202. Slave of the Cannibal God

202. Slave of the Cannibal God aka La montagna del dio cannibale (1978)
Director: Sergio Martino
Writers: Cesare Frugoni and Sergio Martino
From: Drive-In

A woman and her brother set out to find her missing explorer husband. It’s believed that he’s set off for the mountain of the cannibal God, but everyone on the trip is harboring secrets.

This one’s pretty grim, though competently produced. I initially expected it to be Cannibal Holocaust meets Heart of Darkness with the group finding the lost explorer leading the tribe as their mad king. I was half right. It’s closer to the film adaptation of Louise Linton’s memoirs, but less tone deaf.

Shut up. Gawd.

Susan (Ursula Andress) flies to New Guinea to meet her brother, Arthur, and go in search of her missing husband, Henry. They recruit Dr. Foster (Stacy Keach), the man who’d been working with Henry, but was kept in the dark about the final journey. Foster suspects Henry went to the mountain on the forbidden island of Roka because it’s the only place that Henry didn’t know by heart and the only destination he’d feel the need to keep a secret.

No one is allowed on the island, but the group sneaks their way on with a small crew that gets picked off one by one by natural and unnatural means—one’s eaten by an alligator, one’s caught in a trap, etc. Arthur’s behavior grows more erratic and a local that’s been by Foster’s side the whole time acts more and more suspiciously. Eventually, the group is attacked by people covered in white make-up wearing masks. The group escapes the masked attackers and ends up at a mission camp on the island.

Foster says the people they saw were "the Pooka," a cannibal tribe that had captured him six years prior. He’d only survived because he was able to cure a sick child and didn’t escape until another tribe attacked the Pooka, seemingly destroying them. After he tells this to Manolo, an explorer they meet at the mission, he and Manolo see a Pooka and Keach delivers the best terrible line of the movie, “That’s right! You don’t forget the taste of human flesh!” Horrible delivery, horrible smash cut after it, horrible music cue—it’s got everything!

So a Pooka attacks the mission the next night, kills a woman that’s hooking up with Arthur, and manages to stab Foster in the leg before Foster shoots and kills him. Turns out the Pooka was the local traveling with Foster and was the kid Foster had saved all those years ago. Because the group has brought this violence to the mission, the priest kicks them out and the quartet—Susan, Arthur, Foster, and, now, Manolo, seduced by Susan—set off to climb the mountain. Foster’s leg is injured and infected, but he wants to see that the tribe is dead. Susan admits she doesn’t believe her husband went to the mountain with any humanitarian purpose, he knew there was something there to make him rich.

On the way, Foster has trouble climbing a waterfall and Arthur lets him fall and die rather than help. Susan and Manolo find a cave with ritualistic markings and fresh corpses, meaning the tribe is still present and active, but when they try to tell Arthur, they find him running into a different cave. He’s found uranium and he and Susan threaten Manolo at gunpoint to help them sell the mineral rights to the “great powers.” Only the Pooka attack at that moment, kill Arthur, and take the other two prisoner.

In the tribe’s home, Susan and Manolo find Henry mummified and venerated as a god because the tribe thinks his Geiger counter is his heart. Since Henry had a picture of Susan with him, they think she’s a god too and ritualistically feed her part of her brother. Eventually, Manolo breaks free, releases Susan, and they, after some struggles, escape the tribe and the mountain. THE END.

This was one of the video nasties in Britain, a selection of movies so brutal and foul that they not only couldn’t be released at all, but led to an intensification of the censorship laws. Other films on the list included, of course, Cannibal Holocaust, The Driller Killer, and Faces of Death. You know, the films all of us of a certain age heard about growing up for featuring "real death." Curiously, the list also included the Clint Howard vehicle Evilspeak, Don’t Look in the Basement, and The Evil Dead.

Scholarship about the moral panic around video nasties is pretty interesting, especially since some of the movies, like The Driller Killer, ended up on the list just for their advertising, not due to any content in the film. Looking back at many of the films on the list, yes, there are disturbing themes (anything cannibal related or set in a Nazi prison camp seemed to automatically make the list, which, fair enough), but most of the movies are simply bad when they’re not just silly. And there are several that, not in spite of, but because of their outré content, do something interesting and are substantial films because of it. Cannibal Holocaust is grim, but it arguably has a moral purpose underlying its story.

Slave of the Cannibal God can’t make the same claim. It’s a cheap, but competent, exploitation flick trying to jump on the cannibal-film bandwagon. It’s ripping off Cannibal Holocaust to the degree that it even features real on-screen deaths of animals, and that’s never acceptable. Apparently the scenes of animal torture and death weren’t in the original movie, but the distributors told the director Martino to put them in. Various sources make reference to a monkey being flung into the mouth of a snake, which I didn’t see in my cut. Mine did contain the eviscerating and skinning of a live lizard, though, so it’s not like this version is more palatable.

And that’s what sinks this movie. It moves okay, it’s competently done on every level, but you gotta watch animals getting tortured and killed. That’s my line, that’s my limit, and it’s not, in any way, a difficult stance to take. You gotta give this one a pass.