Anthropophagus is one of those films that's had a rather scattered release history in North America. DVD Ltd. put it out a few years back but that version was severely cut by a good ten minutes or so, as was the North American theatrical presentation. Shriek Show now allows Region One fans to catch up with Europe by restoring the movie to its full strength uncut version and fans of the film, for the most part, should be pleased by their efforts.

Alongside Emmanuelle And The Last Cannibals and Beyond The Darkness, Anthropophagus is probably D'Amato's best known horror movie. The movie begins when two vacation bound couples, Arnold and the very pregnant Maggie along with Daniel and Carol, meet up with a pretty tourist named Julie (Tisa Farrow of Zombie) on a cable car in Greece. She needs to hitch a ride to an island just off the shore where she hopes to meet up with some friends, and seeing as the four of them have already chartered a boat for their tip to the same destination, they figure, hey, why not let the girl come along and help her out.

When the five people get to the island they discover it to be completely vacant save for one lone woman who appears and then disappears in various windows at strange times who seems to be watching them. There's no power, no phone service, and no one to help them when a crazed man (George Eastman of Porno Holocaust) who had to eat his own wife and child to survive shows up in cannibal zombie form and starts chowing down on them. That's more or less it. They show up on the island, it's creepy and weird, and then George Eastman eats people.

Anthropophagus succeeds more on atmosphere than anything else. To be blunt, not a whole lot happens for the first two thirds of the movie. There are some soap opera style interchanges between some of the couples and with Julie throwing a monkey wrench or two into the works just by being there and looking good, but a lot of time is spent with them just wandering around the creepy island village. Thankfully, for the most part, it's enough. The setting is the perfect venue for a horror movie and it somehow manages to build suspense in spit of itself. The violent opening scene in which an unseen force slaughters a couple on the beach alludes to the fact that bad things are to come for our gang of vacationers, but we don't really know why or what until it comes at you out of left field.

Of course, this wouldn't be much of a D'Amato horror movie if it didn't have a couple of nasty gore set pieces and Anthropophagus delivers a couple of really good ones that are truly repulsive in nature and in execution. Eastman handles bad guy duties with ease here, and while his make up appliances might look a little phony in some spots, when he's shadowed (which is most of the time) and in dark corners he does look positively eerie and quite threatening. He's a big guy and he's able to use his size to his advantage in the film, coming across as a hulking and intimidating cannibalistic monster.

The rest of the cast are fairly disposable but they serve their purpose as fodder for Eastman's madman. Farrow is fine as Julie, the cute tag along who finds herself causing problems that she never meant to get involved with and Zora Kerova is interesting as the slightly snooty wife Carol. The real reason to watch the film, however, is for the excellent cinematography, atmospheric sets, and nasty gore set pieces that are ultimately thrown in the viewers face. It's a slow moving film but one that manages to remain an interesting and unusual horror movie that makes use of some excellent locations and a great lead performance from Eastman.

Video:

D'Amato shot this one on 16mm stock and had it blown up for 35mm presentations and with that in mind, Anthropophagus doesn't look to bad in this 1.78.1 anamorphic widescreen presentation. Some of the brighter colors look just a little bit washed out but not so much as to be really distracting. Grain and print damage are present but they're kept in check and don't overpower the image. Black levels remain pretty stable and although there is some mild edge enhancement and some mild aliasing present there aren't any problems to report in terms of mpeg compression artifacts. This transfer isn't going to blow anyone's mind but it looks as good if not slightly better than any of the other home video releases the film has seen in its rather scattered history.