Mitchell reveals a lot of misconceptions.

First: Joe Don Baker was once presented as the kind of sex symbol who didn’t just get Linda Evans in bed, he was kind of angry about it.

Second: Mitchell was not intended to be riffed on. And yet here we are, with a movie that most people know from the final episode that Joel was on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Then again, critics hated this when it came out in 1975. Vincent Carnaby said, “Mitchell, starring Joe Don Baker as a hard-nosed Los Angeles detective named Mitchell, has a lot of over-explicit violence, some gratuitous sex stuff and some rough language, yet it looks like a movie that couldn’t wait to get to prime-time television. Perhaps it’s a pilot film for a TV series, or maybe it’s just a movie that’s bad in a style we associate with some of the more mindless small-screen entertainments.

Mitchell spends what seems to be the greater part of the film climbing in and out of automobiles, driving automobiles, chasing other automobiles, parking automobiles, and leaning against the body of automobiles that are temporarily at rest. Once he smashes a hoodlum’s hand in the door of an automobile.

The climax, for a giddy change of pace, features a police helicopter in pursuit of a high-speed cabin cruiser. Automobiles sink when driven onto water.”

He could have been right. After all, the cut that aired on the CBS Late Movie was heavily edited with scenes shot just for TV, eliminating most of the violence, nudity and profanity. It also has the death of John Saxon’s character happen off screen, where we hear about his death on the radio. Keep in mind that he’s presented as Mitchell’s arch enemy.

Mitchell (Baker) is after Saxon’s character, Walter Deaney, but learns from the Chief of Police (Robert Phillips) tells Deaney is wanted for “every federal law violation in the book” and “FBI property.” This doesn’t stop Mitchell, who wants to go after him instead of staking out James Arthur Cummins (Martin Balsam), a crime boss shipping in heroin. To get him off the case, Deaney hired $1,000 a night call girl Greta (Linda Evans) to keep him busy. Instead, Mitchell arrests her for possession and even turns down a bribe. Soon, Deaney and Cummins are working together to kill our slovenly hero.

If you enjoy larger men battling, this has Baker fighting Merlin Olsen. I mean, we’ve already imagined a world where a high priced sex worker wants to sleep with Baker for free. Why not?

Directed by Andrew V. McLaglen (The Wild Geese, The Sea Wolves, Sahara) and written by Ian Kennedy Martin, this also has a great theme song, “Mitchell” by Hoyt Axton.

“My my my my Mitchell
What do your Mama say?
What would she do
if she knew you
were fallin’ round and carryin’ on that way…
Crackin’ some heads, jumpin’ in and out of beds
and hangin’ round the criminal scene…
Do you think you are some kind of a star like the guys on the movie screen…

Well oh my my my Mitchell
What would your captain say?
If he knew you was hangin’ round
Eatin’ with the crooks and shootin’ up the town
Know you been out there, roundin’ up the syndicate
succeedin’ where the others have failed
Oh my my my Mitchell
You shoot ’em just to get ’em in jail
When they take a look in the record book, they’ll find you got a lot of class…

The whole shebang, arrestin’ painted ladies for a little grass
Oh my my my Mitchell!”

Supposedly, Baker was so upset by this being on Mystery Science Theater 3000 that he threatened to fight anyone from the show if he saw them. That didn’t stop them from also doing another of his movies, Final Justice — another movie in which he uses an orange to prove how he is going to destroy someone — on the show.

You can watch this without riffing on Tubi. They also have the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version.

Dino De Laurentiis gave the world a $25 million remake of King Kong. A year later, Runme Shaw looked at that poster and said, “Hold my tiger bone wine.”

If there is one thing Shaw Brothers knows how to do, it’s take a Western trend, give you some cinematic LSD and feed it through a meat grinder until it comes out as something ten times more insane than the original. 

But don’t let the title—or the alternative name, Goliathon—fool you. This isn’t some dry anthropological study. This is a sweaty, neon-drenched, nihilistic masterpiece of Hong Kong exploitation that asks: What if King Kong were a giant, flammable suit actor living in India and had a crush on a blonde girl in a buckskin bikini?

