Anthropophagus is an Italian slasher film from the early 80’s. The movie is about a group of friends on vacation in the Mediterranean. They meet up with a woman who missed her boat to a small exotic island where she was going to spend some time at. The group of friends decide to take the woman to her island and get some sightseeing done in the process. When they arrive at the island, they find out that it has been almost entirely deserted. What they discover is that something has been killing off the island’s inhabitants, and that whatever killed all the villagers may still be on the island. This, my friends is…wait for it…Anthropophagus!

Directed by Joe D’Amato and being on the “Video Nasties” list, I was cringing with delight at the thought of watching this movie. I was unpleasantly surprised to find that it was rather tame. The gore and violence was good, but not extreme. In addition, nudity was scarce (what the hell Joe?).

It was probably on the “Nasties” list due to one scene involving a pregnant woman, which you knew this scene was eventually going to happen as soon as you noticed that this early 80’s Italian horror film actually had a pregnant woman in it. Anyway, the scene is fairly lame by today’s standards (or at least Miike’s Imprint standards).

I did enjoy this movie, though the motive behind the murders is kinda cheesy. The scenery was beautiful and authentic, and the droning weird music made you nervous no matter what was actually happening on screen. I could’ve done without the lame pointless jump scares. I thought gratuitous jump scares was a 90’s American horror movie contrivance. Apparently it is as global and timeless as shooting zombies in the shoulders. The dubbing was adequate and the acting was good. The story flowed well, save for a couple killer teleports and unrealistic demises. Some of the kills were pretty tame also, as in off-screen or implied.

To summarize, I liked this movie, but it is not what I expected. It had potential to be a great movie, but fell short. In my opinion, what’s supposed to make slashers so scary is their realism. There could actually be a guy murdering campers, for example. However, when the killer can teleport, knows where all people are at, at all times, and can murder at will with seemingly no window to do so (hiding under water deep enough to not be seen, but shallow enough to pull you and your water bucket down, cut off your head and put it in the water bucket, all without being detected by a nearby individual), it starts to lose its realism. Throw in the obligatory jump scares, and you have why I dislike the genre in general. This movie had all of those trappings, though it made up for it in other ways. It ended up being pretty good. I give it 6.5 out of 10 more reasons not to listen to terrible early 80’s Euro-electronica on the beach with your headphones on.

This review was fueled by Sam Adams and Dragonforce.