Rating: ★★

Italian cinema of the 1970s and early 1980s gained a reputation for making some of the most extreme films ever put on celluloid. This period saw the Italian cannibal film, which created notorious, frequently banned works like Cannibal Holocaust (1979) and Cannibal Ferox (1981), among others. This was followed by the Italian zombie film, inspired by Lucio Fulci’s Zombie – Flesh Eaters (1979), which was made as a quick copy of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), and saw numerous copies.

There were attempts to blend the Italian zombie and cannibal film together in the likes of Zombie Holocaust/Dr Butcher (1980) and Cannibal Apocalypse/Cannibals in the Streets (1982). Anthropophagus is another such. The word ‘anthropophagus’ is used in biology and comes from the Greek where it literally translates as ‘man-eating’. The film never offers any explanation for what has caused George Eastman’s condition – he is merely a resident of the island who has somehow changed. What we have is a film about someone who eats flesh making them a cannibal but where their activity feels more like a single zombie.

Certainly, director Joe d’Amato pushes the material for the extremes that Italian cinema was doing during this era. Within the opening five minutes, we get a meatcleaver in the head and brain exposed. In others, Serena Grandi hauls a bucket of water up from the water to find a severed head in it. A lot of the gore comes towards the end where we see a tongue torn out; a body that has the skin ripped off its stomach as it is dragged through a hole in the roof; and throats torn out with teeth. At the end, George Eastman tears his own guts out and tries to eat them. Much of this ended up being cut in various versions of the film released around the world. In the UK, Anthropophagus was listed as one of the notorious Video Nasties.

These gore scenes also sit alongside some really contrived fake shocks – like one scene where Tisa Farrow enters a cellar and a hand holding a machete comes up behind her only to anticlimactically be revealed to be Mark Bodin following her, before Margaret Donnelly then leaps up out of a barrel of wine where she has been hiding all along for some reason.

The main issue with the film is that its central character of the Anthropophagus does not enter until the 52-minute mark. Over half of the film’s 92 minute running time is taken up by the journey to the island, a romantic triangle that never goes anywhere, and scenes with the group puzzling over what happened to everybody on the island, where things undeniably resemble something of the Spanish Who Can Kill a Child? (1976).

There is not much to the characters – the tourists are a faceless group, excepting maybe Zora Kerova and the unrequited triangle with Mark Bodin that Tisa Farrow stirs up when she unwittingly joins the group. Kerova’s character conducts the cliché of the tarot reading that unexpectedly turns up sinister results. What must be said in the film’s favour is that Joe d’Amato and cinematographer Enrico Biribicchi certainly capture the pictorial beauty of Athens and surrounding areas.

Joe d’Amato returned with a sequel Absurd/Anthropophagus II (1981) again starring George Eastman. There was a further sequel claiming connection, made well over two decades after Joe d’Amato’s death, with Anthropophagus II (2022).

The film was directed by Joe D’Amato (1936-99), a prolific director in the Italian exploitation industry whose career was predominantly in pornographic films. His other genre films include:- the giallo Death Smiles on a Murderer (1973), the erotic/cannibal films Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977) and Papaya, Love Goddess of the Cannibals (1978), the necrophilia film Blue Holocaust (1979), the erotic/zombie film Erotic Night of the Living Dead (1980), the erotic/voodoo/cannibal film Sex and Black Magic (1980), Absurd (1981), the erotic/zombie film Porno Holocaust (1981), the sword and sorcery film Ator the Invincible (1982), the post-holocaust film Endgame (1983), Ator the Blade Master (1984), the post-holocaust film 2020: Texas Gladiators (1983), the Ator film Quest for the Mighty Sword (1989), Frankenstein 2000 (1992), Contamination .7/Creepers/Troll 3 (1993), the pornographic reincarnation film Chinese Kamasutra (1993), the pornographic Ghosts in the Castle (1994), the pornographic Marquis de Sade (1994), the pornographic Tarzan X (1994) and its sequel Tarzhard: The Return (1998), the pornographic ghost film Erotic Bluff (1995), the pornographic caveman film Homo Erectus (1996), the pornographic psycho-thriller Primal Instinct (1996), Hell’s Angels/Demons of Lust (1997), Hell’s Angels 2/The Seven Sexy Sins (1997) and Hell’s Angels 3/The Devil’s Lair (1998), a series of pornographic vignettes set in Hell, the pornographic Greek myth films Aphrodite: Goddess of Love (1997), Hercules: A Sex Adventure (1997), Olympus, Refuge of Gods (1997), Samson in Amazon’s Land (1997), The Sexual Adventures of Ulysses (1998) and Love and Psyche (2000), Kamasutra (1997), a pornographic film with fantasy elements, the pornographic Queen of Elephants (1997) about a female Tarzan, a pornographic version of the story of the Phantom of the Opera with Phantom (1998), Elixir (1998), a pornographic film involving a youth serum, Eternal Desire (1996), a pornographic version of Highlander (1986), and Experiences (1999) and Experiences 2 (1999) about a woman sucked through her computer to participate in a series of erotic interludes across time.

Trailer here