After an earthquake in the Himalayas (which apparently moved the mountains to the middle of the Indian jungle), a giant ape emerges. Enter Lu Tien, an entertainment mogul who is basically what would happen if Carl Denham were an even bigger scumbag. He wants the ape for a world tour or to turn it into a very large rug. Why do these dudes always want to put these giant monkeys on stage? Anyway, he hires Chen Zhengfeng (Danny Lee, long before he was a John Woo regular), a guy with a broken heart because his girlfriend, a diva named Wang Cuihua, slept with his songwriter brother just to get a hit record. Fame is a fickle mistress.

Chen leads the expedition into the jungle, which is a gauntlet of stock footage, rubber snakes and elephants that look annoyed to be in this movie. Maybe they were warned by monkeys, snakes and alligators about the excesses of Italian film crews. Regardless, just as Chen is about to be monkey meat, he’s saved by Ah-wei (Evelyne Kraft, The French Sex Murders), a wild girl who was raised by the ape, whom she calls Utam, after her parents died in a plane crash. She’s like Jane from Tarzan, but her outfit is held together by hope and cinematic glue.

Naturally, Chen and the wild girl fall in love, because nothing says romance like hiding from an enormous primate. He convinces her to bring Utam back to Hong Kong. This goes about as well as you’d expect. Once they hit the city, the movie shifts to pure kaiju carnage. Lu Tien attempts to assault Ah-wei, triggering Utam’s protective instincts. The ape goes on a rampage through Hong Kong that makes the 1933 Kong look like a disciplined Boy Scout. He’s smashing buses, stomping on extras and eventually climbing the Connaught Centre (the one with all the circular windows that looks like a giant cheese grater; it was the largest building in Hong Kong at the time).

The finale is a pyrotechnic nightmare. While the 1976 Kong died with a whimper on the pavement, Utam goes out in a literal blaze of glory, being blasted by tanks and helicopters while the world burns around him. It’s bleak, it’s loud, and it’s glorious. You will believe that a monstrous monkey can get set on fire.

It’s a Shaw Brothers movie, so the production value is weirdly high while the logic is delightfully low. The special effects were handled by Sadamasa Arikawa, who worked on the original Godzilla films, so you get that authentic man-in-a-suit, miniature-city vibe that warms my cynical heart. It makes me even happier to know the lengths that special effects artist Keizô Murase went to. When the original stuntman refused to be set on fire at the end of the movie, Murase personally doused himself with oil, was set ablaze and jumped off a miniature building three different times, sustaining several injuries from the wood, cement and glass used to make the set. Good news: He was given a gold watch from the film’s producer as payment.

Danny Lee emotes like his life depends on it, Evelyne Kraft spends the entire movie looking like she’s in a shampoo commercial* while holding a baby leopard in a way that says that she’s never seen Roar and the Peking Man himself looks like he’s having a permanent bad hair day (the suit was made from actual human hair, donated by 300 Hong Kong citizens). It’s a movie about the cruelty of civilization, the fickleness of show business and the fact that if you’re a giant ape, you should never, ever fall in love with a white blonde or leave your homeland.

According to Kraft, unlike King Kong vs. Godzilla, this had two endings. In the Indian cut, where it is considered bad luck to fake a death, her character lives. But her character dies at the end of all the other versions of the film. I have seen many Indian movies where someone dies, so this feels like IMDbs.

Only in Hong Kong would the heroine die a bloody death at the end of a film.

Beyond Quentin Tarantino, who re-released this movie in 1999, Roger Ebert was also a fan, saying, “Mighty Peking Man is very funny, although a shade off the high mark of Infra-Man, which was made a year earlier, and is my favorite Hong Kong monster film. Both were produced by the legendary Runme Shaw, who, having tasted greatness, obviously hoped to repeat. I find to my astonishment that I gave Infra-Man only two and a half stars when I reviewed it. That was 22 years ago, but a fellow will remember things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that film. I am awarding Mighty Peking Man three stars, for general goofiness and a certain level of insane genius, but I cannot in good conscience rate it higher than Infra-Man. So, in answer to those correspondents who ask if I have ever changed a rating on a movie: Yes, Infra-Man moves up to three stars.”

