I’ve made no secret of my fondness for this movie, and am glad to own it. But I have mixed feelings about the DVD.

CANNIBAL FEROX is basically director Umberto Lenzi’s rip-off of Ruggero Deodato’s controversial and ground-breaking CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, which arguably inspired THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT many years later. But where Deodato’s movie was grim and serious, Lenzi’s is more unabashedly an exploitation flick, in which cheesy dialogue and 2-dimensional acting combine with gruesome gore effects and a surprisingly believable backdrop — it was actually shot in the Amazon basin, using the natives as cannibals.

HOLOCAUST involved supposedly real “found footage” from an expedition gone wrong being found in New York. FEROX also includes many scenes in New York, but they involve escaped criminals. So different are they from the Amazon scenes that I think many viewers, myself included, have over the years wondered if Lenzi simply spliced two unrelated movies together to pad out the running time. That doesn’t seem to be the case, but it sure feels that way sometimes.

Though many low-budget slasher movies have a weirdly conservative subtext — you know the drill about sex leading to death, and virgins surviving — CANNIBAL FEROX is equally bizarrely “liberal” in its way. The cannibals live a peaceful, secluded life, and only when a crazed city boy on drugs kills one of them does the tribe bring the fury, and, well…Make Them Die Slowly.

There’s also actual animal killing onscreen, which is again a copy of Deodato, but in fairness, all the animals killed are the ones locals would kill for food anyway. You just might not want to see it. In the one instance where that is plainly NOT the case — a snake strangling a small mammal — the victim is ultimately allowed to get away.

The story involves three researchers going into the jungle to prove cannibals don’t exist (you can’t really prove a negative, but whatever). Unfortunately, they run into two escaped criminals, and all the aforementioned bad shit goes down. The movie begins with a disclaimer about how violent the film is: an old-school marketing technique that more filmmakers should use today. And the movie lives up to it, though it should be noted that most of the nastiest scenes are given away in the trailer.

The disc itself isn’t as loaded as some of the other Grindhouse movies I’ve seen. Mainly it offers a commentary track, trailers, and a director interview. There are supposedly easter eggs, but I haven’t found them.

So the commentary is the main thing. At first, you worry it will be indecipherable, as it features director Lenzi and star Giovanni “John Morghen” Radice speaking in heavily Italian-accented English. Then it gets kind of funny. And by the end, I wanted to punch both of them in their faces.

Radice is clearly embarrassed by the movie and continually expresses that he wishes he hadn’t done it. But rather than mount an eloquent defense, Lenzi comes off exactly the way critics of this kind of movie might imagine — he seems like a child throwing shit at people just to amuse himself. Like them or not, the directors of the modern crop of horror films, guys like Eli Roth, can mount an eloquent defense for what they were trying to do and the stories they were telling. Lenzi, not so. Maybe blame the fact that he can’t articulate English well; perhaps it should have been a subtitled commentary. I don’t think he is a hack; obviously I like the movie and feel it does have some merit. But he talks like a hack. He’d be better off shutting the fuck up. Hell, maybe actually get Eli Roth for the next edition to do play-by-play. Lenzi does his film no favors by coming off as he does, and Radice just bags on the movie.

I don’t think the two were in the same room. Sometimes they appear to be talking to each other, but mostly, they talk about each other as if they’re not together. I think I also heard another voice a time or two — an interviewer prodding them a bit.

If you like the movie, buy it, obviously. If you’re a horror fan who hasn’t seen it, I recommend it. I enjoy the flick, and will watch it again. But the extras? Almost counterproductive. I don’t care for them.

Here’s the opening:

“If you have somehow avoided seeing any trailers or clips from Terminator Salvation, do yourself a favor and try to avoid reading anything about it. Don’t even look at the action figures in the toy store. Seriously. The movie’s marketing has gone out of its way to blatantly spoil a major mid-movie revelation that would be a lot more effective if you didn’t see it coming.”

