LAST
CANNIBAL WORLD (Jungle Holocaust, 1976). For better or worse Cannibal
Holocaust is and always will be the most famous Italian cannibal movie,
but here is its lesser-known predecessor. Directed by Ruggero Deodato, it
seems like a cross between The Naked Prey, Mondo Cane and
Umberto Lenzi's obscure cannibal kick-off, The Man From Deep River.
It stars those two stalwarts of cannibal cinema, Ivan Rassimov and Me Me
Lai, but mostly features Massimo Foschi as an American businessman who comes
to the southern Philippine island of Mindanao to meet with a team hunting
for oil. The team has vanished, and it soon becomes clear that the team
met a grisly end at the hands of a local stone-age cannibal tribe and soon
enough the expendible foreigners in the group are killed off and Rassimov
and Foschi are on their own. They eventually are separated, and Foschi is
taken captive by said cannibal tribe. They treat him as an honored guest,
pissing on him, smashing him with rocks, etc. Eventually Foschi escapes
with savage cannibal queen Me Me Lai in tow (somehow the cannibals have
developed breast-implant technology). After Foschi rapes Lai it turns into
a love story. Awwww, well, not for long, eventually the cannibals catch
up to our pair (now reunited with Rassimov) and Lai, for her troubles has
her head bashed open, is gutted, cooked, and eaten. Okay, so this is a Deodato
movie, don't expect a happy ending. Unlike Lenzi's cannibal films Deodato
at least tries to insert some sort of sociological point-of-view, of course
it is pretty crudely left-wing, as in both this and Cannibal Holocaust
white man comes to the jungle and mistreats the natives (in this case pollution
caused by oil drilling presumably) and the natives give the white devil
a taste of his own medicine. Like I said, there's no real sophistication
to his world-view (West = bad Savage = good) but he does try, though I suppose
its that political posture that makes his cannibal films so much more effective
than Lenzi's which are merely content to wallow in exploitational grossness
(not at all a bad thing). Typically though, at the same time Deodato (like
most lefties) is highly condescending to the "natives" viewing them as animals
given over to gruesome rituals and savagery (ie a scene in which a woman
gives birth to a baby, bites through the umbilical cord and tosses it to
a waiting croc). That said, Last Cannibal World is still impressive
to an extent, though it doesn't deliver the gut punch that Cannibal Holocaust
delivers, the jungle footage is much more picturesque than Holocaust, and
some scenes veer into the poetic (as close as an Italian exploitation film
can get). Deodato does tend to linger too long on some things, and the conclusion
is a little too pat (at least there's no specious moralizing on the part
of porn actors). But all said it is not a bad chunk of gut munching action.
Shriek Show put out a pretty good DVD of this, though they call it Jungle
Holocaust despite the title card reading Last Cannibal World,
but it has a very good transfer (the sound is kind of cruddy but oh well)
and good commentary/interview with Deodato (I liked the lobby cards they
include in the case).
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THE LAST HOUSE ON DEAD
END STREET (1977). Sleazy and feel-bad obscurity about snuff films looks
to me like a pretentious student film that was picked up for distribution
and retitled to make it seem related to The Last House on the
Left. It certainly has all the hallmarks of a student film: voice over
dialogue that doesn't always match what's going on on-screen, bizarre, discordant
music, rather theatrical acting, and a completely disjointed plot. What
makes it different from other student films is its copious amounts of gore
and exploitation. First seeing it I was bored silly, but I gave it another
chance and for some reason found it fascinating the second time; I don't
know what the hell the movie is all about, but it exudes a slezeball atmosphere
that most exploitation movies can't match. The plot revolves around an ex-con
(Steven Morrison, who looks like Jack Black) who gets out of prison and
decides to give the world something "nobody ever expected". He hooks up
with a screwy beatnik ("yeah baby, yeah yeah yeah!") who's into "tits like
bananas…and leather" a pair of airheaded chicks (one of whom has an extended
monologue on weather or not to join the motley crew, although her inner
torment, if any, is quickly forgotten) and a student filmmaker to make some
"weird movies". Not surprisingly these "weird movies" are snuff films, and
our nihilistic crew enter into this curious enterprise quickly and without
much debate. For some reason the ex-con has an ax to grind with a porno
distributor, and he and his buddies are rounded up and tortured/murdered
on camera. The fascinating thing about the movie, for me, is that it is
so disjointed, and this isn't a matter of it being stitched together out
of two movies literally, but the film does at times seem to be made of two
different scripts that were arbitrarily put together. The film's first half
is curious enough, complete with some hilarious moments, as a pathetic amateur
stag filmmaker shows off one of his sorry ass works to an "uncomprehending"
distributor, as well as the snuff filmmakers and their strange dialogue
("daddio" and "baby"). The second half, however, becomes another film entirely,
a pretentious and gruesome look at the activities of our snuff heroes, as
they torture and kill people for the cameras in a strange, ritualistic way,
donning masks and chanting discombobulated dialogue. I really began to wonder
if maybe the second half wasn't made first, and the first half was requested
later on by the distributors, or vice versa. But I'm just guessing here,
the film itself is something of an acquired taste, as my own experience
might suggest. Most people seem to be bored silly by the whole thing, but
this sort of combines my favorite genres, the incoherent gore film and the
sleazy art film. Either way, it's worth seeing just to see a guy forced
to give head to a deer hoof (don't ask, don't tell).
