Cannibal Terror (1981)

After the success of Cannibal Holocaust (1979), a number of sequels and rip-offs emerged to cash in on the market. Having made their living in exploitation cinema, the French production company Eurociné quickly turned their attention to this new market, rushing out Sexo caníbal (1980) and Mondo cannibale (1980) from their long time regular Jess Franco and when these proved successful, a third film, Cannibal Terror.

A pair of bumbling crooks are challenged by their female member to try something a little more interesting and rewarding, so they decide to kidnap the young daughter of a wealthy car merchant. They meet up with a contact to flee across the border - she is attacked and killed by cannibals when they stop to fix the car, but the crooks manage flee to their safe house. Eventually the father finds out where his daughter is being held and sets out to track her, but the crooks see them coming and flee into the deadly jungle...

The storyline is probably the least original of the company's three cannibal films and is a pure exploitation project, providing just enough storyline to get the characters into a position to get eaten by cannibals and have a few gratuitous sex scenes along the way. To this extent, characterisation is almost completely lacking, the character of Martin in particular seems to appear out of nowhere at the safe house. For some reason the kidnapped girl seems to be really enjoying herself and is completely unconcerned that she has not seen her parents in several days - perhaps an attempt to stop the censors from objecting to the characters having to bundle a struggling child the whole way. One real relief is that the script chooses not to play up the bumbling nature of the two crooks - the opening scenes as they ineptly try and break into a boat suggest that it could have been intended as a slapstick comedy.

Continuity is none too great and there are many plot holes - we never find out what happened to the ransom demands, never get to see the kidnap itself and never understand why Danville would take his wife on a potentially deadly mission. As far as exploitation goes, the film does boast a couple of good gut munching scenes but although Eurociné were highly experienced sexploitation producers, the film seems to be seriously lacking in the sex deparment, with just a single brief nude scene and a rather unnecessary rape (another sex scene tastefully cuts away before the action starts...). The pacing is pretty sedate throughout, as the film tries to pad itself out to a full 90 minute runtime and it moves along to a rather uninspired ending.

Unlike Eurociné's first two cannibal movies, this is not directed by Jess Franco but is highly remniscent of his productions from the era. Credited director Alain Deruelle does a reasonable job on the film but is clearly wanting to do something much more artisic, as a number of beautiful camera angles testify. Editing however is a real problem, with the film jumping between scenes quite randomly in places giving it the appearance of being cut in places, while the sequences with Pedro clearly seem to be have been shot later and spliced in. The film seems to be set in South America but the landscape is very clearly Spanish and a few grainy stock shots can do nothing to help convince the audience otherwise, however the gore effects are decent - the actors munching their way through a big pile of animal guts - although we never get to see any detailed disembowling and several of the deaths are off camera. The soundtrack is a mixed bag with an annoyingly upbeat main theme but some good dark piano elements in the more menacing scenes.

Jess Franco regulars Antonio Mayans and Olivier Mathot are the two familiar faces in this film and put up a good show - generally all of the lead actors are able to hold their own. Rather less effective are the extras, the cannibals in particular look like nothing more than bored White Europeans and many of them really to not have the physique to be dancing almost naked (some of the better looking cannibals were actually shot on the set of the earlier Jess Franco production Mondo cannibale).

The cannibal genre was never awash with cash, although most of the productions could at least afford to shoot in real jungles, so this really is a barrel-scraping production and it isn't really saved by the script or the relative lack of sleaze. Accordingly, Cannibal Terror could hardly be described as a must-see film, but for fans of Eurociné and Jess Franco style productions or cannibal films in general, this is likely to be of interest - just provided you don't expect any extreme gore and nudity or a coherent plot and authentic location shooting.

Anyone famous in it?	Antonio Mayans - a Jess Franco regular who also appeared in Macumba Sexual (1982)
Directed by anyone interesting?	Alain Deruelle (credited as Allan W. Steeve) - a little known director who also worked on a Eurociné Women-In-Prison film Gardiennes du pénitencier (1979) and the Brigitte Lahaie Festival érotique (1978)
Any gore/violence?	A couple of scenes of gut munching and a vividly mutilated corpse, although no on-screen disembowling.
Any sex?	A brief female nude scene and a violent rape scene.
Who is it for?	Fans of Jess Franco style films and the cannibal genre might find this of interest.

Visuals	Original Aspect Ratio - 1.66:1 anamorphic widescreen. Colour. The print quality is generally very strong with only very slight grain, good colours and high detail. A few stock wildlife shots are lower quality and a couple of brief scenes have more specking and grain and might be from a different print.
Audio	English mono - sounds fine although the dubbing is quite poor (the little girl is clearly dubbed by an adult - although fortunately she doesn't speak much).
Subtitles	None
Extras	The disc includes: "Spicy Deleted Scene" - an extension of one of the scenes from the film, including some extra nudity - the same quality as the film print, although audio is French language. (1m 24s) Original theatrical trailer - English language, with a rather strange voice-over and seemingly random clips from the film. EASTER EGG: An interview with Jess Franco where they ask him about his involvement in this film and he discusses the director Alain Deruelle and some of his work with Eurociné. Franco speaks in very heavily accented English. (6 minutes)
Region	Region 0 (ALL) - NTSC
Other regions?	Released in the UK by Hard Gore with an uncut, anamorphic print but no extras (is now out-of-print). Also released by Laser Paradise in Germany - non-anamorphic print with German audio only.
Cuts?	Cut status unknown. English language print

The Film

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The DVD

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