Cannibals

Cannibals (1980) follows an explorer whose expedition into a remote jungle ends in horror when a native tribe attacks, taking his young daughter and leaving him for dead. Years later, he returns to the same land, driven by guilt and obsession, to find the child he lost and confront the savagery that changed his life. This adventure-horror blends pulp sensationalism and eerie mysticism in a delirious tale of vengeance, trauma, and forbidden worlds.

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  For many viewers, the biggest stumbling block to enjoyment of this movie is the issue of plausibility. My advice is forget it – Franco has an artist’s contempt for the plausible. He’s more interested in the absurd, the bizarre, the ineffable. Plausibility is very low on his agenda: it’s one step away from mundanity. He’s a kind of poet of the unlikely. … We’re in some delirious netherworld of his own devising, a place where realism is a joke to be kicked around like a deflated football and abandoned in a ditch. … The Cannibals doesn’t try and then fail to match the shocking violence or gritty realism of its Italian forebears. It’s the work of a total iconoclast who’s been asked to make a movie in a genre he dislikes, and who’s decided to amuse himself with the material while offering just enough genre ‘gravy’ to pass it all off as horror.