*Speaking of IMDbs, I learned from that site that The Peking Man wasn’t the only thing turning heads in India. Kraft’s fur bikini proved so distracting that male extras were repeatedly slapped by their wives mid-scene. This battle of the gazes forced the frustrated crew to reshoot the sequence until the cast finally focused on the monster instead of the star.

Kraft claimed that her fur bikini in the film was so skimpy that her top kept popping off while filming, especially during the action scenes. Everything would then stop while she fixed the wardrobe malfunction, but after it kept happening, she just ignored all the male actors and the film crew staring at her breasts. She suspected, but could not prove, that Shaw Brothers had the wardrobe department deliberately make her top that way so that everyone could see her topless and possibly even have footage of it to use in the film.

Once abandoned to the wilds of public domain DVD sets, Messiah of Evil was for a time the gold amongst the dross, a film of incredible power. Hidden amongst old television shows, near-unwatchable transfers of Spanish horror and video store-era throwaways, it held a haunting power. Did I see that? Is this movie real? Can I explain it to anyone who hasn’t seen it?

Today, Messiah of Evil isn’t just a legendary once-lost film returned to power. It’s a work of art that feels like it came from beyond the wall of sleep, the place where the Ancient Ones slumber until time untold to come back and reclaim their rightful and most horrible power.

You can watch Messiah of Evil on several levels. On the most basic, it’s a film about Arietty (the never before or since more lovely Marianna Hill) attempting to find her lost artist father in the cursed town of Point Dume, California.

It’s also a zombie movie of sorts, made in the wake of Night of the Living Dead yet uninfluenced by it, where an entire town slowly becomes something like the living dead. As they bleed from the eyes and lose all sensation, they begin to crave meat from any source, be it an entire grocery store’s meat department, mice or human flesh. Once they give in to their transformation, they light fires on the shore, as their ritual of The Waiting anticipates the Dark Stranger’s return to glory, leading them toward taking over the rest of reality.

Or maybe it’s about something else. Is it about the final days of the class struggle that started in the 60s? The zombies nearly all wear suits while their targets, like collector of legends Thom (Michael Greer, who would go on to provide the voice for Bette Davis after she quit the film Wicked Stepmother) and his two lovers, Toni (Joy Bang, who worked with talents like Roger Vadim, Norman Mailer and Woody Allen before Messiah) and Laura (The Price is Right model Anitra Ford), are free love visions of style and sophistication. Yet the Dark Stranger cuts through class, even turning cop upon cop near the climax.

Parts of the film were never fully realized, but that doesn’t matter. Some critics complain that major plot points and the lead characters’ motivations are never fully explained. Even the most normal people in this film act like the strangest characters in others. At no point does it feel like we’re watching a movie set in our reality.

I don’t want that.

This is what I want. A transmission from another place where our surrealism is their everyday.

Messiah of Evil was created in an environment that will never exist again — the New Hollywood that starts with traditional studios panicking as their blockbusters and musicals would stall at the box office, while films like Easy Rider succeeded. Suddenly, deeply personal films would be made within the studio or even exploitation systems. Indeed, the previously mentioned Night of the Living Dead is packed with politics and social commentary, things only hinted at in past horror and science fiction films. This trend would die with Jaws and Star Wars. Yet at this point, as this film’s commentary track by Kim Newman and Stephen Thrower reminds us, even the creators of the blockbusters that changed entertainment forever, all the way back then, all wanted to be artists. And in a moment of true irony, the creators of this film — the husband-and-wife team of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz — would go on to direct Howard the Duck and write American Graffiti and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for Goerge Lucas.