If you’d like to proceed anyway, CLICK HERE…

It almost seems crazy in retrospect — and probably will still to those of you too young to remember — but there was a time in our very recent pop-cultural history that people were scared stiff of the threat posed by Satanism.

Yep, Satanism. Heavy metal music supposedly contained subliminal messages about the devil if you played them backwards, role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons were thought to be a form of preparation for Satanic mind control, and as for horror movies…well, it didn’t get much more blatant than that. Satanists were thought to be roving everywhere, sacrificing animals willy-nilly and abusing children; there was even a massive and very unfortunate trend of therapy patients under hypnosis suddenly having “recovered memories” of being abused by devil-worshippers (nearly all of these turned out to be completely false).

Devil worship has never actually been a serious danger in this country, though. Charles Manson may have alluded to it among many other things, but his was a more general batshit craziness. And Anton LaVey’s official Church of Satan was mostly just an anti-Christian, social Darwinist philosophy.

Not that that stopped certain entertainers from playing into the paranoia. Lesser metal musicians like il Duce milked the paranoia for all it was worth (prior to his death from walking in front of a train, Duce also claimed that Courtney Love paid him to kill Kurt Cobain). And the horror movies certainly couldn’t get enough of old Scratch — ROSEMARY’S BABY, one of the best of all time, dealt with Satanists, and even featured LaVey himself as Satan.

And this brings us to I DRINK YOUR BLOOD, originally titled PHOBIA before the distributors, anxious to sell it on a double bill with a black and white 1964 zombie movie, renamed both to be I EAT YOUR SKIN and I DRINK YOUR BLOOD. Joe Bob Briggs has jokingly referred to this as the ultimate drive-in double feature for Catholics, as the titles, he says, clearly refer to Holy Communion.

The movie itself has one of those truly demented plots you just can’t believe anybody could come up with. It centers on a scary multicultural hippie Satan-worship group who like to get naked and sacrifice animals (a real chicken gets killed onscreen, though the rest of the violence against animals is staged). The group is led by a charismatic muscleman named Horace Bones, who is clearly from India but dresses in Native American garb, leading the viewer to posit that the casting director was simply asked to hire an “Indian” and got confused. Bones is played by a charismatic actor/boxer/dancer who simply goes by the name of Bhaskar. He is unfortunately a quadriplegic nowadays; I’d like to see him in more stuff.

So, the cult comes to a town that’s getting ready to be demolished (the film was shot in a town that actually was ready to be demolished, so the cast and crew got to trash the place as much as they liked). While there, they beat up a local girl, causing the town’s token ornery ol’ coot to take shotgun in hand and threaten the scary newcomers. They respond as any evil hippies would, by dosing him with LSD.

Then the old guy’s grandson takes up the gun, hoping for a measure of revenge, but he gets randomly attacked by a rabid dog that he shoots dead. Here’s where it gets twisted — the kid decides that a fair and just revenge against the Satan-hippies for making grandpa take drugs is to inject a bunch of meat pies with blood from the dead rabid dog, thereby giving them all rabies.

And here’s where horror movies can teach you stuff: rabies in the film is called “hydrophobia,” which literally means fear of water. I assumed this was bullshit technobabble written with the perception of a less-than-knowledgeable audience in mind, but it’s true — rabies is called hydrophobia. It’s not, as this movie broadly suggests, a condition that induces fear of water in any form…rather, it comes from the fact that rabies victims refuse water because swallowing is so painful for them, and also they become sensitive to relatively benign noises like running water. But just so you know, if you’re ever pursued by a rabid animal, merely throwing water on it will do nothing to save you.

I DRINK YOUR BLOOD purports to be the first movie to be rated X for violence. By today’s standards, it isn’t super-gory, but it is in some ways more disturbing than a splatter movie with good production values…it almost has the look of a home movie gone terribly wrong, and some of the effects are more real than would be allowed nowadays: a scene involving barbecued rats was done using real dead rats that had died from scientific experiments, spray-painted black.

