Coming Attractions: Cannibal Lolocaust!

Something I've wanted to do since I started this blog (all five entries ago) was to chronicle the span of one of my personal favorite little film niches. A niche filled with ugly little movies of practically no artistic value, devoid of anything other than cheap (sometimes very cheap) titillation, crass sexuality and over the top, often times completely unnecessary violence and brutality.

I'm speaking of course of Robin Williams movies.

No, I'm talking about cannibal movies! Now pretty much everybody out there has at least heard of the big daddy of them all, Cannibal Holocaust, but there are a pretty sizable amount of these movies, most them pretty fucking bad, and all of them the kind of thing I talk about on this site. So I decided that, using Wikipedia as my guide, I'm gonna go through and systematically review and rate all of these fucking movies, on a not terribly objective scale, which I'll outline in a second. Now I'm certain there are more of them out there than are listed on Wikipedia, which only lists the cannibal boom canon, so to speak. If you guys out there know of others that fit the genre, lemme know. But officially, I'm starting with 1973's The Man From Deep River and finishing up with 1988's Natura Contro. Not counting any heads-up I get from you devoted readers (ha ha) that means I'll be reviewing SIXTEEN of these things. The stuff I put myself through for the four people who read this blog.

"Has Killer Forklift updated yet? I need more Avenged Sevenfold jokes!"

Now onto the format. We're gonna do a more-or-less in-depth recap of the "plot" of the movie, and then I'm going to rate the movie from one to ten on the following patented Cannibal Movie Ratings Scale!

Sex: Let's face it, these are cheap exploitation movies. In the Sex category, I'll be rating the film from Erection Rejection (0) to Pause-and-Toss (10). The more attractive the naked people and the more porno the sex scenes, the higher the rating.

Violence: Following closely on the heels of sex as the reason exploitation movies get made, the Violence rating will encompass both how brutal and shocking the violence is, and how well made and realistic looking it is. As most of these movies were made in the early 80's however, we're gonna have to be a little loose with "realistic" and judge it by the time.

Animal Death: One of the disturbing trademarks of cannibal films is that they often times legitimately kill animals on film for the shock factor. This category rates just how frequent and unpleasant these scenes are in a given movie.

Keep begging, Bonzo.

Cannibalism: Believe it or not, some cannibal films are actually a bit light on the whole "cannibalism" thing. This category will rate how much cannibalism is actually in the damn movie.

Sameyness: Cannibal Movies, and alot of exploitation movies in general, tend to be kinda....oh, let's be charitable and say "homages to other films". The Sameyness category rates just how similar to previous movies the individual cannibal flick is. Granted, this gives The Man From Deep River a huge advantage as its kinda the ur-example, unless we wanna count Mondo Cane. And I really don't feel like including Mondo Cane, because it's a completely different kind of movie.

Anyone, on Thursday I'll have the first review up, Umberto Lenzi's The Man From Deep River!
Pray for me.

Also, on a "Thusfar unrelated to cannibalism" note, I want you all to go and check out my buddy Bill's blog, Porno Paycheck. It's about the many harrowing and hysterical experiences of working at a shifty porn store. NSFW, but very very funny.

Hanzo the Razor

Now I'm not really very big into manga and anime. It's never really been my thing. I'm not going to denigrate the entire art form and say that it all sucks, but for the most part I find it childish, badly drawn and often times hair-pullingly full of faux-philosophical bullshit. Try as you might, you're not gonna find much anime in my collection.

Unless it's porn, I mean.

So when I say there is manga out there that I fucking love, you better believe I mean it. And the manga that I do love is the work of writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima. "Lone Wolf and Cub" is their magnum opus as well as their most famous collaboration, but for me, it's "Hanzo no Mon", localized to America by Dark Horse comics as "Path of the Assassin" that really shines as their best work. But it was in "Path of the Assassin" that I started noticing some....disturbing trends in Kazuo Koike's writing.

...

Yeah...it kinda seems like ol' Kazuo has a bit of a thing for women getting raped and then falling in love with the guy who raped them. The main character in "Path of the Assassin" has this happen to him no less than TWICE, and since I'm still only about three-quarters through the books I wouldn't be surprised if it happened again. Maybe it's just my soft squishy American liberal mind, filled up with stupid ideas that rape is fucking horrible and shouldn't be trivialized like that and sometimes women might even count as people, but I'm having a really hard time coming up with something that's nearly as offensive as having rape victims go ga-ga over the man who just took them by force. I mean seriously, what is worse than that?

Isn't one of these assholes dead now?

Anywoo, my point is that Koike-san takes the idea of rape being the thing that opens a woman's doors of perception (....) to unbelievable pleasure and runs completely off the fucking wall with it in the manga "Goyokiba", about an Edo samurai-police officer named Hanzo, a self-mutilating sadomasochist, whose nickname is "Kamisori" (meaning "Sharp" or "Razor") and who patrols the mean streets of Tokugawa-era Japan armed with a love for justice, a hatred of oppression and a giant cock that he routinely flagellates to make stronger.

"Sometimes you need to hit it to keep it in line."

Rooster jokes aside, the part I left out is how Hanzo goes about enforcing the law and bringing justice to  the people. But I don't need to tell you. All I need to do is show you the cover of the DVD boxed set of the films based on the manga, and trust you have both two working eyes and a memory-span longer than a boll-weevil's.

       The "Longest Arm" is his penis.

Yeeaaaaah. In his quest to see that harm does not befall the common man, Hanzo the Razor routinely rapes the ever-loving shit out of the women who know things about the cases he's working on, which sends them into such tremors of unbelievable ecstasy that they not only readily confess everything they know, they become placid, love-struck sex kittens who follow Hanzo around worshipfully.

Cuz, ya know, thats what really happens with rape victims.

There are actually three movies in the series but they're essentially the same thing over and over again. Hanzo stumbles upon some plot, does some detective work, beats the shit out of his massive dick with a wooden truncheon, finds a woman related to the plot, rapes her into paradise, fights some ninjas, and solves the crime. This shit would be nigh-unwatchable if it wasn't for two things: Shintaro Katsu, who plays Hanzo, strutting around these carefully constructed Edo-period sets like he was the Japanese version of Shaft, and the funkadelic soundtrack, both of which on their own are massively entertaining. These two things ALMOST manage to turn the movies into high-camp, but then we have a rape-scene and it gets all squicky again.

On a slightly related note, I realized my boxed-set of the Hanzo movies and my boxed-set of the TV series "Shogun" have weirdly similar color schemes. I hope this wasn't on purpose.

"Little Timmy said he wanted some Japanese-sounding movie...what was the name?"