John's Horror Banana-nanza Episode Sixteen: Anthropophagous the Beast

Well, buying this movie on Amazon was a mistake.

According to a book I referenced earlier, "Eaten Alive! : Italian Cannibal and Zombie Movies" by Jay Slater, this movie is simply a quickly made stalk and slash / cannibal movie with wrestler George Eastman playing the killer and Tisa Farrow, the Italian horror vet, playing the heroine. Written by a director who once penned "The Erotic Nights of the Living Dead", Joe D'Amato, it was lumped into the infamous "Video Nasties" list of the 80's for it's scene involving a fetus being ripped from the mother and eaten. While there was intense gore, the review said that without the last 15 or so minutes, the movie may be remembered as the worst film ever made, with it's boring, pointless conversations and dull dialogue.

So I expected basically a bloodbath and lots of loose storytelling, but all in all, a good 20 minutes or so of a horror flick.

So what did I get?

First of all, when I opened the package it was delivered in, I got a movie called "The Grim Reaper", which I guess is an alternate title. It showed a picture of Eastman eating his insides. I thought, "Wow. This is gonna be over the top." Turns out, I got the edited version. The extremely edited version. There was no fetus eating. The violence was less than grisly. The climatic ending was ruined due to a lack of gut eating, if that's at all possible, which made the cover art virtually meaningless.

Basically, this is exactly what I thought for about 50 minutes of the movie. Boredom, poor dialogue, badly lit set pieces, but the worst part is, this movie is not found in very many places in its uncut glory. The American version is basically 90 minutes of crap. Sure, Eastman does kill a few people here and there, but the scares are laughable, and some of the scenes are completely unbelievable. This is obviously a rush job, and without the gore, it’s an awful film.

The plot is a man and his family are in a boat trapped at sea, and Eastman kills his family and eats them. Then he ends up on an island, where vacationing idiots show up to talk about trivial nonsense. He kills them after a lengthy build-up, one that includes a blind woman covered in blood and an obvious prop head in a bucket.

Eventually, it's him against the heroine, and of course, he meets a horrible end. But that's pretty much all this is. Other than the gore, which was heavily censored as I said, this movie is a waste of time.