Cannibal Terror (1981)

Overall Rating:

Nastiness Rating:

Directed by: Alain Deruelle (as A.W. Steeve)/Olivier Mathot (uncredited)/Julio Pérez Tabernero (uncredited)
Written by: Julio Pérez Tabernero/H.L. Rostaine/Jesus Franco (strangely, uncredited)

Another day, another cannibal-themed Nasty. Little more than 10 minutes in and I already knew that this one was going to be particularly Nasty. The “lead” characters are awful and awful dumb. They’re low-rent crooks who decide to kidnap the (horribly dubbed) little girl of a rich…something or other. They mostly just bicker amongst themselves, curse in badly dubbed English and get hit by cars.

Other than that, nothing much happens for a while. That is, until they (for some reason) take the kid to some deserted locale in the Outback (!?!?) that is “just on the border of cannibal country.”

Uh…really? How many countries have this sort of thing just laying about? (This was filmed in Spain, so apparently there are a lot of Spanish cannibals.)

Naturally, their contact/driver gets carried off by the cannibals to be stripped, bled and eaten in a fairly graphic scene. Also naturally, one of the crooks rapes the wife of the guy who is taking them in. ‘Cause that’s just what you do…apparently.

You know, even if I was the most horrible human being in the world, if I heard the word “cannibal” uttered anywhere near me, I would suddenly be on my best behavior. I know what the fuck happens to rapists in Cannibal Country! (Spoiler alert: They get what they deserve.)

Of course, bloody, awful, horrible, cannibal-infested revenge ensues. The husband ties the perpetrator up and WHISTLES FOR THE CANNIBALS! Yes, you can call cannibals to do your bidding! Strangely, we don’t see the cannibals do anything but run towards their meal. No blood. No carnage. What the fuck?

A lot more nothing happens for about 20 minutes. When mom and dad start making the trek to get their daughter, the bad guys (and girl) run with the kid, finally seeing what happened to their evil friend. (Oh, we see the aftermath? Eff that.)

This is an unrelentingly (and unintentionally) silly movie. The “natives” look like the filmmakers just went to some Spanish neighborhood, put up signs that said, “we need dudes who will jump around in loincloths and makeup while chanting in gibberish” and they took the first 25 dudes who signed up. They all look completely different from one another (as opposed to being uniformly tribe-like) and…they’re all guys! There’s not a single woman in the entire tribe! Do they procreate by eating flesh? There are little boys, so there MUST be some procreation’ goin’ on.

(There does appear to be one woman, but I’m not sure. She’s dancing in a cloud of smoke and I can’t tell if it’s a woman or a long-haired dude. We’ll call her Smurfette.)

According to imdb.com, this movie was really only put on the Nasties list because it had the word “cannibal” in the title. It was un-banned in 1985 because someone actually watched it and decided that it wasn’t nearly Nasty enough to be a Nasty. That may be true, but two scenes make it not for the feint of heart: the chow-down scenes at the beginning and end of the movie are fairly gross, if pretty obviously fake. Other than that…maybe the leftovers of the rapist? I dunno. That’s even pretty tame.

It does, however, show that even cannibals have hearts. They don’t eat the little girl and even return her to her parents. These cannibals only eat bad people!

This is certainly a Nasty to skip. Not nasty enough for gore-hounds and certainly not good enough to qualify as entertainment, it’s just not really recommended to anyone.

LOW POINT: I guess those two chow-down scenes. Yeah. Definitely those.

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