More crudely constructed and slightly less gory than the similar Cannibal Holocaust, Umberto Lenzi’s putridly shot Cannibal Ferox (aka Make Them Die Slowly) charts the journey from New York City to the Amazon jungle of a NYU anthropology student named Gloria Davis (Lorraine De Selle), her brother Rudy (Danilo Mattei), and slutty sidekick Pat (Zora Kerova). For her dissertation, Gloria is intent on proving that cannibalism doesn’t exist, but after meeting up with sadistic thief and drug dealer Mike (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) and his pal Joe (Walter Lucchini), the arrogant student comes face to face with the Amazon’s flesh-eating inhabitants. As with Holocaust, Ferox disingenuously vilifies white Westerns as the world’s real savages (and actually blames the natives’ barbarism on modern civilizations’ aggressive actions, because violence begets only more violence), all while shamelessly staging and orchestrating the kind of repugnant and misogynistic nastiness it supposedly decries. Phony scenes of castration, Hannibal-esque brain munching, and naked women being suspended by hooks through their breasts are interspersed by despicable, gratuitous instances of authentic animal murder, a regular stream of tedious unpleasantness that’s periodically interrupted by a NYC-set subplot involving Holocaust (and Debbie Does Dallas) star Robert Kerman as a cop searching for Mike. But for all its boundary-crossing indecency, the most shocking thing about Cannibal Ferox is that it remains a somewhat popular entry in the largely worthless Italian cannibal genre.
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