Review: Long Island Cannibal Massacre (1980)

Directed by: Nathan Schiff
Starring: John Smihula, Fred Borges, Michael Siegal
Written by: Nathan Schiff
Country: United States
Available on: DVD (Image Entertainment)
IMDb

I wish I had been half as creatively ambitious as Nathan Schiff when I was a teenager. Before he turned 20, Schiff had made three Super 8 feature films, including his most (in)famous, Long Island Cannibal Massacre. This flick, about a Long Island man in cahoots with two Long Island weirdos — one with a sheet over his head and goggles over that — to murder young folks and feed them to his leprous and now cannibalistic Long Island father, who talks like cookie monster after gargling with glass shards and uses fancy words like “thou’st.” On the case is a Long Island detective who’s had enough of fighting crime within the confines of the law and has stricken out on some old-fashioned vigilantism. In this movie, you will discover heavy accents; a whole lot of tough cop talk about absolutely nothing; what appears to be water-filled condoms slathered in red-dyed syrup passing as innards; a distraught son, exhausted by having to kill and dismember people to keep pappy happy, talking through his feelings with the chopped-up remains of a woman stuffed in a garbage bag in his passenger seat; skin lesions brought to life via sloppily slathered, stale oatmeal; and stock music playing over every second of runtime. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear Bartok’s “Music For Strings, Percussion And Celesta,” which was used prominently in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. This is kind of an amazing coincidence since both films were released in 1980, and the piece works equally well in both. The constant murmur of library tunes from a bygone era, offset by the sleazy carnage it accompanies, creates a peculiar and unsettling atmosphere that’s hard to shake. During the climactic battle at the end, a real, whirring chainsaw is used and the actors are praying to Jesus Christ, Our Lord, Amen, that the extra-layered clothing that’s stuffed with animal viscera will be enough to keep arms from being lopped off for real. It’s impressive that these people would put their lives on the line for one Long Island Cannibal Massacre. There isn’t anything here you would typically call “accomplished,” but there is most definitely some kind of lunatic genius at work, a through-line of madcap artistry fueled by the demented passion and moody detachment from reality that only a teenager could channel this purely.

Overall rating: 8 out of 10