The Big Payback, Part 2

Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio (1972)
AKA Man from Deep River, Deep River Savages, Sacrifice!

Cannibal Ferox (1981)
AKA Make them Die Slowly, Woman from Deep River

Besides our friend Ruggero Deodato, Umberto Lenzi is the Italian director most associated with the cannibal horror subgenre- and they’re almost all Italian. For better or for worse, Lenzi is credited with starting the genre with his 1972 film Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio. Interestingly enough, cannibal films were absent from grindhouse screens for five years after the film’s release; Deodato brought it back in earnest with 1977’s Ultimo Mondo Cannibale. The deluge of cobra/mongoose battles and “native” breasts that tumbled out of South American location shoots thereafter is surprisingly different from Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio, including Lenzi’s later contribution to the canon, Cannibal Ferox. It’s not a horror film per se, but a blend of the adventure, ethnographic, and romance genres.

Where Cannibal Holocaust is the granddaddy of twenty-first century “gore porn,” Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio resembles cable TV survival stories, albeit with loads more nudity. It begins as a sun-baked film strip extolling the pleasures of the anarchic East; our English hero, Bradley, takes photos of some adorable children in Bangkok, stabs a man with little to no police consequences, and floats lazily down a river, surrounded by chattering monkeys. Until, of course, he’s strung up in a tree like a trapped bear and hung out to dry. Banish those Cannibal Holocaust fears from your mind, dear reader, for although the people of this river village are, shall we say, lacking in character development, they do not gut our hero. This is not to imply, however, that Lenzi’s racial politics are in any way progressive; about 70 minutes in, an ape-like, darker-skinned tribe commits the lone act of gory cannibalism in the movie. Lenzi merely believes that there are “good savages” and “bad savages,” degrees of difference from the European ideal. After some bloody initiation rituals, the friendly tribe makes Bradley a warrior. At first, he dismisses them as “animals,” but eventually he adopts the tribe’s moral code as well as its way of life. In its ambivalent attitude to its own prejudice, Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio more closely resembles early American accounts of capture by “Indians” than the other cannibal movies.

This pretense of realism is supported by the tone of the film; Lenzi was inspired by the Mondo genre, active in Europe at the time. Mondo documentaries use the pretense of being educational to further the public’s knowledge of subjects like teenagers necking on the beach and Swedish sex toys; like Court TV, their thrills are doubled by the pretense that the shocking things on screen really happened. One of Mondo’s favorite subjects is “exotic rituals from around the globe,” and the disclaimer at the beginning of the film could be lifted from any film of this genre: “though some of the rites and ceremonies shown here are perhaps gruesome and repugnant, they are portrayed as they are actually carried out.” Then, like a Mondo film, the plot is a thin coat of montage and excuses stringing together soft core sex, real animal death, and bizarre rituals. Lenzi will forever be infamous for starting the customary killing of real animals in cannibal films with Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio; he incorporates cruelty to animals at key scenes to enhance their visceral impact. Tribal rites are similarly played for maximum titillation; for example, the tribal elder’s daughter chooses her husband by having the warriors of the tribe stick their arms through a hole and fondle her waiting breast on the other side. (Sounds like a dirty joke…Mr. Show, Season 1 anyone?) When the camera zooms in on Bradley’s hand- and he reaches for hers, foregoing the breast for the moment- the snickers of dirty old men are palpable.

Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio’s chronology lunges forward in stops and starts; just when the tension in a scene is building and the real action seems about to start, suddenly it’s over. For example, the murder that sets the plot into motion occurs with all the clarity of a hit-and-run accident. Bradley, drinking at a bar, asks a man if he wants a drink, the guy pulls a knife on him, and, with a mere lunge, the knife miraculously appears in the guy’s stomach. Apparently thirty seconds is too long to spend launching a movie like Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio. The audio of the film only makes things worse. It’s not made clear when exactly Bradley learns the tribe’s language, if at all, and he and his friends speak in a mishmash of English/Italian and the tribal language, made more confusing by the inconsistent dubbing on the Media Blasters version of the DVD.