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LETHAL PANTHER (aka
Deadly China Dolls, 1990). I guess you could call this The Killer
as directed by Joe D'Amato, there's lots of nudity and sex, but John Woo's
"ballets of blood" more closely resemble William Shatner singing "Lucy in
the Sky With Diamonds". Two top female hitpeople are hired to kill a mob
boss, and then are hired to kill each other, instead they team up against
the gangster behind it all. Somewhere in all this a CIA agent (Sibelle Hu,
who inexplicably turned up in numerous action films, despite a complete
lack of fighting skills, screen presence, or acting ability) gets involved.
Director Godfrey Ho is the Hong Kong Al Adamson, mixing and matching bits
and pieces of various shitty films to make a whale of crap that stinks and
stinks and stinks. I should say there's none of that here, but this shot
in the Philippines affair is abominable.
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LETHAL PANTHER 2 (1991).
As if one Lethal Panther wasn't enough, we get an unasked-for sequel.
This one is probably even worse than the first, and is credited to a woman
director, "Cindy Chow" who certainly doesn't advance the cause for women
directors in Hong Kong very far. It has, in its favor, the worst acting/dubbing/camerawork/kung-fu
wire tricks I've ever seen, as well as an almost non-existent plot. "Cynthia
Luster" aka Yukari Oshima teams with charisma deficient Filipino actor Jess
Babida to bring down a gang of international criminals. Probably shot in
a couple of weeks (if that) on a spare-change budget, it as a gun-fight/fist-fight/car
chase ever five minutes, but the stuff in between that is unwatchable. Maybe
if ex-Philippine president Joseph Estrada starred in this it would be a
little more entertaining. Probably not.
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LES LIAISONS EROTIQUES
(1992). It must've seemed like a good idea on paper: team legendary fringe/underground
director Koji Wakamatsu with super-producer Kazuyoshi Okuyama, along with
rising star Rie Miyazawa and icon Beat Takeshi. Unfortunately the final
product is a massive failure, a clichéd and predictable "thriller". Miyazawa
and Yuya Uchida play a pair of Japanese in Paris who operate a detective
agency/Japanese tour service. One day an enigmatic Japanese businessman
(Beat Takeshi) hires Uchida to trail his French mistress (Jennifer Gallin)
whom he suspects is having an affair, and it doesn't take Uchida long to
find that Gallin has numerous lovers, and like clockwork he's seduced by
the woman and caught up in a mess of murders and double dealings. Anybody
who's seen a few films like this can guess exactly what's going to happen,
maybe in Japan they don't have much contact with film noir, but that's all
this is, albeit poorly done. Even worse is the idiotic shoot-out conclusion
that seems like it was hastily added at the last minute. Miyazawa is barely
an actress, Beat Takeshi's part is underwritten and can't decide if he's
a dangerous man or a morose romantic, Gallin is just there to be a shapely
white woman, and even the swipe at the producer, calling Beat Takeshi's
crooked businessman Okuyama wears out quickly. Only Uchida's sly comic performance
is memorable, and only a brilliantly edited sequence where a very nervous
Uchida attempts blackmail stands out. The rest of the film is crap, but
check out Thomas Weisser's review in one of his Japanese books where he
mercilessly pimps the film to sucker people like me into buying a crappy,
overpriced 100th generation dub from Video Search of Miami.
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LOVE FEAST (aka The
Photographer, 1969). This is an absolutely pathetic movie. It almost made
me cry it's so bad. It stars Ed Wood, and that's the only notable thing
about it, since it's a worthless nudie film. Wood plays a perverted photographer
who gets women to come over to his house. He gets into bed with them, but
can't get on his freak bone because he's constantly interrupted by more
women coming over. Eddie gets tired out, drinks (he did a lot of that in
real life), says "I'm gonna cry!" and then a group of sados show up, put
Ed in a dress and dog collar, and force him to lick boots. It was sad seeing
Ed Wood, who I say was a mad visionary (not as good at self promotion as
say, Alexjandro Jodorowsky) in this garbage, looking completely ridiculous
in his Shemp haircut and prematurely aged face. Wood says: "Now I love girls!
Girls! Girls! Girls!" Words to live by, but I didn't need to see this film
to hear them.
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LUTHER THE GEEK (1988).
You have to see this to believe it. It is an otherworldly bizarre slasher
film with an absurd ending that'll make you think you're hallucinating.
Edward Terry (who looks like a cross between Tom Noonan, John Malkovich,
and Max Shreck as Nosferatu) plays a bald psycho with metal teeth
who's released from the nut house (complete with metal teeth, of course)
twenty years after killing three people. He shows how reformed he is by
tearing out an old woman's neck with his razor teeth (the old woman looks
like the one in the Tweety Bird cartoons, she's even got a shall and is
knitting!). He ends up at a woman's house and terrorizes her and her big-breasted
daughter. This is all played completely straight and serious, and guess
what? Luther clucks like a fucking chicken!! The blood sprays in gallons
and Luther clucks his goddamn head off. Director Carlton J. Albright wrote
and co-produced The Children an equally incredible movie that features
radioactive tots with lethal hugs. Fuck John Waters, Albright's King of
Bad Taste in my book! The man's a genius, where is he now?!
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