidating as the following, does feature the suspended Fran character (Lisa Blount) which ads a different sort of menace to the whole thing.

 

Furthermore, according to the book Cannibal Holocaust: The Savage Cinema of Ruggero Deodato, Cut and Run was originally titled Marimba and slated to be directed by Wes Craven. Obviously it didn't end up that way but as you can see above it does prominently star the unforgettable Michael Berryman who also glared out from the screen, posters and VHS boxes of Craven's The Hills Have Eyes parts 1 and 2 (1977 and 1985 respectively.) Deodato really has a thing for Wes Craven.

Deodato also re-hired both Berryman and Lynch for Barbarians, his entertaining last minute entry in the barbarian/fantasy craze that briefly swept the post-Conan 1980's.

 

Barbarians

Italy - 1987

Director - Ruggero Deodato

Media Home Entertainment, 1988, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 28 minutes

Strangely this post began as a short write-up of this amazing VHS tape, but upon remembering my Cut and Run tape, I got sidetracked, so this is what you get. Suffice to say that Barbarians is pretty tongue-in-cheek funtastic as well, despite what should just be skull mashing stupidity. No matter what, ol' Ruggero hits his mark.

Gorezone #25 - Umberto Lenzi

Hey, who doesn't like eating meat? I mean really, besides vegans and lacto-vegetarians, who doesn't like dead-body food? What's not to like about a good old fashioned corpse feast? For this reason I must digress back into my regular Danksgeben mode and celebrate the consumption of human flesh. Because I know of absolutely zero cannibal movies that haven't been reviewed to pieces, and even fewer of those that haven't made it to DVD, I'll give you the next best thing; an interview with the prince of Italian cannibalsploitation, Umberto Lenzi. This issue of Gorezone came out in 1992.





Friends over at B Movies and Beyond, and Cult Trailers have posted some good Lenzi flavored stuff, check it out.

And.....
here is one of my favorite trash posters, a German version of Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox snagged from an American DVD release insert from 2002 or so.

Cannibal Apocalypse

A nice VHS cover from It's Only A Movie(.co.uk).

Cannibal Apocalypse

Italy - 1980

Director - Antonio Margheriti (Anthony M Dawson)

Various distributors, various dates, various formats, but pretty much gone.

Run Time approx. 1 hour, 36 min. (according to IMDB)

Don't fault me for posting on this movie just because it had a DVD release (which is now out of print I gather). I'm bringing it up so that I can gather a bunch of VHS and poster images in one place and because I'm going to reference this film in an upcoming write-up. One of the reasons I've never done full writeups for movies like this is because they are well known and popular, cult-classics if you will. Plenty of people have written/spoken about these high-profile exploitation films. I still love 'em, but it doesn't give you any new information to hear me ramble. In any case...

Though he's had a long string of exploitation successes, for my tastes, Antonio Margheriti really hit home with this Cannibal Apocalypse. A bunch of soldiers in Vietnam (check) are held in tiger cages and starved. Finally they are fed human flesh (check) which they consume eagerly, infecting themselves with some kind of spreadable zombie/cannibalism disease, whether physical or psychological, it doesn't matter, they just do. Rescued by John Saxon (check) and some haphazard gunfire and explosions (check) they return to the States and start killing and eating people (check) while John Saxon ogles his underage neighbor (check). Whew.
Talk about exploitation, I can think of few instances in which genre cliche's are combined with such recklessly brilliant abandon, and spearheaded by John 'effing Saxon. This is one of the reasons why Margheriti is a genius, he doesn't care if it makes logical sense or it fits in (even in a hypothetical "film" world).
Every November I celebrate American Thanksgiving (the Canadians have one too) by giving thanks for the worlds largest as-yet untapped food-source; people. Writing this has convinced me which film to start off this year's celebration.

Thanks to the various sites from whom I borrowed the following images.

Another VHS cover, this time from Antionio Margheriti.com

This is the version I have on DVD, but I got the cover scan from It's Only A Movie(.co.uk).

Poster image from Honors Zombie.

Alternate titled poster from Friki Tu Puta Madre.

A third poster I got from Wrong Side of the Art.

And hey, why not, a one sheet from Grindhouse Database

Flesh Eating Mothers

Forbes Video doesn't want you to forget who the tape belongs to.

Flesh Eating Mothers

United States - 1988

Director – James Aviles Martin

Academy Entertainment, 1989, VHS

Run time – 1 hour 30 minutes

Preceded by trailers for One Man Force, and Murder Story, Flesh Eating Mothers benefits from a great name, but the inclusion of action movie trailers makes me think the distributor wasn’t sure what to do with this movie, which usually means the film itself is every bit as confused.

