(1980)
Overall: MEH
Off-putting disco music, terrible dubbing, swiped footage, real on-screen animal murder, gratuitous torture, rape, flesh-eating, and nudity, plus a Jim Jones styled villain, Eaten Alive!, (Mangiati vivi!) is Umberto Lenzi's first of two cannibal craze cash grabs that he made in the early 1980s. Deliberately tasteless since how could a movie like this NOT be, it borrows some of its nastiness from Lenzi's own Man from the Deep River, as well as Ruggero Deodato's Last Cannibal World and Sergio Martin's Slave of the Cannibal God, all of which are seminal enough works in the sub-genre. Which is not to say that this one fails to carve out its own sleazy niche amongst its peers. Recognizable character actor Ivan Rassimov has the naturally fiendish charisma to pull-off the Bible-quoting psycho who rallies his followers together through a mind control concoction of snake venom and hackneyed screenwriting. The plot is hardly worth paying attention to, (ignorant white people venture into dangerous tribal territory and then try to escape, the end), but Lenzi pulls no punches with a barrage of awful set pieces that are there for pure icky shock value. These movies are an acquired taste more than most, but fans of ugly jungle exploitation will be both delighted and not surprised by what they encounter here.
(1980)
Overall: MEH
The 1980s were ripe with zombie films and Italy alone produced a fare share of them, with Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City, (Incubo sulla città contaminata, City of the Walking Dead), being one of the first to get the decade's ball rolling. No more or less nonsensical and ridiculous than any of the other ones, it at least tweaks the zombies themselves who are not reanimated corpses but mutated humans that have to feast on human blood in order to maintain their radiation-ravaged form. The rate at which they take over the populous is absurdly quick, with a plane full of them easily overpowering a barrage of armed military personnel, at which point they render both the city and countryside barren in a manner of hours. It is pure nonsense that is "enhanced" by horrendous makeup effects that look as if they were applied within thirty seconds per actor and cost about seventy-five cents to produce. The movie has a number of fun set pieces though, including the aforementioned showdown in an open airfield, a news studio segue where an unplugged TV set immediately turns into a grenade when thrown, and a finale on top of a roller coaster that results in a gloriously unconvincing prop dummy falling to its death. The film is also full of charisma-less characters and predominantly bounces between various, monotonous subplots that merely get in the way of the unintentionally funny moments, but at least the silly stuff is fun.
(1981)
Overall: MEH
A companion piece to the previous year's Eaten Alive!, Cannibal Ferox, (Make Them Die Slowly, Woman from Deep River), may confuse people to think that they are watching the exact same movie within the opening few minutes, which once again is set to lousy disco music as the credits play over an urban landscape. We are then quickly treated to the most gratuitous use of the word "shitface" before we switch to the jungles of Columbia to meet a crop of obnoxious, stupid, and awful characters who come face to face with naked tribe people that go all munchy/gentile mutilation on them. As "same shit, different cannibal movie" as it all is, credit can be awarded to Umberto Lenzi's screenplay, which offers up an ironic angle in that the character played by Lorraine De Selle is venturing on such a trek to prove her thesis that man-eating-man action is merely a racist myth. That goes about as well as one would expect as we witness Giovanni Lombardo Radice being one hellova lunatic scumbag who provokes the locals into slicing and biting back at him, plus there is on-screen animal mutilation because of course. Hey, at least the non-disco music is kind of awesome and no one gets too raped this time!
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