Review: Last Cannibal World (1977)
(aka Ultimo Mondo Cannibale, Jungle Holocaust, The Last Survivor, Cannibal)
Directed by: Ruggero Deodato
Starring: Massimo Foschi, Me Me Lai, Ivan Rassimov
Written by: Tito Carpi, Gianfranco Clerici, Renzo Genta
Music by: Ubaldo Continiello
Country: Italy
Available: Blu-ray (Code Red)
IMDb
A few years before Ruggero Deodato made his horror masterpiece, Cannibal Holocaust (1980), he directed Last Cannibal World (known just as well as Ultimo Mondo Cannibale and Jungle Holocaust; it wouldn’t be Italian horror without at least a few other titles). This flick was originally supposed to be helmed by Umberto Lenzi as the sequel to the film that started the whole Italian cannibal cycle, Man from Deep River (1972). But instead, we have Deodato testing out some of the depraved shit he’d perfect down the line.
Last Cannibal World has a simple story, despite being written by three people: Robert and his pal Rolf are two oil prospectors flying to meet up with their team on the island of Mindanao. Their plane is damaged during a rough landing, and they’re forced to venture out for help, finding a cannibal tribe instead. Robert is captured and subjected to all sorts of runtime-draining stuff for the amusement of the natives, including being stripped, having his peen tugged repeatedly, getting a handjob, getting pissed on, receiving multiple beatings with rocks, eating rotted meat, and watching the obligatory on-screen killings of live animals. If you thought the turtle murder in Cannibal Holocaust was hard to bear, you should either skip this movie entirely or step away for 10 minutes or so as soon as you see a crocodile show up. It’s by far the most fucked-up of any of the animal deaths in these flicks because it’s obvious the poor thing was alive throughout the entirety of its butchery.
Robert endures these humiliations until he’s pressed into savagery to escape and survive. This is a brutal film and easily one of the hardest in the cannibal canon to sit through. It’s pretty light on human-on-human gore, but Deodato and crew more than make up for that with excessive atrocities of a different sort. Though Last Cannibal World doesn’t offer the astute social observations of Cannibal Holocaust and relies on the usual arsenal of sensory battery — including gratuitous physical and sexual violence, imperialist racism, the previously mentioned animal snuff, and a slew of other stomach-churning sights — it differentiates itself from a bunch of other depraved exploitation joints is its craftsmanship and dedication to mining the particularly exquisite darkness of the jungle.
This is methodical psychological attrition perpetrated by a skilled practitioner. Massimo Foschi as Robert and cannibal film stalwart Me Me Lai as Pulan, his tribal girlfriend of sorts, are both excellent in purveying the physical and emotional cost of their terrible ordeal. Though all these Italian excursions to exotic locales benefit from the natural beauty in which they’re filming, I’m not sure it’s been shot as well as it is in this movie. There are so many breathtaking shots of the Philippine Island of Mindanao that you sometimes forget you just saw a cannibal woman give birth to a baby, tear the umbilical cord with her teeth, then toss the crying newborn into a lagoon for crocs to eat.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to properly explain to anyone else, or even myself, why I like the Italian cannibal movies. They’re grotesque and filled with completely unnecessary assaults on animals and women, and, frankly, they make me feel like shit afterwards. But they have an innate ability to rattle me loose from the safety of the artistic distance granted to an audience, and that’s something. And as far as that goes, Last Cannibal World is one of the best. So, if these treks into the blackness of the human condition are your thing, there’s a lot to begrudgingly appreciate here.
Overall rating: 7.5 out of 10
