31 Days of Halloween, Day 22- Cannibal Apocalypse (1980)

Directed by: Antonio Margheriti

Top 8 Cast: John Saxon, Wallace Wilkinson, Elizabeth Turner, Ramiro Oliveros, Cinzia De Carolis, Giovanni Lombardo Radice, Malik Farrakhan, May Heatherly

Plot: When Sgt. Norman Hopper rescues members of his platoon from a Hanoi prison camp he gets bit by the guts-slurping soldier Charles Bukowski (no relation). When these boots return home from the war they’re bringing more than just complex PTSD with them. Join our fighting elite as they struggle and fail to resist their new urges for eating people, spreading and bringing the cannibal apocalypse to the streets of Atlanta.

Response: Rabid zombies with Purple Hearts, Saxon is their King. Relive yr trauma’s on the silver screen. Dudes pissin on shit. The better to eat you with, my dear. The old faking-a-pulled-muscle-so-your-hot-vet-neighbor-can-touch-your-inner-thigh trick. Cannibalism as sex addiction. Cannibalism as PTSD response. Cannibalism as contagion. The kinda film that says good spectacle is flashing back to slo-mo shots of Vietnam villagers engulfed in flame. The two vets who aren’t Saxon are particularly reprehensible. Boudoir jazz as we soder through leg meat, me and the lady doc gettin hot. Our syphilitic FUBAR monstrousness infecting the whole damn town.

Quick Thoughts & Background: This movie is gross, mean-spirited and not on the side of life. For all its transgressive excess, it’s also peculiarly rote and a bit dull. There are some interesting and wild ideas in here though.

Extreme exploitation cinema, it seems to me, is a bit like stand-up comedy in the sense that it often seeks to cross the line in order to get a reaction as well as to remix our intellectual boundaries. The risk is reintegration and muscleization of prejudice. The reward is new poetics.

Apocalypse is an outlier amongst the Italian cannibal films of the 70’s and 80’s. I’ll attempt a brief layman’s history of the subgenre. The basic template is white westerners run afoul of Stone-Age level natives who eat them. Boiler plate colonial racism with a little primal fear thrown in for spice. This kinda imagery is probably older than cinema itself. You almost couldn’t make a rainforest adventure picture without a dread cannibal! The 1930’s Tarzan movies had them and weren’t King Kong’s natives cannibals or am I misrembering? Anyway the whole trope got a massive influx of energy in the 70’s in Italy.

First there were the Mondo films (Mondo Cane, Mondo Nudo, Africa Addio, etc..)* pseudo shock-docs that proposed to contain actual footage of bizarro customs in other parts of the world (largely just scenes of animal abuse) and this gave way to the cannibal film with exemplars like Man from the Deep River & Papaya, Love Goddess of the Cannibals.

In February of 1980 the to-date-biggest and most infamous cannibal picture came out, Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust**. I don’t know how quickly Cannibal Apocalypse went into production or the extent to which it was already in the works, but it came out a mere 6 months later.

Part of what makes Apocalypse unique is its city setting*** and its idea of cannibalism as contagious disease. The blueprint of infection and transmission is almost straight Romero which makes Apocalypse a pseudo zombie film. It certainly feels like a remix of the cannibal, zombie, and ‘Namsploitation genres.

Our Day 2 picture, Shatter Dead featured undead zombies. They rotted, they failed to heal. But they weren’t, for the most part, murderous. They weren’t feral beasts hell-bent on eating your brains. They also didn’t carry a pathogen. They were made that way by angel fuckery and poetic conceit. Day 22’s Cannibal Apocalypse retains more of our expected zombie tropes and behaviors. These folks definitely want to eat you alive. They got this way as a result of infection. But they aren’t reanimated corpses. They aren’t dead or undead. They don’t shamble. Two variants on a theme. If you plotted them on a Venn diagram the center would contain our Romeros, Snyders, Max Brookses, and the bulk of popular zombie media.

