Call it Il paese del sesso selvaggio (The Country of Savage Sex). Or refer to it as Deep River Savages and Sacrifice! Or just say it by the name most of the U.S. saw it as, Man from Deep River. Whatever title you see it as, you can claim to have seen the first movie in Italy’s cannibal cycle, which, like all filones, takes another, the mondo, and goes even further.

British photographer John Bradley (Ivan Rassimov, who was Serbian) has been photographing the Thai wildlife. A boxing match is more interesting to him than the woman he’s with and soon, he’s so drunk that he’s stabbing a man in a bar fight. Then, it’s time to go into the heart of darkness and go down the river. He wakes up, and his guide is dead, and he’s been taken, as the natives believe him to be a merman thanks to his wetsuit. 

After some torture, the chief Luhanà agrees to release John to Maraya (Burmese/British cannibal movie queen Me Me Lai), who has shown an interest in him. Her governess, Taima, speaks English and decides to help him escape. That night, a helicopter comes close, and John tries and fails to get away, killing Maraya’s fiancé, Karen. This, for some reason, makes him seem like he could be a member of the tribe, so they start to torture him all over again to see if he belongs. In case you’re wondering, yes, this would like you to think it’s A Man Called Horse.

By the end of the film, he’s had a child with Maraya, but she doesn’t make it. When the helicopter comes to rescue him again, he hides and goes deeper into the jungle, having left the world of civilization behind.

This film was a huge success in New York City’s grindhouses, but it ran into problems when it tried to cross the pond. Even though the BBFC took one look at the celluloid in ’75 and slammed the door on a theatrical release, the flick pulled a fast one, sneaking into UK homes under the title Deep River Savages. But you can’t keep a good exploitation film down for long without the moral crusaders noticing. By 1983, when the DPP was busy clutching their pearls and drafting the infamous Video Nasties list, Lenzi’s opus was right there in the crosshairs. Once the Video Recordings Act of 1984 became the law of the land, the UK government dropped the hammer. Deep River Savages wasn’t just trimmed. It was banned in its entirety until 2003, when three minutes were cut. In 2016, another release saw three more minutes chopped with the same disdain that animals are sliced to bits in this. In the U.S., this got an R rating.

Director Umberto Lenzi really hit almost every filone Italy had to offer, from peplum (Samson and the Slave Queen) and Eurospy (008: Operation Exterminate, SuperSeven Calling Cairo) to comic book movies (Kriminal, Tarzan In the Golden Grotto), giallo (Seven Blood-Stained Orchids, Eyeball, Spasmo), pliziotteschi (The Tough Ones), Conan rip-offs (Ironmaster), horror (Ghosthouse, Nightmare Beach) and even VHS era cash-ins (Primal Rage, Hitcher In the Dark). He also made two more cannibal films, Eaten Alive! (which takes scenes from this film) and Cannibal Ferox, which was released in the U.S. as Make Them Die Slowly. 

In case you’re wondering about that scene where Me Me Lai gets raw-dogged on the ashes of her dead fiancé, it’s based on truth and isn’t just the kind of transgressive imagery we expect in Italian movies. It’s based on a traditional African ritual known as widow cleansing. In the internal logic of the culture, a woman becomes dirty when her husband dies. She’s essentially a walking biohazard of bad luck and grief, supposedly possessed by the lingering spirit of the deceased. To stop this curse from spreading like a supernatural virus through the rest of the village, the widow has to be scrubbed clean and the only way to wash away the shadows of the dead is through a three-day marathon of unprotected sex with a purifier, who is usually the dead guy’s brother.

A warning: For many fans of cult and exploitation cinema, scenes of real animal death are often the ones that make the movie difficult to revisit. Here is the breakdown of the animals killed on screen in this film:

• A Crocodile: This is one of the film’s more protracted and famous scenes. The animal is dragged from the water, bound and then cut open and gutted while still alive.
• A Python/Large Snake: The snake is decapitated during a sequence intended to show the dangers of the jungle.
• A Monkey: In a scene that reflects the survival tropes of the genre, a monkey is killed and its brain is eaten by the characters.
• A Mongoose vs. Cobra: True to the mondo style that influenced Lenzi, there is a sequence featuring a fight between a mongoose and a cobra that ends with the snake’s death.

While Man from Deep River is often praised for its lush cinematography and for being more of a fish-out-of-water adventure than the later, more mean-spirited cannibal films like Cannibal Holocaust (intended as a Lenzi-directed sequel, but he turned it down twice), the inclusion of these non-simulated animal deaths remains its most controversial element.