Directed by Eloy de la Iglesia
Starring Emma Cohen
Eusebio Poncela
Vicente Parra
Vicky Lagos
A character study of a man slipping into homicidal madness, this is a great Spanish horror film, and exactly the kind of fear flick they don't make anymore.
Parra is a young slaughterhouse worker who, after accidentally killing a rude taxi driver, freaks out when his girlfriend says she plans to take the story to the police. Convinced he wouldn't be given a fair hearing because he's impoverished, he kills her.
When his own brother gets wise to what he did, he rubs him out. As more and more residents of his small town invade his privacy - from his brother's girlfriend to his own father --and become suspicious if his new homicidal lifestyle, he finds himself compelled to terminate their lives too. Things get even raspier as town dogs start noticing the stench from his home as the bodies continue to pile up.
The title is a tad misleading, but that doesn't diminish the power of this very well-made Euro shocker, which was thankfully re-released in 2000 on both video and DVD by Anchor Bay. "Cannibal Man" is a gory, remarkable and uncompromising movie, straight outta the sleazy seventies. But despite its exploitation value, it manages to be intelligent as well, both a parable on how one bad moral decision can lead to a string of others and a character study of a man slowly going insane. It's also one of the few films out there that has actually managed to make a a protagonist out of a killer, without falling flat on its face. "American Psycho" attempted to do this with extremely bad results. There are many similarities between that film and this, and it's hard not to believe that director Mary Harron (and perhaps author Bret Easton Ellis) tried to recapture some of the magic of "Cannibal Man", but neither the book or film came close.
<< Back
-- Review by Lucius Gore
|
