aka La Montagna del Dio Cannibale, aka Prisoner of the Cannibal God, aka Slave of the Cannibal God

• Directed by Sergio Martino
• Written by Cesare Frugoni and Sergio Martino
• Starring
  • Ursula Andress
  • Stacy Keach
  • Claudio Cassinelli
  • Antonio Marsina
  • Franco Fantasia
• Produced by Luciano Martino

It’s hard to discuss Mountain of the Cannibal God without comparing it to Jungle Holocaust (1977); the earlier movie was obviously the direct inspiration for the later. Not only does Cannibal God exhibit similar “native” costuming and similar insert footage of animals eating and being eaten in the “circle of life,” but (unless I miss my guess) it shares at least one location, the giant cave in which the cannibal tribe lives. Whether by cunning design or the blind luck of the genius savante, Jungle Holocaust rises far above its exploitative impetus and becomes a meditation on savagery and civilization. Cannibal God, on the other hand, is pure schlock exploitation which never approaches a tenth of the appeal of the film that inspired it; it’s clumsy, soulless, and unengaging for any viewer with a higher aspiration in life than seeing Bond girl Ursula Andress undressed.

The specials on today’s menu.

Andress plays Susan Stevenson, wife of an anthropologist who went missing after a months-long expedition into the jungles of New Guinea (as represented by Sri Lanka, where the non-cave parts of the movie were shot). She’s something of a big deal, with enough money and influence to rattle the chains of the British Consulate in New Guinea and the government liaison thereto, but the story is that Dr. Stevenson’s expedition was undertaken without government approval or oversight, and thus they only have the vaguest idea of where he might have gone or when he might have met trouble.

Susan and her brother Arthur (Antonio Marsina) turn then of a sometime-colleague of her husband, Dr. Edward Foster (a young Stacy Keach, before he got thick, when he looked a little like Oliver Reed in his prime). Foster has some idea where Stevenson may have gone: Raka, an isolated island off the jungle coast, declared off-limits by the government and rumored to be “cursed.” Susan prevails upon Foster to lead an expedition of the three of them, plus a half-dozen Guinean bearers, to find out if her husband was lost on Raka.

Hey, finish that! There are people starving in Ethiopia, you know!

It’s tempting to skip over the middle section of the movie entirely; it certainly doesn’t linger long in one’s memory. They traipse through the jungle, with Susan consistently getting tangled in vines or coming face-to-face with a tarantula or falling in water. She’s the standard unprepared female, but at least she doesn’t whine and moan about the jungles and wish aloud that she was back in civilization. Actually, the less she opens her mouth, the better; Andress was a handsome woman, and looked fifteen years younger here than her forty-two years would suggest, even in the nude scenes that pepper the last part of the movie (I never thought her particularly pretty, but she’s certainly striking), but she was never a master thespian, and when you have a Swiss actress reciting English dialog written by Italians and directed in her performance by an Italian director who wasn’t too firm in his own grasp of English, it’s no wonder that every word that falls from her mouth is lifeless and inert.

In contrast to the passive bad acting that Andress exhibits, Marsina as Arthur acts badly aggressively. If it was all designed to make Keach look good, it worked — not that Keach isn’t a professional performer onscreen, but his part is severely underwritten for most of the movie. The man who confidently and casually leads an expedition to an unexplored island in the beginning is hard to reconcile with the later revelation of an earlier trauma among the cannibals of Raka; again, it’s a case of poor direction. Through a combination of lackluster performances and an unfocused script, Foster is the only character who arouses any goodwill in the viewer — which is too bad, as he’s not meant to be the protagonist. In fact, who is the protagonist? Susan is a passive passenger on the expedition, Arthur is the designated dick, and Foster has “supporting character” written all over him. If it weren’t for the sudden addition of Manolo (Claudio Cassinelli), a white man who’s lived the last few years in the jungle, after the halfway mark, we wouldn’t have any contenders for the protagonist label.

Sometimes it’s better not to know how the sausage is made.

Am I forgetting something? Oh, right — cannibals! No, I haven’t been neglecting them; they only show up at the very end of the movie, where they lay mantraps and chop up the dead and, naturally, come to worship the blonde Susan. For mud-daubed primitives with filth-clogged hair who wear rudimentary loincloths, they sure have a snazzy goddess costume for Susan to wear; it looks like a leftover from an Atlantis epic, or maybe a nightclub floorshow.

As with other films in the cannibal genre, Cannibal God spices up the rubbery violence against humans with some very real violence against animals: a tarantula is skewered, a monitor lizard is gutted, various snakes are ill-treated, and in a sequence which has become infamous, a monkey is caught and eaten by a python. I mentioned in my review of Jungle Holocaust that I don’t have a problem with animal-eat-animal violence as such — “circle of life” and all that. If we’re talking about a predator/prey relationship that would exist without a camera crew around, then hypothetically I don’t find jungle mealtime to be more unethical in a cannibal movie than in a PBS nature documentary.

It’s a pity the cannibals didn’t have access to the Bedazzler.

That said, it seems that the closer the animal is to human, the harder it is to watch the violence. The death of the spider is no biggie; the gutting of the lizard is seen as unkind in a clinical and detached way; the monkey-munching is a lot harder to countenance. [Warning: Screencap coming.] There is some controversy as to whether the python just “happened” to attack the monkey while the cameras were on it, or whether the film crew essentially thrust the monkey into waiting snake jaws, but either scenario leaves one uncomfortable at best — especially when one realizes that it isn’t “high art” that these animals are dying for, or even the inadvertent art of a Jungle Holocaust. Martino wasn’t make a high-minded statement about brutality and animal instincts here; he was directing a blatant ripoff of the trailblazers of the genre, and included the animal scenes solely for imitation’s sake.

My desire to turn this into an image macro means I’m probably going to hell.

By all accounts, Cannibal God had a larger budget than either The Man From Deep River (1972) or Jungle Holocaust. It certainly doesn’t look primitive; the cinematography shows off the jungle to good effect (though the editing, especially in scenes with dialog, shows a lack of comprehension of the rhythms of the English language). But despite that, it never really engages the audience. Aside from a few schlock shocks, it’s a tedious travelogue.

Some Notable Totables:

(all from the “uncut and uncensored” Blue Underground release)

• body count: 16, plus a spider, a monitor, a monkey, a hawk, a crab, and several fish and snakes
• breasts: 14
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• dwarfs: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0