Boy, I had high hopes for this one. One of the most infamous Video Nasties, reviled worldwide for its 'foetus eating' scene, Anthropophagus The Beast really failed to deliver for me. Its cover-, and main star, George Eastman as cannibalistic serial killer Nikos, is quite terrifying. A sinister looking fellow with menacing eyes, towering at an incredible 6ft9", Eastman as himself is pretty scary. Add monstrous make up effects and he is terrifying. As it happens, Eastman was a frequent collaborator with veteran horror director Joe D'Amato, and co-wrote Anthropophagus. He's an amazing villain, but the story and set-up is slow and boring.
It pains me to say this. I am aware of director D'Amato's stellar cult horror status, and Anthropophagus has a lot of what it needs to be good, but it's just so goddamn boring. Set on a beautiful Greek island, which is creepily deserted, the movie gives us a bunch of friends who go to stay in one of the many lovely houses. Among their entourage is a heavily pregnant woman and a nutty new age woman who prattles on about how the Tarot cards say they shouldn't be there, and that they're going to die there, etc. The others aren't very memorable.
They see some creepy figure skulking around the place and leaving messages on dusty windows, and they are, of course, undeterred by her obviously ghostly presence. They chase after her, certain she is a real person, inexplicably running from them on a mysteriously deserted island. Nothing up with that. They find a mutilated body, and then they run back to their boat, which is adrift, so they leave the pregnant woman out there by herself and sleep in the house.
In the house, they come across a blind woman, who is equally as crazy as the tarot woman, raving about the smell of blood and the like. Then Nikos (who I can't really help but refer to as Anthropophagus - isn't he the titular character anyhow?) shockingly appears behind the door. Wow, this guy kicks it old school. He was hiding behind the door. Still, he's very scary looking. From here, all hell breaks loose with the towering fiend taking out the boring bunch left, right and centre. I am writing this a few weeks after watching, but even this recently, much of the movie is lost on me. I admit, after an hour or so, I found myself just waiting for the foetus scene, as I had conceded that nothing else was going to be anywhere near as entertaining or shocking. I wasn't really wrong. This scene comes right at the very end of the movie, and it has unsurprisingly been rather jumped up by hearsay. It was pretty brutal, and visible enough to require the infamous skinned rabbit as a prop. But another real problem I have is that the characters don't seem to find their plight anywhere near as dreadful as we do as an audience. As the pregnant woman and whichever bloke is with her are cornered in a cave, with Nikos approaching them, they speak calmly, and seem surprised at the most. While the woman is having the skinned rabbit pulled from her innards, she just sort of moans in a high pitch. I don't think it even takes a woman to know that this ordeal would more likely result in ear-splitting screams of agony.
Everything is very amateur and the acting is terrible. There are two--OK, three things that make this movie in any way memorable to me. 1) The foetus scene: D'Amato and Eastman came up with one gross gem, and it feels like they wrote the rest of the movie to accommodate it. 2) Shortly afterwards, the rest of the friends are at some mansion, and one of the women gets tripped into a noose, which sends her hurtling over a thirty-foot banister. That was pretty crazy. 3) Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr George Eastman. He is the star, the bearer, the objective of the movie, and it's a shame that the lagging plot development only leaves us with about 20 minutes of him.
The closing minutes see the female remainder being pulled down and then chased back up a well by Nikos, in a sequence that is pretty close to being scary, but for the fact it seems to play out in slow-mo. With an unexciting Moog synth soundtrack and minutes of ridiculously slow grabbing, moaning and reaching, all tension is gone. And again, the female on the receiving end of this snail-paced terror addresses it with considerable nonchalance. The entire movie is played out far too casually, with the characters not seeming to recognise the situation they are in. But then where would we be in the horror world without award-winningly idiotic characters?
I wanted to like Anthropophagus, and when I researched it, and the backgrounds of its makers, D'Amato and Eastman in particular, I really wanted to like it. Alas, I really did not. Perhaps I'll have more luck with one of their alternative co-productions. Porno Holocaust, maybe.
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