SLAVE OF THE CANNIBAL GOD (1978)
aka La montagna del dio cannibale
Article 3429 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 11-24-2010
Posting Date: 1-3-2010
Directed by Sergo Martino
Featuring Ursula Andress, Stacy Keach, Claudio Cassinnelli
Country: Italy
What it is: Italian cannibal flick

A woman organizes an expedition into forbidden territory to find her missing husband. However, the territory is the home of cannibals.

My version of the movie runs only 82 minutes, which is even shorter than the 86 minutes R-rated version, according to IMDB. The longest version runs 103 minutes. There doesn’t seem to be much missing plotwise, so I can only assume that I’m missing much of the gross-out footage and animal killing footage. I can spot some of the moments where the footage would belong, such as the moment when the cannibals feast on the remains of one of the dead expedition members; there’s obviously some detail missing. Maybe it’s just as well; gross-out for the sake of gross-out is not really my bag, and though the human killings are faked, the animal killings were not, and there’s at least one notorious scene in which a monkey is killed by a boa constrictor that I’d rather not see, especially as there is evidence that suggests that the filmmakers actually threw the monkey to his certain death. The plot isn’t much; it’s your basic Double-Stuffed Safari-o with animal killing footage substituted for stock footage, though there is at least one unexpected plot twist where we discover that one character’s motivations aren’t quite altruistic. The presence of Ursula Andress as the film’s star also gives a hint that the ending may not be as nihilistic as some of the more extreme Italian cannibal films.