CANNIBAL FEROX (1981)

 While CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is clearly the high-point and most well known of the jungle cannibals sub-genre this obvious rip-off by Umberto Lenzi has it's own gory disgusting appeal and on certain days I even prefer watching it to it's inspiration. It borrows so much from HOLOCAUST that it gets pretty ridiculous; Robert Kerman appears in both(though a much smaller role here), a big-ass turtle gets hacked up in both, a giant anaconda gets to squash a cute little fury animal and of course intestines get ripped out of people dumb enough to travel into the heart of the Amazon. Everything in this one is dumbed down a bit though and if you think too hard about it all it doesn't make much sense. It also, for the most part, foregoes the moralizing and just focuses on how much grossness can be put on screen in it's 90 minute run-time. It does seem like there was a competition between director Lenzi and HOLOCAUST's creator Ruggero Deodato as to who could make the bigger gross-out with Deodato starting out with JUNGLE HOLOCAUST in '77 which is comparatively tame compared to these two and then Lenzi responding with EATEN ALIVE in '80 which is a bit gory and rapey but not super extreme. Then it's all topped by the extremity of HOLOCAUST and finally ends up with FEROX which features a couple of castrations, heads lopped off, limbs lopped off, giant grub-worm eating, severed dick-eating, giant hooks through tits in an "homage?" to that A MAN CALLED HORSE movie, etc, etc. John Morgen stands out as the best actor in this whole thing (besides Kerman who isn't really used all that much) as he portrays a sleazy murdering, native-torturing bad-ass while most of the other acting is pretty clunky but who cares since it's all about how many entrails can be munched and how much blood can be spilled and this movie delivers like a greatest hits package of depraved spectacle. AKA MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY