Filmed in Coatbridge, Scotland
I guess when you've run out of Westerns, Gialli and Eurocrime films to make you've got to start looking elsewhere for inspiration. Last Cannibal World isn't the first even Italian cannibal film (that being Deep River Savages) and it's not Ruggero Deodato's first jungle film either - that's Gungala, a film with a far less sinister atmosphere than this vileness. What this film did was kick off another genre exploiting free-for-all of cannibal movie clones which isn't what you'd call the best period of Italian cinema.Some guy actor called Massimo Foschi, who will be spending the majority of this film naked, plays an oil prospector called Robert Foster. Robert in a private plane with jungle expert Ivan Rassimov and two people who will shortly become cannibal fodder because they are not white. Robert's concerned that they can't get in radio contact with the makeshift airfield an advance party of engineers has set up, and things get worse when they tried land and a wheel is knocked off the plane by the long disused radio. That's no good.
The pilot reckons he can get the plane up and running in short order, but then Robert ruins everything by running into the jungle looking for his missing engineers and gets lost. Eventually Ivan Rassimov finds him and they head back to the plane, finding the murdered corpses of the engineers on the way back. Now Robert is in a hurry to leave the place, but the pilot tells him it's too late and they'll have to fly out first thing in the morning. We the audience are then clued in that someone is out there in the dark (via a nice jump scare), but when the female companion of Robert has to go outside to pee, she's captured by the natives waiting outside and things go tits up right away.
Robert shows that he's probably inherited his oil company because he seems to operate without any foresight or intuition. The pilot gets a spike ball to the guts, Robert loses Ivan on some river rapids after they get lost again, then Robert thinks it's a good idea to eat some strange mushrooms before tripping out, getting caught by natives, getting stripped to the nuts and getting his tummy banana tugged on by some backwards cannibals.
They also think he's a bird and dangle him off the ceiling of the cave their in before trying to eat his watch and throwing him in a cave with some birds while periodically throwing slops at him or peeing on him. Robert also gets to meet Me Me Lai, who mistakes the universal hand signal for 'I need food' for 'give me a handy'. Me Me stands out a mile not only because she's the only cannibal with all her teeth, she also seems to have a very good plastic surgeon judging by those fake boobs!
We spend rather a long time watching the natives being primitive and eating snakes/crocodiles, stock footage of animals eating other animals, and the natives being savage by having a rival native's arm eaten by ants before eventually escapes with Me Me and the romance/lengthy chase sequence begins! Turns out the most romantic thing you can do with a native is punch her directly in the face.
If you remove the animal cruelty from this one (and luckily my copy is missing the croc eating scene, but keeps the gore intact), you have a decent jungle adventure which thinks it's being clever in showing one civilised man's descent into savagery as the only way he can survive his ordeal in the jungle, although it's all just an excuse for gore and violence. The animal stuff is kept to a minimum thankfully, but that would be remedied in Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust, a truly nauseating exercise without any redeeming features.
The goriest part of this film is reserved for Me Me, who is rewarded for leaving the tribe by being served up with a bat confit, grub ganache, native drool foam, bamboo tuille and a crocodile jus. This won the tribe Masterchef: Cannibals in 1977.
score 6/10
Bezenby 17 October 2018
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw4403298/35042
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