Anthropophagous the Beast

A recently assembled group of holidaymakers, including the pregnant Mary (Serena Grandi) go pay a visit to a Greek island, where Julie (Tisa "little and rather less successful sister of Mia" Farrow) expects to find a couple of her friends.

Carol (Zora Kerowa – Cannibal Ferox, The New York Ripper) foresees disaster in her tarot cards, but the others pay no heed, dismissing her as neurotic. We, however, know better, with a scene setting Zombie/Jaws like opening sequence having already shown a swimmer getting dispatched by an unseen presence in the water and her headphone wearing boyfriend, oblivious to the world, getting a cleaver to the face.

The boat arrives. Mary slips and twists her ankle and so elects to stay aboard while the others explore. As they disembark we take the point of view of an observer… the same figure as then kills the boats captain, abducts Mary and sends the vessel out to sea…

Meantime, the other five holidaymakers explore. Carol thinks she sees a figure at a window, but when they go investigate no one can be found.

As the signs accumulate that something bad has happened – first a smashed telegraph, then a pointed sign to "go away" then a horribly disfigured body – and that there is indeed "evil on this island" as Carol suggested, the holidaymakers decide it is time to leave…

With darkness descending and a storm brewing they take refuge in Julie's friends' place. Again, it is deserted…

During the night Julie and Andy decide separately to explore… in the dark… with a minimal light source…

Andy is attacked by blind girl, whom Julie recognises as her friends' daughter, Ariette, and calms down.

"What's going on and what's happened to your parents?"

"They've disappeared… I can smell him… I'm the only one who knows when he's coming. And I'm never wrong. He smells of blood…"

In what can only be considered strange behaviour given the circumstances – self actualisation ranking somewhat below survival in Maslow's hierarchy of needs and all that – Andy confesses his liking for Julie. His ex, Carol, overhears and runs off into the dark woods in the way neurotic plot devices are wont to do…

As Julie pursues Carol to try to explain, Ariette detects the presence of the killer in the house…

Culminating as it does in a sequence in which the titular monster, having picked off assorted members of the party, is gouged in the stomach by a pickaxe and proceeds to eat his own entrails, Joe D'Amato/Aristide Massaccesi and George Eastman/Luigi Montifiori's Anthropophagous the Beast (AKA Antropophagus, The Grim Reaper etc) might be seen in retrospect as the definitive auto-critique of the Italian horror film circa 1980.

That is to say, it did not matter how plodding and perfunctory the direction was (Cannibal Ferox), how implausible and illogical the narrative (House on the Edge of the Park, City of the Living Dead), how inept the bulk of the performances, nor or how cheap the whole exercise (tutti), so long as the film delivered new shocks, placing their creators in a self-defeating "race to the bottom".

At the same time, the discerning fan will also be able to identify the singularities of Anthropophagous amongst director D'Amato's filmography, noting the absence of nudity and sex for instance, and be able to mount a case for the film's virtues away from it's raison d'etre scene where Eastman's beast removes and eats Mary's foetus.

We might begin, for instance, by noting some well handled moments, such as the suspenseful chase through the woods, where D'Amato's illumination of Julie with momentary flashes of 'lightning' showcases his experience and expertise as a cinematographer; or the combination of a flashback sequence that explains the monster's origins – shipwrecked with his wife and son, his accidental murder of his wife after she reacts in horror to his reasonable/survivalist suggestion that they consume the by-then dead boy leading to his insanity and becoming an Arabic/Indian style ghul (cf. The Ghoul) – and Death Line style survey of the squalor of his lair that actually gives an element of sympathy and pathos to the creature.

In sum, even if the excruciatingly slow pace and frequently murky visuals make Anthropophagous the Beast a challenge to sit through at times and a less than ideal introduction to D'Amato and the Italian horror sub-genre and, even if, no, these cannot be ascribed to a desire on the film-makers' part to make something like a gore version of Michaelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, there is still more to the film than meets the eye.

Anthropophagous the Beast is available on R1 US and R2 UK and German DVDs. None is exactly impressive. The US and UK discs omit the foetus eating scene, somewhat akin to cutting the burning sledge out of the end of Citizen Kane. The German disc is fully uncut and in the original 1.85:1 aspect ratio, but suffers from poor quality source materials and stygian visuals that are sometimes quite literally a black screen. Better than that nth generation tape-traded copy, though…