Cannibal Apocalypse is pretty repellent and there’s a lot of good gross gore but it never quite gets transcendently extreme. The connection of sex with cannibalism is interesting (though perhaps more artfully and shockingly articulated in something like Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day or even Julia Ducournau’s Raw). Its richest articulation of its themes of abandonment to pain and perversity ironically corresponds to the moment when the movie becomes the biggest slog. When John Saxon fully gives in to his disease, leading his platoon of grossies on a sewer-bound quest for city flesh, the movie both shows us the disturbing power of its ideas and takes away the one humanizing element that would enable us to care about any of this beyond titilation or intellectualization. With good man Saxon gone bad all were left with is the rats and bullet sprays, the slow formulaic tread toward Shakespearen tragedy.

The sexy jazz score is both effective and comic.

The final “kinder karnage” image is a good, resonant, and suitably smart-dumb note to end on.

My last thought relates it back to Day 18’s Vampyros Lesbos****. That film, made probably for straight dude’s orgasms, found a degree of reclamation (it would seem) with some lesbians who found it to be an accurate and rich portrayal of femme-for-femme-lust*****. I wonder if anything similar has happened or will happen with Cannibal Apocalypse. Is this picture, whose politics seem mainly concerned with revealing deep sickness and whose aesthetics reveal zero sensitivity, an almost-acidentally-authentic articulation of veteran rage? Do any veterans, despite all the exploitative sleaze, see themselves here? In the way that some lesbians, despite all the exploitative sleaze, found themselves in Vampyros Lesbos? Or do we just want to see leg meat hit with a Dremel saw and Cinzia De Carolis’ teenage pubes peeking out from the top of her panties?

Shot: Mainly in Atlanta, Georgia. The sewer segments were filmed in Rome. And the Vietnam opening was shot in the Philippines.

Second Opinions:

“Not enough cannibals. Not enough apocalypse.” the_rad_maker on Letterboxed

"It was talking about the Vietnam war like it was a virus you could bring home. I thought it was a great metaphor for a psychological condition…At one point we were shooting a scene and a guy brings in this tray of meat. I asked what it was for and they explained to me it was supposed to be body parts, even genitals, and we were supposed to gnaw on them. I asked Margheriti to take me out of the scene and I went to my hotel room. Once I found out what the true nature of the film was I got so depressed.” Star John Saxon on the making of Cannibal Apocalypse in a 2002 interview

“..never be confused for high art but Cannibal Apocalypse offers plenty of bizarre low-budget thrills for the Eurotrash aficionados…” - AllMovie Database

“Although the film has been maligned by critics, who claim Margheriti disinherited his adeptness at the gothic by meddling in the vulgar genre of high-gore, the sympathies he evokes for perversion as at turns tragic pathology and strange alternative desire, the disdain with which he represents hyperreal examples of ‘normal’ male sexuality and the extraordinary versions of human flesh he presents for our pleasure, a pleasure which compels us into a world of perversion and desire beyond the palatable, are all continued thematically if not stylistically in this film.” - Patricia MacCormack, Senses of Cinema

“A cannibal-movie that actually tries and succeeds to be different.” - from Vomitron_G’s IMDB review

Score:

Autumn Vibes: 0/5

Scares & Chills: 1/5

Cultural & Cinematic Importance: 2/5

Monster Action: 1/5

* Not sure if there’s anything here but it would be interesting to explore the Mondo films in relationship to high-brow, more politically correct, documentaries that also trade (arguably) in exoticism or at least world beauty and (also?) incorporate experimental/slip-stream techniques. I’m thinking of film-works like Sans Solei, Fata Morgana, Baraka & Powaqqatsi.

**The older I get the more respect I have for Cannibal Holocaust and the less I ever want to revisit it. A devastating film of intense paradox that critiques and holds complicit its own audience. Cannibal Holocaust is everything its title suggests. A statement against its self as well as the most uncompromising version of what it purportedly opposes. But be warned there’s a ton of unsimulated violence against animals as well as real atrocity footage. (This is a footnote within a footnote but the Riz Ortolani score is majestic and when it showed up in the recent Riddle of Fire I was delighted)

***An alternate title for the film was Cannibals in the Streets

****By the way, Jess Franco? One of the main cannibal movie guys. Yes, it wasn’t all queer vampires, Frankenstein dungeons, metafictional detectives and porno for Franco! If you want classic innovative musicals go for Busby Berkley or Vincent Minelli; if you want old skool, soul-deadening cannibals try Deodato, Franco, Umberto Lenzi or Joe D’Amato!

*****I may be over-stating the case here.