31 DAYS OF FRIGHT: Sexo Canibal

While exceptions can certainly be found, a good deal of 80s cannibal cinema seems to go a little like this: A team of archeologists/students/adventurers/drug smugglers accidentally ends up in a remote rain forest where they encounter a hidden tribe of savage jungle denizens. When the archeologists/students/adventurers/drug smugglers make an unfortunate error in judgment the savages attack and eat them. A sole survivor lives to tell the tale.

So what happens when you let notorious Eurotrash filmmaker Jess Franco loose on the cannibal genre? For good or bad you get all that the phrase “notorious Eurotrash filmmaker Jess Franco” has come to signify through the years. There’s Trashy Horror Film Franco, Depraved Sex Flick Franco, Women in Peril Franco, and Just Plain Ol’ Atrocious Filmmaker Franco – and each of these personas collides head-on in DEVIL HUNTER (aka MANDINGO MANHUNTER and SEXO CANIBAL), an overly-ambitious genre hodgepodge out now on DVD from Severin Films.

When blonde bimbo actress Laura Crawford (Ursula Fellner) arrives at her hotel decked out in a red swimsuit, tossing off quotes like “I have no opinion of men, I just love them!” life seems quite grand. As she cavorts on the beach with her dog and has her photo snapped by paparazzi, another young woman isn’t having much fun being chased by a group of jungle natives who catch her and carry her off on a big pole all while being watched from afar by The Devil, a nude, deformed native with creepy bloodshot eyes.

By the time DEVIL HUNTER is a mere 15 minutes old, Franco whets our appetite with a little something for everybody. In addition to the jungle chase, Crawford gets nude, takes a bath and is kidnapped while the aforementioned savage with the eye problems chows down on the native girl who has been lashed to a tree in what appears to be some sort of sacrifice.

Naturally (though inexplicably), the kidnappers take the starlet to their cave hideout which is on the same island inhabited by The Devil and a tribe of natives who worship/fear him. Why go there? Who knows, since Franco never bothers to tell us how or why they’ve spirited Crawford to this completely inane location to wait for the $6 million dollar ransom. (Atrocious Franco rears his head!) An ascot-wearing studio boss named Goldstein hires Peter Weston (Al Cliver) to deliver the ransom and bring the girl back; should he happen to bring the ransom back, too, there’s $600,000 in it for his troubles.

By this point it’s abundantly clear that each and every Franco mentioned above is in totally over his head with the director and cast seemingly as confused as the audience. There’s Chris the Kidnapper who freaks out in the jungle one minute (“This wild vegetation gives me the creeps!”) then calmly sets off for the ill-fated ransom drop the next. Then there’s Jack the Nam Vet Chopper Pilot whose dubbed accent provides the film’s hysterical highlights as it randomly zig-zags from Long Island to Texas, Philly and Boston. All the while, Al Cliver strides through the flick like he’s just stepped off the set of a Marlboro photo shoot, projecting an air of casual disinterest about the kidnap victim he’s been hired to return.

And who can forget The Devil – a buck naked black dude with what appears to be ping pong ball halves and Play-Doh glued to his face who looks like he stumbled off the set of one of those 70s Fillipino BLOOD ISLAND movies.

Cut from the same cloth as CANNIBAL TERROR (also available from Severin), DEVIL HUNTER might be the “better” movie but ends up being not nearly as much fun. By ham-fistedly trying to juggle cannibals, jungle adventure, sexploitation, women in peril and blaxploitation, Franco simply ends up with an unsatisfying mish-mash that’s neither inept enough to amuse nor accomplished enough to be entertaining. Not to mention far more restrained than the box’s “Never Before Released Scenes of Cannibal Sex Carnage!” warning would suggest.