Ruptured Review: Anthropophagus

Country of origin- Italy
Year of release- 1980  
Director- Joe D'Amato 
Stars- Tisa Farrow, Saverio Vallone, George Eastman 

To celebrate this film’s 35^th anniversary, and its recent fully uncut Blu-Ray and DVD release in the UK by 88 Films I think it is time to review one of the most important Italian horror films of the 80s.

The film begins with a young couple walking on the beach of a small archipelago island, the two of them stop by a large rock and the woman decides to take a swim, leaving her boyfriend to listen to his incredibly oversized headphones. It isn’t long before the young woman is dragged below the water’s surface never to be seen again. We then see a point of view shot from whatever killed her, which is now heading towards her boyfriend who proceeds to have a rather head on meeting with a large meat clever. The film then cuts to a group of friends who have hired a boat and plan to travel around archipelago islands. The first island they land on almost immediately rings alarm bells for the group as the island’s small village seems to be completely deserted and the islands only line of outside communication has been destroyed. As they search the village for any signs of life they find a badly decomposed mostly eaten human cadaver, and decide to get the hell out of dodge. However, when they get back to the boat they find to their dismay that is now drifting out to sea, leaving them stranded on the deserted island with way to call for help. And it isn’t long before the bodies begin to mount up as a deranged cannibal mercilessly stalks his prey and uses their flesh to feed his perverse hunger.

It is hard to believe in this day an age that when this film was first released in the UK on VHS, it was thought by the moral crusaders of the time to be an actual snuff film. It is due to this reputation as a shockingly sick and demented film that would likely turn all who saw it into gore hungry serial killing perverts, that got it placed on the now infamous “Video Nasty” list. How anybody could have thought that the cheap and cheesy gore and splatter that this film has to offer was real, is beyond me.

This film is a perfect example of why 1980’s Italian horror is for me the best kind of horror. It has everything I look for in a horror film, it has a simple yet effective plot that makes sense and doesn’t leave you feeling like you have be in some way cheated. It has a solid amount of practical gore, including the now legendry foetus eating scene that continues to shock audiences even today, along with the equally infamous self-disembowelment scene. And it has silly dubbing and an often poorly timed synth soundtrack that sounds like something from a bootleg Clockwork Orange rip-off. Combine these elements together and you have yourself a 90 minute festival of Italian brilliance that had me smiling like an idiot from start to finish. Overall I highly recommend this film, It’s frankly pretty hard to go wrong with a film that features the great George Eastman eating babies and terrorizing the blind, this classic gets a 8/10 from me, check it out.