Director/Screenplay/Photography – Ron Bonk, Producers – Howard Gromero & Jonathan Straiton, Music – Tim Kelso, Digital Effects – Duke Studios & Virtual Interactive, Special Effects – Adam Shannon & Jimbo Jones Wallon. Production Company – SRS Cinema.
Cast
Kellyn Lindsay (The Girl), Nicola Fiore (The Woman), Wes Reid (Stan), Anne Hartfield (Cammie), Michaela Ziparo (Jennifer), Ashby Brooks (Cee), Jennie Russo (Kay), Rob Rozier (Meir), Derrick Johnson (Little J), Jody Pucello (Kirk), Jack Gargaro (Dad)
Plot
Demolition is due to begin on an apartment building tomorrow. The remaining residents become trapped in the building as group of masked figures who may belong to a cannibal cult suddenly burst in to kill them. They realise that the woman who leads the group is seeking revenge against them for her girlfriend who was raped in the basement while none of the residents stood up to defend her.
Ron Bonk is a New York-based filmmaker and distributor. Bonk has been making films since the 1990s with the likes of The Vicious Sweet (1997), Strawberry Estates (2001), Clay (2007), Empire State of the Dead (2016), She Kills (2016) and House Shark (2017). Bonk also runs the SRS Cinema label, specialising in the production and distribution of low-budget horror and exploitation films, including titles such as Inbred Redneck Alien Abduction (2004), Satan’s Cannibal Holocaust (2007), Terror at Blood Fart Lake (2009), Night of Something Strange (2016) and Sharks of the Corn (2021), among others, including a series of unserious Amityville sequels.
Cannibal Holocaust (1979) is one of the most notorious films ever made – an Italian cannibal film that pushes the envelope in terms of screen torture and cannibalism. It has become a cult classic. Ron Bonk poses his film as some kind of sequel but in truth the title Ms Cannibal Holocaust is a massive cheat. The film lacks even the slightest connection or similarity to Cannibal Holocaust. Cannibal Holocaust was about filmmakers in the jungle falling afoul of cannibal natives; by contrast, Ms Cannibal Holocaust is a film about a mystery cult that invades an apartment building and attacks the tenants. In fact, it is not even a film about Cannibalism. The nearest connection we get is one line of dialogue where it is speculated that the hooded figures might be a cannibal cult. Basically, Bonk has appropriated the title to get people watching – it worked for me – and then does entirely his own thing.
In actuality, Ms Cannibal Holocaust is a Home Invasion story about the tenants of an apartment being terrorised by mysterious masked and hooded figures out to kill them. As becomes apparent, it is a variant on the Kitty Genovese story – where in 1964 in New York City, a woman was raped and stabbed to death while loudly screaming for help where claims were made that 37 people had heard or seen the attack but did nothing to help. Here the tenants are having Revenge enacted against them for having stood by and done nothing to intervene while Nicola Fiore’s friend was being raped.
Nicola Fiore and avenging cultists
In the part of the titular avenging ‘ms’, Nicola Fiore, who has maintained a regular career in low-budget genre films since the late 2000s, plays with a fierceness of glare that comes right out of the screen. (Although the revenge explanation fails to quite any explanation who the other Cult members are – they just turn up and accompany Nicola Fiore with fanatical intent for no apparent reason).
The film suffers the same problems that all of Ron Bonk’s early works do. It is poorly made – cheaply shot and made with minimal budget or resources to hand. It is direly in need of an editor. The film only runs to 64 minutes but these drag and it feels as though it could easily have been trimmed of more than that. More importantly, the film is vague and ill-defined in terms of plot and this, along with the blatant bait-and-switch title, leads to a frustrating film where you neither know nor even care what is going on.
