RIP John Saxon
The world of genre cinema lost a legend recently with the sad passing of John Saxon's shade beyond the veil. Though he'll be forever remembered for the role of Nancy's dad in Wes Craven's seminal frightfest A Nightmare on Elm Street and Bob Clark's pioneering slasher Black Christmas - alongside early appearances in horror/sci-fi flicks like John Gilling's 1965 The Night Caller (a.k.a. Night Caller from Outer Space) and Curtis Harrington's Martian vampire tale Queen of Blood the following year - the artist formerly known as Carmine Orrico graced many Italian exploitation movies with his presence, working with greats such as Mario Bava (The Girl Who Knew Too Much, a.k.a. The Evil Eye, 1963) and Dario Argento (Tenebrae, 1982).
Betwixt these twain, Saxon worked with spaghetti splatter maestro Antonio Margheriti (who was operating under his usual nom de guerre of Anthony Dawson - not to be mistaken for the Dr. No-serving British character actor of the same name) on the notorious Cannibal Apocalypse (alias Apocalypse Domani: literally Apocalypse Tomorrow, in an amusing Coppola-baiting move; alias Cannibals in the Streets; alias Invasion of the Flesh Hunters), one of the DPP's infamous "Video Nasties" rounded up by the likes of professional God-bothering busybody Mary Whitehouse and idiotic Tory Graham Bright. Now, since I were but a wee youth i've been fascinated with horror movies, and the Nasties in particular: it's the sweet tang of the forbidden, combined with a natural inclination toward the contrary which has always made me want to do anything The Authorities tell me not to. Which explains all the killings, probably. Anyway, over the years i've managed to see quite a few films on the DPP's famous list - many of them now freely available and uncut, and leaving wondering what all the panic from the 'moral' minority was about in the first place - and the only one that I definitely don't want to see again is Ruggero Deodato's infamous 1980 real animal slaughter fest Cannibal Holocaust. Seen it once, never want to see it again. We've all got a line we've got to draw somewhere, right?
So it was with a slight bit of trepidation that I approached its fellow Italian cannibal stablemate Cannibal Apocalypse.
The screenplay, by reliable Italian splatter stalwart Dardano Sachetti, begins back in the 'Nam a green beret Captain Norman Hopper (Saxon) braves hails of bullets and shards of spiced-in stock footage (the grainy 16mm film of helicopters sticking out like much more of a sore thumb on a cleaned-up Blu-Ray than it would have done on an original grittier grindhouse print in 1980) on his mission to rescue two of his fellow soldiers who've been captured by the Viet Cong. Fighting his way through explosions and insurgents, Hopper locates his home town boys - Tom Thompson, played by Tony King, and the amusingly-named Charlie Bukowski played by one of sleaze cinema's all time heroes Giovanni Lombardo Radice under his John Morghen pseudonym. Bukowski and Thompson have been held down a bamboo-barred pit, an oubliette of starvation wherein they have been left without food for a tortuous amount of time. When during the raid-cum-jailbreak one of the female Vietnamese plunges into the prison pit (on fire), the starving men eagerly pounce upon her and feast upon her flesh. Nothing like having a cooked meal delivered to you, I guess. As Hooper reaches down into the hole to rescue the men, Thompson sinks his teeth into the Captain's arm -
- only for Hooper to awaken in his own bed alongside his wife Jane (Elizabeth Turner) years later, still haunted by the nightmares of his wartime trauma, the scars on his arm a constant and indelible reminder. When Bukowski, on finally being released from the Hospital for Nervous Disorders onto the streets of Atlanta, gets in touch with his old war buddy and reaches out to meet up with each other Hopper demurs - the sound of Charlie's voice triggering him with flashbacks and giving him strange carnal urgings for the flesh of his teenage neighbour Mary (Cinzia De Carolis, credited as the more Anglophonic Cindy Hamilton) and not in a sexy way. Or maybe in a sexy way, if longpig is what strums your strings. The dejected Bukowski, looking more and more like a cadaverous Travis Bickle, seeks haven in a cinema but the young couple getting frisky in the row in front of him provokes more than an annoyed tut: his suppressed cannibalistic desires suddenly overwhelm him and he takes a bite out of the girl's throat.
Fleeing the shocked theatre, Bukowski is pursued by an enraged mob of bikers and holes himself up in a grimy strip mall raiding the huntin' 'n' fishin' section to arm himself and get involved in a shootout that culminates in police siege. As his ex C.O., Hopper volunteers to go in and negotiate a de-escalation of tensions and finally convinces Charlie to give himself up, but not before he gnaws into the hand of one of the police officers as he's bundled into the wagon ("GET IN THE BACK OF THE VAN!"). Taken off to be incarcerated in the nearest psych ward, Bukowski makes eye contact and implied psychic contact with a fellow inmate: his ex-pitmate Thompson. When Thompson bites May Heatherly's Nurse Helen as he's strapped down to a gurney, the contagious and transmittable nature of the cannibal transmission becomes clear when she bites out the tongue of her co-worker (though she doesn't bite off his penis as per the original screenplay, the actress asking for the scene to be scaled back a wee bit) and sets Thompson and Bukowski free.
As the cannibal plague spreads, the police station also becomes a scene of gore when the bitten cop goes rabid and tears off the breast of a female officer and eats it before being dispatched by a bullet to the head. When Hopper too finally gives in to his long suppressed hunger for human, he joins his war buddies and the nurse to go on the run. After a communal bonding feast together on a garage mechanic who Bukowski gleefully carves for dinner with a power saw, the group (what's the collective term for cannibals? A cluster? A chowdown?) head down into the sewer system beneath the contaminated city. Hooper's command authority enables him to somewhat rein in and marshal his 'troops' as they revert to their wartime mentality to survive - a cadre of veterans against the outside world, their perverse killer instincts brought back from the killing fields to the urban jungle marking them out as outsiders that the authorities must ultimately destroy. Obviously I don't want to delve right into the climax for those who have yet too experience the movie, but caught like hungry rats amongst the actual hungry rats and cornered by the cops, this does not end well.
In summation, Cannibal Apocalypse is a much better film (better acted, better directed, better budgeted) than i'd expected. I suppose the real grime is to come when I finally subject myself to stuff like Cannibal Ferox. I'll get round to that one day, probably. But here we have something approaching a meditation (albeit a deliciously exploitative one) on the after effects of war, post-traumatic stress and the outsider in society wrapped in a bow of celluloid stitched together from Cronenberg's Rabid, Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Cimino's The Deer Hunter.
Plus, y' know, blood and guts and stuff.
Don't take as long as I did to actually get around to watching it.
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