In my recent visit to London I bought Anthropophagous a DVD released by 88 Films. Though I’m a huge horror fan, I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never seen this film. I wanted to buy this DVD for quite a while but it is a bit of rarity and the prices on Ebay are kind of high. But I finally got it and watched it.
Anthropophagous story
The film is directed by Joe D’Amato and seems to be his most notorious film. A video nasty that had been banned in several countries at the time of it’s release. Beyond The Darkness is the Joe D’Amato film I’m most familiar with. This is one of my favorite films of that period of time. And since I read a lot of good things about Anthropophagous I had to check it out.
The plot of the film I quite simple. It’s about a group of people visiting a Mediterranean island. When arriving there, they discover that that the island is completely desolate. The only person they see is a woman in black by a window. They quickly discover that something is very wrong with this place after finding a rotting corpse and one of their friends has gone missing. After that the mayhem and suspense goes further leading to a gory finale.
It thought Anthropophagous was a great flick and you will definitely like it if you’re into Italian gore movies from the 70’s and 80’s. Though some people may feel that it’s a bit slow in the middle. I found it to be very suspenseful. The acting, like most of these kind of films, isn’t the best. But it is isn’t horrible either. I watched the English version so the dubbing has a lot to do with it as well. But what do you expect when you watch a movie like this?
The gore scenes were great, there is a lot of nasty things going on. But I won’t spoil any of that. I also have to mention that the killer looked great and very disturbing.
The music in Anthropophagous is also great, though sometimes a bit frantic. But I it does add to the suspense.
Anthropophagous DVD
88 Films did a great job on remastering the film. It still looks a bit gritty but not like a VHS or anything like that. I think that’s great, if these films look ultra HD it takes some the charm away from it. The DVD also has the English language version and the Italian version with English subtitles. What was kind of strange is that the first scene is in German and obviously dubbed. Although there isn’t much said in this scene, I find this kind of odd. I tried both languages but it didn’t make any difference. But since it is very short I don’t mind.
The DVD of Anthropophagous also has some bonus features. It has a documentary about 42nd street. The notorious block in America at which they played a lot of grindhouse films at the time. The documentary is about 80 minutes long. Which is a great addition. I haven’t watched the whole thing yet, but I will sometime. The few minutes that I saw looked very interesting. The DVD also features the original Italian opening credits as well as a couple of trailers.
Overall I think this is another great release by 88 Films. And money well spend. I’m very glad to have this in my collection and I would recommend this to any true horror fan.
This film is released with different titles. Some other titles are:
- The Grim Reaper
- Anthropophagous: The Beast
- Zombie 7
- Man Eater
- The Savage Island
- Gomia, Terror en el Mar Egeo
- Anthropophagus
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