"Never get out of the boat", Willard muses as he chugs up the Mekong trying to keep the savagery of the Jungle that crowds its banks at a safe distance in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). You might say that the defining characteristic of cannibal films is that they always "get out of the boat". That is when they begin to be what they are.

Cannibal Ferox is a doom-laden journey into the dark heart of the Amazonian jungle. A film in which the worst things that can happen to a character do happen: characters are castrated, have limbs hacked off, one has the top of his head sliced off with a machete, a meal is made of someone’s brains, a young girl is hung up by meat hooks, organs are torn out and eaten raw. We watch cruel brutal violent gore-splattered blood-soaked events that sound a death knell to every civilized value with a mixture of unwilled fascination and revulsion that forms a stark contrast with the objective scientific observation that motivates the film’s central protagonist. Gloria (Lorraine De Selle) is an anthropology student intent on writing a thesis on cannibals. She is trekking through the Amazon basin with her brother Rudy (Bryan Redford), a photographer who has come to document the expedition, and her friend Pat (Zora Kerowa), an over-sexed blonde who has merely come because Rudy has promised to take pictures of her. Her aim: to locate the elusive Mañyoca tribe and prove that cannibalism does not exist. Big mistake. In the end, Gloria is the only survivor, a narrative outcome that recurs fairly frequently within the cannibal genre and which is strangely reminiscent of Melville’s Moby Dick. The comparison between Cannibal Ferox and Moby Dick is not as far-fetched as it may at first seem. Melville was fascinated, obsessed even, by a sense that at the heart of everything lay, not a benevolent god, but a blind malignant implacable unthinking evil. Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab, consumed by the need to destroy this malignancy which he identifies with the White Whale, ends by destroying himself and his crew, save for the book’s narrator, Ishmael who escapes to tell the tale: "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee", (this quote comes from Job, another fellow who long before Ishmael sailed through Melville’s fiction, also came face to face with the irrational carnage that seems to rein in the heart of existence). The difference between Moby Dick’s Ishmael and Cannibal Ferox’s Gloria is significant: he tells the tale, she doesn’t. After escaping back to New York, we see Gloria being awarded a degree for her completed thesis in which she presents her findings stating that cannibalism is a myth that does not and never did exist. This is surprising. It functions to provoke a question: why would she do this? why would she conceal that fact that her friends were, in a very factual and un-mythical fashion, devoured by very factual and un-mythical cannibals? why would she suppress the horrors she encountered? The surprise we feel at Gloria’s dissimulation, and the questions it provokes, are an important part of the film. Gloria’s inability to accept the implacable irrational violence and cruelty that constitute the truth about human nature mirrors modern Western civilizations inability to acknowledge the chaos that lies in the heart of its order.

Although this film presents Western civilization as blind to its own nature, it also lets audiences see what the civilization in which they are embedded refuses to see. From the beginning the filmmakers show us a New York briefly constructed of a selection of images focusing on crime and violence: in one scene mobsters beat an addict and shoot him at point blank range; in another they beat a woman and kick her in the head. These images establish that the distance between Civilization and the Jungle is not as great as one might wish or suspect, and they deeply implicate Western society in violent brutalizing behaviour. This implication is made explicit by the filmmakers emphasis on the cruelty of Western interaction with indigenous cultures. There are overtones of Western colonialism in Mike Logan’s (John Morghen) exploitation of native labour to pan for emeralds. (Logan is one of those drug dealers you find in cannibal films seeking their fortune in the depths of the jungle who provide a perfect target for the cannibal’s knife-wielding machete-hacking fury.) The contrast between the whites and the natives is fairly simple: the natives are trusting and hard working, whilst the whites are deceptive, lazy and, in varying degrees, corrupt. And the filmmakers’ opinion of Western civilization is further revealed in an unusual image: an American Express card that has been discarded in the midst of the jungle. On the simplest level, this card in the jungle expresses the utter uselessness of all that civilized society values in the face of primal encompassing chaos. The close-up of the card in the hand of the cannibal who finds it, magnified as it is to fill the entire screen, only emphasizes the fact that Western society’s sense of superiority and power is an empty illusion. The fact that Gloria purposely dropped the American Express card with the hope that it would be discovered and lead others to rescue her expedition underlines the vanity of our belief that we can escape the forces of the Jungle. In the end, she owes her life to an act of one of the cannibals who cuts her free, and not to help from the civilized world. In Cannibal Ferox, as in the Italian cannibal genre in general, real power lies with the Jungle, and not with Civilization. In any struggle, chaos will invariably swallow-up order; and death will invariably swallow-up life -- and if it doesn’t, if a life is casually thrown out of the whirlpool of death, it is not so much a victory as it is an uncertain uneasy reprieve.

I think cannibal films, despite the fact that they are probably seen as inhabiting the lower end of low culture, cut fairly deeply into our thoughts and our feelings. Having said that, it is clear that they do not try to philosophize, but rather to entertain. They generate a mixture of fascination and horror in us that comes, at least in part, from wondering what unspeakable acts that filmmakers will represent. The existence of this genre itself might serve as a proof that human beings like to watch cruelty and violence as long as it is constructed within a suitable context. On a character level this context can be articulated as follows: the most evil characters die a terrible, painful, often long drawn-out, always graphic death; more neutral characters who are not developed deeply exist merely to de dispatched, (also graphically); and of the character who are developed more fully, a few always have to die. These undeserved deaths, (also suitably graphic), tug, at least a little, at our heart strings, and more significantly, they establish the deeply dangerous nature of the uncontrollable forces unleashed. They also allude to the moral framework in which these films exist. No matter how much such films appear to revel in gore, death, wounds, agony, torture and sheer horror, and no matter how much they really do revel in such things, it is quite clear that audiences would not accept a fictional world in which all the innocents die agonizing deaths and all the corrupt characters flourish. I mention this only because morality is not the first thing that comes to mind when people think of the Italian cannibal genre of the late 70’s and early 80’s. In fact, a lack of moral values, or more precisely, a surplus of amoral depravity, is usually the first thing such films are accused of, and yet, the moral framework in which they exist is unmistakably there. It’s just that a sensitivity to the Jungle, the irrational, and chaos is also there, and in the hands of Italian directors it is given a very sharp edge that draws a lot of blood and gore, and echoes the unforgettable refrain that haunts the final pages of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness like the exhalation of a last breath or the strange waxy smell of a blown-out candle, "The horror! The horror!"

I was sent a copy of Cannibal Ferox to view by Xploited Cinema, which specializes in cult films and Imported DVD’s. The copy is an Ultrabit DVD and comes in a specially designed collector’s tin, individually numbered and limited to 3333 copies. This is a high quality, beautifully presented DVD.

To buy this film from Xploited Cinema click here