ANTHROPOPHAGOUS THE BEAST
WATCH IT IF YOU DARE!
RELEASED BY VFP
CATORGRY NUMBER : VFP001
RUNTIME : 88 MINUTES 41 SECONDS
AKA : ANTROPOPHAGOUS, THE MAN EATER, THE GRIM REAPER, MANEATER-DER MENSCHFRESSER, GOMIA, THE SAVAGE ISLAND AND ANTROPOFAGO
DIRECTOR : ARISTIDE MASSACCESI (JOE D'AMATO)
COUNTRY : ITALY
YEAR : 1980
STARRING : GEORGE EASTMAN (LUIGI MONTEFIORI, ZORA KEROVA, SAVERIO VALLONE, VANESSA STEIGER, TSA FARROW
REVIEW
Another notorious nasty from director Joe D’Amato. This charming Italian cannibal movie stars George Eastman as monster Klaus, who has been shipwrecked and has eaten his wife and child. Yum.
The film starts off quite well with a young couple frolicking on a deserted beach. The young girl goes for a dip in the sea, and gets dragged under the water and butchered. A good scene follows, from the monster’s point-of-view, where he walks across the beach, blood dripping, towards the young man who is lying sunbathing. Unfortunately for him, he gets a meat-cleaver through his head.
The main bulk of the film involves a bunch of friends, who take a quiet boat tour of some beautiful, sunny Aegean islands, despite the fact that one of the girls has seen some pretty scary things in her tarot cards. The gang comes across one solitary island where all the inhabitants seemed to have disappeared, leaving the village abandoned. They shack up for the night, but soon find that they aren't quite alone.
We don’t actually see the monster until the last 30 minutes of the film, but this is probably one of the fastest paced endings to any film in this genre. Klaus picks off the young friends one-by-one, until there are a handful left. In one notorious scene, he tracks a husband and heavily-pregnant wife to a catacomb/cave, quickly disposes of the man, then throttles the women with one hand, whilst giving her an abortion Eastman-style with the other. Once he has “delivered” the unborn foetus, Klaus finishes off the scene in style by sinking his teeth into the flesh. This scene got the film in trouble with the censors, as unbelievably, they thought it was real! If you look closely though, you can see that it is actually a skinned rabbit, wrapped in bacon. Never-the-less, a powerful and nasty bit of footage.
The film closes quite tensely, with 2 girls in the loft of a house. Klaus manages to get on the roof and hoist one girls head through the ceiling, where he rips a large chunk of flesh from her neck. Lurrvly. Then in the final sequence, he is in some kind of well and is chasing the girl-on-a-rope up the stairs, before getting a pick-axe in the stomach when he gets out, and strangely enough, trying to save himself by eating his own intestines, before falling into a heap.
WRITTEN BY TONY FRIZZELL
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