This is a movie where the heroine finds herself in the throes of undead transformation, throwing up mouthfuls of insects while the shade of her father begs her to not tell the world what she knows before he attacks her. After murdering everyone else in their path, the dead things of Point Dume don’t kill her. No, they resign her to an even more horrible fate: she must spread the legend further so that once the Dark Stranger arrives, more of reality is receptive to his grasp. She ends the film in a mental institution, knowing that one day soon, the end of everything we hold dear will arrive.

I love that this movie once appeared in DVD bundles easily available in K-Marts and WalMarts, places where normal people would find this asynchronous transmission from another place and time and wonder what the hell they were watching. Much like the infection of Point Dume or Arietty spreading the infection into other towns, it found the right people. It always discovers the best way to transmit its message to those most willing to spread its legend. It survives, no matter what, despite not being finished, despite age, despite being lost for so long.

How wonderful it is to have what was once occult brought into the light and yet it loses nothing of its infernal power. In fact, it retains its power now, all the furtive watches and evangelists that loved this movie and spread that message.

BONUS: Listen to the commentary track that I did with Bill Van Ryn from Drive-In Asylum here:

You have to admire the balls of the makers of this movie. Actually, you can probably see them from space. They bought footage of Sir Christopher Lee from another movie and used it as the beginning and end of this movie, then said the film stars the venerable thespian. Learning that a lawsuit would be long and expensive, he just had to fume. I wonder if he was as angry as when he walked out of A Bay of Blood?

Lee’s speech has nothing at all to do with the rest of the movie. Let’s all admire his plaid slacks, however.

Anyway, the real meat of the movie involves the death of a dog named Poopers, four college students killing one of their professors and lots and lots of paintings, then Morak, an evil force, comes out of the possibly dead professor.

You’ll be forgiven if this movie seems like it makes no sense because it doesn’t. And that’s probably why I liked it: I watched it five drinks into a bender, and it was perfect for that moment when alcohol goes from tasting wonderful to tasting like way too much.

This was probably made in 1975, but who cares? How many movies do you know where dead teachers command cacti from beyond the grave to kill their students? I can think of one, and I’m writing about it right now.

Seriously, Christopher Lee spent as much time looking at contracts as all my favorite horror stars. Work is work, but I have no idea how he thought reading a script about a shaman convention inside a wood-paneled room was going to work out all that well.

Evan Lee made one movie. This was it. If he made any more, the world would have exploded.

In case you need to know just how odd and weird and whatever other descriptors you need for it, Ed Wood himself shows up in a cameo. Now that’s a guy who knew how to throw a non-sequitur speech directly into a movie. Pull the string!

Made in Germany as Mädchenhandel lohnt sich nicht, this is a black-and-white dive into the gutter that feels like it was filmed in the shadow of a rainy alleyway. We’ve got a plot that would make a grindhouse theater owner weep with joy: shady characters luring women to parties, drugging them and peddling them off for cold hard cash and fixes.

According to a reviewer on Letterboxd, in the German version, the nude scenes have been surgically removed. In their place? An off-screen ballad-singing duo who pipes up like a Greek chorus of morality. They don’t just sing; they warn the audience about the soul-crushing reality of trafficking and, at times, literally narrate exactly what is happening on screen as if we’ve suddenly gone blind.

This has a lot and maybe it all, like a street preacher who is screaming about the end of the world, slapflights, an evil boat nightclub, a bad guy named Pretty Boy who is surrounded by women who love him, a cop named Oscar who hangs people by their ankles, a one-eyed bad guy named Willie, big French hair and all dubbed dialogue.

This was directed by Jean-Pierre Bastid, whose book Laissez bronzer les cadavres! was filmed as Let the Corpses Tan. He also directed an erotic horror movie called Hallucinations sadiques and the mondo Les teenagers.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Marisa Mell is the female George Eastman. No, she doesn’t act like a wide-eyed gigantic maniac in every movie. It’s just that no matter what movie she appears in, just her name being in the credits guarantees that I will watch the film.

Also known as …dopo di che, uccide il maschio e lo divora (…After That, It Kills the Male and Devours It), which is one of the best titles ever.

