Here comes another former official video nasty from the DPP hitlist looking better than it ever did at the time thanks to the wonders of modern remastering. Directed in 1978 by prolific Italian jack-of-all-trades Sergio Martino (who made the superior 1972 giallo All the Colours of the Dark), Mountain of the Cannibal God is probably the classiest of the entrail-ripping cannibal genre, thanks to a feisty lead turn from Ursula Andress and some decent production values.
When her husband Henry goes missing in darkest New Guinea, slinky adventuress Susan Stevenson (Andress) and her brother Arthur (Antonio Marsina, channelling Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter) enlist the services of her husband’s old friend Professor Edward Foster (a frazzled Stacy Keach). Foster reckons Henry’s at the mountain Ra Ra Me, forbidden to non-local explorers on account of it being cursed (by cannibals, as it turns out!). So, Susan and Edward head to the jungle like a proto Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone, the difference being that Romancing the Stone didn’t have scenes of gratuitous real-life animal slaughter, close-up disembowelment or everyone’s favourite cannibal flick moment where a bloke gets his John Thomas hacked off with bloody great knife. Be honest: you’d miss it if it wasn’t there (see what we did there?)
Sergio Martino stands with Umberto Lenzi (Cannibal Ferox) and Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust) as a director of substance who can’t help but elevate the material from the grindhouse mire. The action is visceral, the tension is well-wound and the ominous rhythmic incantations of the soundtrack by the ubiquitous Guido and Maurizio De Angelis has ‘180-gram vinyl limited edition’ stamped all over it. With Sri Lanka and Malaysia doubling for New Guinea, it also looks pretty terrific; the cave where Andress is kidnapped, stripped naked, and tortured is seriously epic in scale, especially in shots where it’s clear Martino has recruited massed-legions of local tribesman to the cannibal cause. Having said that, the savages here are all shortish fellas and have been made up with a bizarre blueberry tint to their hair which makes them look uncannily like the Umpa Lumpas from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. So if you find yourself humming ‘Pure Imagination’ during the scene when one of them back-scuttles a large and completely disinterested wild boar, that’s the reason why. Keach phones it in but Andress really throws herself into the action; naked or clothed, she’s fearless – scenes in the accompanying documentary of her nearly getting swept away by raging torrents and the fulsome praise of her director will leave you in a similar state of admiration.
Shameless has done the decent thing and confronted the animal cruelty issue head-on, putting up a disclaimer that the material has been ‘softened’ on this newly-minted print, while previously-lost gore scenes that don’t involve cuddly lizards getting horribly eviscerated have been restored. Fine by us. The extras include a documentary looking at the filming of this very contentious material and a longer look back at the making of the film that sounds like it was a sweaty, leech-encrusted nightmare. Sergio Martino looms large and proves to be a sharp-minded, genial raconteur who, unlike some of his Italian peers, doesn’t look down on his home-grown genre from a great height. In other words, if you’re going to make this stuff, you may as well make it properly.
THE MOUNTAIN OF THE CANNIBAL GOD (1978) / CERT: 18 / DIRECTOR: SERGIO MARTINO / SCREENPLAY: CESARE FRUGONI, SERGIO MARTINO / STARRING: URSULA ANDRESS, STACY KEACH, CLAUDIO CASSINELLI, ANTONIO MARSINA / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
