Cannibal Man

Marcos lives in a run down apartment on the outskirt of the city, near to a new high rise development and works in a meat processing plant making a popular brand of soup, full of meaty goodness.

One night he gets in an argument with a puritanical taxi driver who starts a fight and attacks his girlfriend. Seeing red, Marcos picks up a rock and hits the man.

The next day the taxi driver's death is announced in the papers. There seem to be no leads nor witnesses, but Marcos's girlfriend turns up and says he should go to the police. Unwilling to do so, Marcos decides to silence the woman permanently, strangling her.

The comedy of terrors continues as Marcos's brother unexpectedly returns home early and starts asking too many questions. His unwillingness to help Marcus cover up his crimes leads to his demise, via a hatchet to the head.

And so it continues, with one exception: In an apartment on the 13th floor of one of the high rises a young homosexual has been watching. But his desire for companionship is such that he declines to turn Marcos in and an unlikely relationship develops…

The protracted death spasms of the Franco regime were a golden age for Spanish horror cinema, with many talented film-makers turning to the genre as outlet through which they could critically engage with the regime and reach a popular audience that had no interest in the official, co-opted and neutered art cinema of the period.

Perhaps the most fascinating of these directors was Eloy de la Iglesia. Prefiguring the better known Pedro Almodovar in his focus on homosexuals and other marginalised groups and never attracting much attention from 'serious' critics – though popular with domestic audiences – he later became a heroin addict and disappeared from public view for the better part of a decade before being belatedly rediscovered in the mid-1990s with a retrospective at the San Sebastian film festival.

As a cannibal film Cannibal Man – also known as Apartment on the 13th Floor and Week of the Murderer – is obviously a failure, with the closet approximation Marcus's method of disposing of the bodies at his place of employment, perhaps pushing the film close to Corpse Grinders territory.

And the attention-grabbing title has probably probably proven a mixed blessing, gaining notoriety as a former "video nasty" in the UK – it will be recalled they went haphazardly after anything bearing the word cannibal – with all the cult cachet that implies but also raising gore score expectations that the film cannot but disappoint, despite a procession of bloody murders and documentary-style slaughterhouse footage reminiscent of Georges Franju's Blood of the Beasts

Understood in its own right, however, Cannibal Man impresses. That the film-makers were able to sneak such subversive content – the taxi driver as representative of Francoist ideology with its willingness to embrace economic if not social modernisation, along with a pervasive critique of the officially sanctioned culture of machismo – the Spanish authorities is in itself remarkable. That they managed to fashion such a compelling horror cum black comedy cum satire out of this material all the more so.

Only the English dubbing hurts the effect, necessarily blunting the historical and cultural specifity apparent elsewhere and neutralising the more nuanced aspects of the fine performances, particularly from the compelling Vincente Parra.

Cannibal Man is one of Anchor Bay's lesser DVD releases in terms of presentation and extras. The film – announced as Eloy de la Inglesia's Cannibal Man and seeming sourced from a German distributed print – is presented in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio and mono sound and generally comes across as fine if unremarkable, while the only extra besides the liner notes/insert is the US theatrical trailer.

Originally released as a single disc, the more recent rerelease sees the film double billed with Sergio Martino's rather more conventional Italian genre entry Mountain of the Cannibal God, making it a good value for money package for the Eurohorror enthusiast.