A wealthy landowner named Don Miguel (Stephen Boyd, who was in Ben-Hur) is haunted by his dead mother and missing wife — who may have been murdered — when he meets a gorgeous runaway named Marta (Mell), who may have killed the man who she was running from.

I haven’t seen any of José Antonio Nieves Conde’s films before, but this movie makes me want to watch every single one of them.

The strange thing is that this movie pretty much became true in a way, as Boyd and Mell fell in love, as they made this and The Great Swindle one on top of the other*. Despite Boyd not wanting anything to do with Mell at first — was the man made of stone? — he eventually fell for her and they married in a gypsy ceremony near Madrid, cutting their wrists and sealing their blood. The couple was so possessed by the mystical and sexual desire they felt for one another that they even went to have it exorcized in another ritual.

Boyd had to run from her, as the relationship physically and mentally exhausted him. As for Mell, she’d tell the Akron Beacon Journal that “We both believe in reincarnation, and we realized we’ve already been lovers in three different lifetimes, and in each one I made him suffer terribly.”

In the same year that all this happened, Mell was also dating Pier Luigi Torri, an aristocratic nightclub owner who fled the country after a cocaine scandal. Arrested in London after it was discovered he had a $300 million dollar gold mine and had also scammed a bank, he somehow escaped his jail cell and ran from the police across rooftops, escaping to America for 18 months. Evidently, Mell dated Diabolik in art and in life.

So let’s talk about the Mell relationship in the film instead of reality. She has come to live with Miguel, who collects insects and has two servants who keep things tidy. She enters his life by claiming that she is on the run for a self-defense murder. Miguel decides to protect her from the police because she looks like his wife Pilar (also played by Mell) who has left him or was killed. He’s also tormented by the death of his sainted mother while she may not be who she says that she is.

Oh yeah — and now Marta is acting as Pillar to throw the police off the scent of the man whom she either wants to marry or destroy.

Marta is a gothic-style giallo but is also dreamlike throughout. There’s a continual obsession with placing Mell in front of mirrors. And for someone who was rarely used outside of her sex appeal in films, she absolutely haunting here. Somehow, Spain put this movie forward for Oscar consideration and if I ran those popcorn fart boring awards, I would have given this every single award.

Sure, this movie rips off Hitchcock, but it also wallows in sin, which is what I demand from the giallo that I come to adore. Somehow, someway, this aired on broadcast TV as part of Avco Embassy’s Nightmare Theater package, along with A Bell from Hell, Death Smiles on a Murderer, Maniac Mansion, Night of the Sorcerers, Fury of the Wolfman, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Horror Rises from the Tomb, Dear Dead Delilah, Doomwatch, Witches Mountain, The Mummy’s Revenge and The Witch. Man, how did any of those air on regular TV?

*Credit to the Stephen Boyd Fan Page and Marisa Mell: Her Life and Her Work for this information.

Call it Mansion of the Doomed. Or The Terror of Dr. Chaney. You may also refer to it as Eyes, Eyes of Dr. Chaney, House of Blood or Massacre Mansion. But whatever name you choose to refer to this Charles Band-produced, Michael Pataki-directed movie, you will probably enjoy it. Seriously, it’s packed with sleaze, eyeball-removal, and plenty of your genre favorites.

Dr. Leonard Chaney (Richard Basehart) isn’t your typical megalomaniac; he is a man hollowed out by a singular, obsessive guilt. After causing a car accident that blinded his daughter Nancy (Trish Stewart), he transforms his basement into a makeshift surgical theater and starts cutting up eyeballs so that he can get his girl to see again, starting with her fiancé, Lance Henriksen and moving on to Marilyn Joi, who played Cleopatra Schwartz in The Kentucky Fried Movie.

Gloria Grahame — as Chaney’s wife — and Vic Tayback — playing a cop — are both in this, meaning that this is a Blood and Lace reunion. Pop the cork on that sparkling cider! Celebrate!