The opening scene is good though. A hunter running through the woods notices some blood dripping into the snow and looks down to find only the ragged stump of an arm. No explanation is given, so I guess that was the expository question that will be answered by the remaining plot.

Several average lookin’ middle-agers breathe heavily and congratulate each other after a particularly sweaty adultery session. The guy, Roddy runs off home to make an appearance but soon leaves his unsuspecting wife at the house for a jog over to another lonely waiting housewife. This guy must have some serious coital trapeze act because he’s ugly as sin but all the married ladies in the neighborhood are tripping over eachother to ride the Rod. Checking up on the health of the ol’ rod, Roddy stops at the wood-paneled VD clinic to ogle the assistant and exchange lurid sex tales with the doctor who posts various amusing VD related signs on the wood paneled wall behind his desk.

In one of the few creepy scenes in the film one of the adulterous moms discusses the production of veal with her son while trying to force him to drink more milk. I turned to my companion and said, “Hey, maybe this is a metaphor for women’s liberation from the domestic prison” or something just as wishful.
“This film is barely a single entendre” my comrade in pain replied.
How right he was.

But honestly there are a few satisfying moments, like when the mom eats her baby, and when the battered wife splits her face open into a giant toothy jaw and eats her alcoholic husbands arm off. It’s badly shot and badly edited, but it’s fulfilling, really it is. They are just housewives (and amateur actresses,) and it loses it’s novelty really quick, particularly with the addition of forehead slappingly tedious “comedic” dialogue. The addition of the mother’s various high-school aged children banding together to fight the epidemic was supposed to add some sympathetic protagonists and action/tension I reckon, but the closest it got was the cryptozoological spectacle of one lovesick hydrocephalic girl and her extremely greasy sleazoid boyfriend.

Fortunately the 3 foot tall mortician adds a little comedic interest. He isn’t convinced by the asshole VD doctor’s dismissal, and after doing an autopsy on one of the mothers, discovers some unusual virus in “the vaginal passageway”. This guys dialogue is moderately funny, and it helps that most of it is delivered alongside the 7 foot tall VD docs hot assistant, but it’s not enough to save the movie. The physical effects had a lot of potential for menace, and if you really pushed it, maybe some humor since the mothers looked like Killer Klowns. The feel good ending, chock full of hugs as it is belies an inability (lack of budget?) to explore the possibilities of the film. It’s like a domesticated cannibal snow globe where most of the real flesh eating occurs off-screen and the wink at the end lets everyone off the hook.

This British VHS box art is hilarious thanks to use of the word "mum" in the synopsis.

I don't remember seeing DVD's available when I bought my tape, but there are at least three variations of the same cover art.

And finally, the defunct Austrian rock band Flesh Eating Mothers.

Hunter's Blood

Hunter’s Blood

United Statesl – 1986

Director – Robert C. Hughes

Embassy Home Entertainment, 1987, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 42 min.

Surprisingly comfortable within the warm fold of 80’s exploitation, Hunters Blood, with all the B names behind it, has a lot to go on, and with little hesitation it sets to work. The cover, and box synopsis immediately invoke Deliverance, an association I am surely not the first to draw (and in fact the reason I bought it). Nevertheless, Hunters Blood quickly sidesteps any chance at class with an instant shower scene, an asexual one, but the point is that we establish this as exploitation right away.

David (Samuel Bottoms, Lance the surfer in Apocalypse Now) and his dad (Clu Gulager) don flannel & vests and hop into his uncles rumbling Bronco and rip up the road on their yearly hunting trip. Picking up dads brother and his New York lawyer buddy Marty (Joey Travolta) they back slap their way up to a beer joint in the Apilachians where loudmouth Marty plays the boorish tourist and gets the vengeance ball rolling. After sexually harassing the barmaid, they get in a knife fight with some more hillbillies, and take flight in the Bronco.
With sheer stupid blundering luck propelling them from here on, the protagonists run into the redneck’s poaching operation. Time after time they are self-trippingly lucky enough to escape, capture, be captured by and escape again the bloodthirsty filth encrusted hillbillies. Yet, despite prolific flayed and crucified warnings from skittish Game Wardens, the group resorts to positive thinking.
Thanks to good old fashioned yankee naivete, they continue the hunting trip. It is this very stubborn determination to die that makes the horror films of this generation so watchable.

Somebody has to get shot, yes, there will be blood in this movie. Between a fair mix of shrieking idiocy and meat-headed obstinacy, the surviving civilised guys will, after a few dramatic personnel cutbacks, surely catch the last meat wagon back to town .

VHS sleeve from Backwoods Horror

  The poster whence came the artwork. Courtesy of 123 Nonstop as is the one below.