Friday, February 02, 2018

Movie review - "The Mountain of the Cannibal God" (1978) ** (spoilers)

I'd never seen an Italian cannibal movie - apparently there's enough for form a sub-genre - and only watched this because of Ursula Andress. It surprised me - no classic, a lot of it was off putting, but it did consistently surprise me.

It benefitted from location filming - the jungles and rivers are real, the actors are there, and it looks great. It also has two Hollywood names - Andress and Stacy Keach.

The plot is a riff on King Solomon's Mines with Andress and her brother Antonio Marsina going on an expedition with professor Stacy Keach to find Andress' missing husband. Explorer Claudio Cassinelli goes along.

The first half of this seemed fairly straight forward - a traipse through the jungle, battling the elements, with Marsina being a brat and Andress making eyes at Cassinelli. I was surprised why they had Keach and Cassinelli in the film. There was lots of footage of animals being killed, which I understand was a thing from exploitation Italian films of the time.

It gets weirder and weirder - a woman sleeps with Marsina and is stabbed by a cannibal, Keach dies at a waterfall (a real shock), they stumble upon a cannibal lair. The husband is dead with a geiger counter that's being worshipped by the cannibals; they kill and east Marsina, and strip Andress and oil her up and start shoving lizars into Marsina. Some natives have sex and masturbate, and one has sex with a pig, and someone gets their dick cut off and it all gets pretty wild and Andress and Cassinelli escapes.

It's bizarre and weird and certainly not what I was expecting.

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