The same kind of demented creativity involved in such effects is also on display in the story-telling and filmmaking. Though the rabies-infected folk are somewhat reminiscent of today’s fast-moving zombies, or the victims in THE SIGNAL, the movie is definitely one of a kind (and if I were looking to remake an old horror movie, I’d snap up this one, Platinum Dunes!). Bhaskar, previously a star in India, is one of those actors you can’t take your eyes off. It’s almost too bad that the nature of the story really didn’t allow for a Horace Bones sequel.

The DVD from Grindhouse releasing is about as thorough a package as a fan of the film could hope for. One thing that will initially catch everyone;s eye, however, is that it’s full frame and not widescreen. So what’s up with that? I asked the folks at Grindhouse, and here’s what Bob Murawski wrote back:

It was shot full aperture 35mm, probably with the intention of matting for 1.85:1 when projected theatrically. This is the way most 35mm films are shot even today. We looked at matting the image, but felt that it worked best compositionally in the 1.33 4×3 aspect ratio. Perhaps the inexperienced camera crew did not realize that it would be projected in movie theaters in 1.85 and just composed the shots for full frame. This is common with college film crews who are used to shooting 16mm. I asked David Durston the director what he thought it should be and he said he didn’t remember. So we decided to transfer full frame instead of arbitrarily cropping the image. Every bit of image that appears on the negative is included in the transfer.

That’s hardcore. And it looks fine.

Director David Durston and Bhaskar give a running commentary that’s full of tidbits like the fact that shaving cream was used for the foaming mouths, which Bhaskar complains tasted terrible (wouldn’t toothpaste foam have worked?). Both director and star are clearly still proud of their movie, which is good to hear.

The disc also contains deleted scenes, most of which were trimmed because the producers feared they were too comedic (an extended acid trip for grandpa, a finale where the kid tries to confess to causing everything and the cops laugh at him), or in the case of one alternate ending, too bleak (the hero gets shot in the head by his secretly rabid girlfriend). I would have liked to see these scenes seamlessly reintegrated, but that probably wasn’t technically possible.

Other extras include an original theatrical trailer for the Blood/Skin double feature (though all the footage it shows is from Blood; they probably didn’t want to reveal that Skin was black-and-white), and some present-day conversations between director Durston and a few of his actors, plus the original ad-man that renamed the movie in the first place, who admits he suggested the title as a joke. There are also a bunch of outtakes spliced together, but these are for completionists only — it’s literally every scrap of extra film the Grindhouse folks could find; no bloopers or great revelations here.

Easter eggs include a scene of Durston and Bhaskar watching the DVD together, and the opening credit sequence of I EAT YOUR SKIN. The DVD package also claims that there’s “rare and shocking” footage of Bhaskar doing “The Evil King Cobra Dance,” but I have not found it yet. The package insert folds out into a mini-poster of the original double-feature artwork (see image above)

The opening DVD menu is also a pretty cool animation — as is one of the paths to an easter egg — though I can imagine tiring of it with multiple viewings, as you have to let it play out before you can select anything.

Obviously this is not a DVD for everyone, but if you’re a horror fan who hasn’t seen this one, I highly recommend it, as you’ve never seen anything quite like it. And if you’re already a fan of the movie, rest assured that Grindhouse have put together a worthy package for you.

Probably both movies you’ve never heard of, but hey, try to guess them anyway…

“Like any misunderstood religious group, the Santa Muerte cult—that in reality is mostly adopted by convicted prisoners—makes an easy target for a lil’ religious slander in the name of cheap scares.” (ANSWER)

“”When a beautiful businesswoman breezes into town, a local motel owner’s creepy son develops a fixation on her and will go to any length to have her. Another Psycho remake? Not quite—this is actually a slightly unsettling romantic comedy” (ANSWER)