Lenzi’s direction, bolstered by competent performances from the leads, is what makes Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio tolerable. He provides the visceral fix befitting of a minor Lucio Fulci and comes up with some inventive camerawork, like a sequence featuring a kaleidoscope lens, the eye popping use of bright orange, green, pink, and blue, and the prodigious use of close-ups common to later Italian horror films. Besides this, the gross-out factor is the only thing that might qualify Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio as a horror film, since Lenzi’s directing talents don’t extend as far as the creation of thrills, chills, and suspense. But at least Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio is a relatively benign film. Between 1972 and the release of Cannibal Ferox, in 1981, Lenzi bowed to studio pressure for gore and/or decided that humanity is a disgusting stain on the Earth, because Cannibal Ferox, though arguably better directed, deserves to be shelved and forgotten just as much as Cannibal Holocaust does.

Unlike that other movie, Cannibal Ferox is not based on any pretenses of reality; its story is totally fictional, creating a level of fantasy that allows the viewer to relax a little bit. Its tone is less downbeat and depressing, and therefore it’s more…err…“fun” to watch than Cannibal Holocaust. “Fun” is a relative term, of course, since the last thirty minutes are peppered with slaughterhouse quality dismemberment, including a scene which makes the sex=death metaphor totally blatant by impaling a woman by her breasts. A guilty giggle at such an outrageous scenario is forgivable, but as in all “cannibal cycle” films, sustained pleasure in this spectacle is for the sadistic only. Lead actor Giovanni Lombardo Radice even disavowed his involvement with Cannibal Ferox, stating in an interview he wished he had not appeared in the film. He plays a hardened, immoral jungle guide who leads a PhD student and her friends into the jungle to be corrupted, maimed and killed. The travelers stumble into a charged situation, and the guide tortures the locals to extort information about a hidden treasure- until the big payback comes due.

Radice’s shame in his character in Cannibal Ferox is understandable, but his role as the sadistic monster makes the innocent anthropologists easier to sympathize with. The accidental nature of their situation compared to that of the documentary filmmakers in Cannibal Holocaust makes the film scarier on a psychological level.
The main character is a PhD student, Gloria, who ventures to the Amazon to prove that cannibalism is a myth concocted by racist conquistadores. Her earnest idealism is capped with a speech where she condemns Western society for perpetuating a cycle of violence in which native peoples are compelled to participate. The audience is meant to feel sad and terrified for her, a feeling best conjured in a scene where Gloria and her friend sing a lullaby from the bottom of a pit, trying to steel themselves to their gory doom. But the identification that Lenzi compels the audience to feel with Gloria‘s liberal idealism is negated by his portrayal of the “savage” jungle people; like Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio, Cannibal Ferox is confused about its racism. The tribal people here are a lot more animalistic than in the earlier film; and as Il Paese del Sesso Selvaggio viewed the “natives” with a paternal master’s eye, the non whites in Cannibal Ferox are mindlessly violent ape people caked with mud. Gloria’s words about cannibalism as a racist myth are replayed over surgically graphic scenes of torture, and it’s horribly disappointing. It’s a cheap cop out, a cynical, reactionary reaffirmation of racism and white colonial dominance. Lenzi’s attitude in this regard is depressingly typical of the era and the thing that makes Cannibal Ferox total crap is how cliché it is. By the time it hit grindhouses in 1981, films stuffed with exotic fauna having their throats cut, half Italian/half English dialogue, cannibal castration, and intestine eating had become annoyingly common. And when a hooting man painted black eating raw monkey brains becomes cliché, it’s time to pack things up and go home. Not surprisingly, the “cannibal cycle” essentially died after Cannibal Ferox, with only three more films made before the last of the genre, Natura Contro aka Cannibal Holocaust 2, in 1988.