Frank Ray Perilli wrote this. He worked with Pataki on the softcore film Cinderella, plus he wrote the movies Dracula’s Dog, Laserblast, End of the World and Alligator.

Come for the stars, stick around for the Stan Winston effects and enjoy the craziness of Basehart as he goes from loving father to kidnapper of children to a man who has an entire group of eyeless victims just meandering around his basement.

This movie is pure scum. It’s even a category 3 video nasty, which means I had to watch it at midnight when I really needed to go to sleep. You can do the same and watch it for free on Tubi.

If Juan López Moctezuma had only ever gifted the world Alucarda, his seat in the pantheon of cult cinema would already be upholstered in velvet and stained with theatrical blood. But Moctezuma wasn’t just a director; he was a surrealist provocateur who served as the head of programming for Televisa and worked as the producer/right-hand man to Alejandro Jodorowsky on El Topo and Fando y Lis.

The film follows a journalist who treks to a remote, mist-shrouded institution to profile the revolutionary “System of Soothing” pioneered by the esteemed Dr. Maillard (Claudio Brook, Alucarda, The Devil’s Rain!). The pitch? Treat the mentally ill by allowing them to indulge their delusions rather than chaining them to walls. However, the progressive atmosphere quickly curdles into something far more sinister. The reporter discovers a chaotic, ritualistic society where the doctor’s daughter, Eugenie, tells the reporter that he hasn’t met the real doctor, just one of the inmates who is quite literally running the asylum and randomly quoting Aleister Crowley. Even better — Susana Kamini, Justine from Alucarda, shows up as a cult priestess!

Imagine if Hammer or Amicus made a movie in Mexico, with all of the dialogue in English, and fed massive amounts of drugs to everyone involved. That’s pretty much how I imagine that this film was made. It’s also an Edgar Allan Poe story (The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether), but really, it’s also a costume drama with more powdered wigs than a British courthouse.

Brian Trenchard-Smith is the patron saint of go-big-or-go-home. For his feature debut (along with action scenes directed by star Jimmy Wang Yu), he didn’t just walk through the door. No, he kicked it down, set it on fire and then hang-glided over the ashes. The Man from Hong Kong (aka The Dragon Flies) is the ultimate East-meets-West collision, a 50/50 co-production between Australia and Hong Kong that plays like a James Bond flick on a steady diet of adrenaline.

Originally, this was supposed to be a Bruce Lee vehicle. Can you imagine? But after the Dragon passed, the production pivoted to Jimmy Wang Yu (The One-Armed Swordsman himself). He plays Inspector Fang Sing Leng, a Hong Kong cop who lands in Sydney to extradite a drug courier and ends up tearing the city apart to get to the man at the top. That man? None other than George Lazenby.

Yes, the guy who played Bond once gets to play the heavy here, Jack Wilton, and he is clearly having the time of his life being a total bastard. He’s joined by an Ozploitation who’s who, including Hugh Keays-Byrne and Roger Ward (both of whom you know from Mad Max). Even a young Sammo Hung, billed as Hung Kam Po, shows up to get into a scrap on top of Uluru!

If you’ve seen Stunt Rock, you’ve seen the action from this movie, as legendary stuntman Grant Page hang-gliding over Sydney Harbor like it’s no big deal. This is a stunt show with massive automotive carnage designed by Peter Armstrong that rivals anything coming out of Hollywood at the time. In the final showdown, Lazenby actually gets set on fire. Not movie fire. Real fire. He even got singed during the take, because that’s just how they rolled down under

And let’s not forget the theme song. “Sky High” by Jigsaw is a soaring, majestic piece of 70s pop that has absolutely no business being the intro to a movie where people are getting punched in the throat, yet somehow, it’s perfection. It was also the theme song for Mil Mascaras and his brother Dos Caras in Japan.

If you want to see what happens when you mix martial arts mastery with a complete lack of regard for human safety, make The Man from Hong Kong your destination. Also: No permits were used to film this.

You can watch this on Tubi.

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.