A perennial favorite among spaghetti gore mongers, Joe D’Amato’s 1980 cannibal opus remains an overrated but nonetheless quintessential entry in Italian grue. It boasts no less than three major veteran genre actors (ZOMBIE’s Tisa Farrow, RABID DOGS’ George Eastman, and MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY’s Zora Kerova) and possess all the queasy excesses and bizarre indulgences that made Italy’s fright films of the era so memorable. One of the UK’s earliest "video nasties", ANTHROPOPHAGUS quickly became something of a legend of gore and thrills. Released severely truncated in myriad countries, the uncut print (released uncut for a painfully short time during England’s pre-nasty days) was often the crowning jewel for many a genre collector. However, compared to D’Amato’s "masterwork" (1979’s BUIO OMEGA) and his subsequent output of gooshy horror/porno hybrids, ANTHROPOPHAGUS seems almost quaint. Almost.

When a family is stranded at sea on the Greek archipelago, dad (RABID DOGS’ George Eastman) satisfies his animal hunger and devours his son and mother. Upon landing ashore, Eastman terrorizes a small Greek island town, satisfying his insatiable hunger for human flesh. A group of tourists’ fates are sealed when they decide to visit the ill-fated island with a new acquaintance (Tisa Farrow). The expected cat-and-mouse motif is given the full D’Amato treatment with gory abandon and his trademark bad taste.

Unfortunately, the element of tension is all but lost in the initial half of the film, which is as tepid as the Aegean waters. The group of characters is a bland bunch, and the film is rife with genre institutions, which means good and bad things. The film revels in ludicrous logic and embarrassing genre conventions, such as Carol’s (Zora Kerova) cryptic Tarot readings blatantly foreshadowing the impending mayhem. And Marcello Giambini’s schizophrenic score vacillates wildly between cornball synth and effective atmospherics (similar to his work for D’Amato’s 1980 film EROTIC NIGHTS OF THE LIVING DEAD). The film also sees fit to incorporate a fair amount of storyline gristle, such as the unnecessary and forced love interest one character finds in Julie (Farrow’s character). Cheap scares (including the proverbial "cat jumping on the piano" bit) continue to devalue the film as well, and such scenes merely appear as missed opportunities for the gore fans hunger for. Furthermore, D’Amato’s direction is typically uninspired, consisting mainly of static mid-range shots and periodic, extraneous zooms. Such factors make it all to clear that D’Amato is simply biding time until his cannibalistic heavy shows up.

With this conjecture in mind, newcomers to the genre may wonder what all the fuss is about. All skepticism is single-handedly washed away, however, when Eastman’s towering frame shares some screen time with some very frightened island-hoppers. Unlike the 1981 sequel (ANTROPOPHAGUS 2, AKA ABSURD), Eastman gets the full monster makeup treatment here and the effect is quite startling. D’Amato is also able to construct a few genuine thrill sequences as well, including a deadly encounter in the cannibal’s macabre lair. The encounter quickly turns gruesome, and contains one of the film’s most heralded gore highlights: Eastman’s yucky devouring of a pregnant woman’s fetus. The effect is surprisingly convincing (D’Amato admitted that the "fetus" was, in actuality, a skinned rabbit) and the film’s most appalling image that would become its trademark of sorts. Then, of course, there is the climatic showdown between Eastman and Farrow, one of the film’s most intense sources of tension, that ends in the infamous intestine eating sequence, where Eastman devours his own slippery coils.

D’Amato himself admits that ANTHROPOPHAGUS was not one of his favorite films. It is often uneven and off-putting, and the impoverished budget will likely turn more mainstream horror viewers off. But D’Amato, like so many low-rent horror directors before him (and such contemporaries as Jess Franco), works best under budgetary constraints. D’Amato’s shrewd eye for cheap, yet effective location makes maximum use of the authentic Greek locales, and the deserted villas have an eerie, Twilight Zone effect to them that complements the sporadic thrills quite nicely. Regardless, many will never be able to recognize ANTHROPOPHAGUS for what it is: a flawed but immensely influential exercise in gory thrills, Italian style.