RyothChatty ridiculous rating

Skunkyrate Gripping story with well-crafted characters

GazerRise Fantastic!

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Sam Panico Also known as La Montagna del Dio Cannibale, Slave of the Cannibal God and Prisoner of the Cannibal God, don't be fooled by the pedigree of having big stars like Ursula Andress and Stacy Keach. This film may seem restrained at first, but it goes absolutely insane by the final ten minutes. I mean, when has Sergio Martino (All the Colors of the Dark, Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key) ever steered us wrong?Susan Stevenson (Andress, the original Bond girl) is looking for her husband Henry, an anthropologist who has gone missing in the jungles of New Guinea. Along with her brother Arthur and Professor Edward Foster (Keach), they travel to the mountain Ra Ra Me, a cursed place where the authorities will not allow expeditions.Of course, they go there. What did you expect? They're stupid white people. The jungle thanks them with attacks from spiders, snakes and alligators. And then Manolo (Claudio Cassinelli, What Have They Done to Your Daughters?), a jungle guide, joins their party.Bad idea. Arthur has sex with one of the native girls, who is already married, but a cannibal attacks and kills both the husband and wife. A missionary makes them leave, as they have brought nothing but sin, adultery and death to his village. Don't screw in the woods. And don't bring your Western values to the jungle.It turns out that none of their reasons for coming to the island are altruistic. Susan and Arthur have no interest in finding her husband, but are instead looking for uranium deposits. Foster is there just to find the tribe of cannibals who had taken him captive in the past so he can wipe them off the face of the earth.On the way, a waterfall takes Foster after Arthur doesn't save him. And they reach the mountain, which isn't just a uranium mine. It's made from uranium. And how do we know that? Well, Suan's husband's body is being worshipped as a god because the Geiger counter he had keeps ticking, like a heartbeat.At this point, the film rewards you by going completely off the rails, descending into chaos. A native attacks Susan, but is stopped by the tribe and castrated, then his penis is cooked and eaten. Another villager has sex with a giant pig. Meanwhile, the drums build in a hypnotic rhythm as another female villager masturbates (this is from the "director's special selection" version, there are several cuts of the film). As this happens, Susan is stripped and smeared with orange honey by two naked female cannibals before being fed her own brother. Manolo is tortured. It feels like a nightmare you can't wake up from, one of the only moments where the Martino who delivered a quick succession of giallo a decade or so before rears his artistic head.Then, it's over, with Manolo and Susan escaping. I mean, one would think that there would be years of therapy after this. But I don't know. Perhaps she can get over this easier than most.This isn't a great movie. It might not even be good. It is entertaining for the last section, but there's also the problematic issue of animal torture in the film - a monkey is slowly eaten by a snake and lizard being cut apart. Martino claims he tacked on these scenes at the distributor's insistence. I guess the cannibal audience - an outgrowth of the audience for mondo films - needed more than just Ursula's breasts and a dummy of Keach getting killed for their kicks.

Leofwine_draca Here's yet another movie in the Italian exploitation cycle of the cannibal film. This isn't a particularly brilliant movie, but one that is pretty easy to watch with only a few grisly moments scattered throughout. This plays more like a jungle adventure than some of the others, with our explorers having to overcome all manner of dangers including waterfalls, rapids, crocodiles, snakes, and of course the cannibals themselves. You know the drill; see one of these films and you've seen them all. All have basically the same elements except in different orders with different actors. And what actors we have here...Ursula Andress takes the lead. The former Bond girl and Hammer beauty (appearing as the star of SHE) is in good shape here for a woman of 42 years. She could pass for ten years younger no problem. Andress is the mascara-wearing and rather fearless explorer complete with an Indiana Jones-style hat which she wears at all times. Her acting ability is rather limited but she's more than happy to disrobe when the script calls for it, especially in the predictable ending which sees her stripped and then painted (with putrefying flesh, ugh!) by the natives who think of her as a goddess.Also popping up is Stacy Keach ("you never forget the taste of human flesh!"), surprisingly a rather popular and famous actor. I'm not exactly sure what he's doing here. I mean, obviously Andress just wasn't getting the parts anymore and had to sink to low-grade exploitation, but Keach? His salary must have been hurting the producers of this too as he is bumped off about halfway through, ignobly falling down a waterfall to his death. Other Italian cast members include a blond-haired creep who gets a spear in the gut for his crimes and a bearded Christopher Lambert lookalike who turns out to be the film's cheap macho lead.All of the familiar ingredients are in place for this film. You've got the foreign members of the party being picked off one by one in various gruesome ways. You've got one poor extra walking into one of those spiky jungle traps and getting impaled. Then there's the excessive animal cruelty, which sees all manner of monkeys/snakes/birds/lizards/spiders/you name it/ getting killed under the camera's unflinching gaze. These are the hardest parts of the film to stomach. There are more decapitations, impalings and castrations than you can shake a stick at, but the really grisly bits involve various rotted corpses and the inevitable flesh-eating.The cannibalism doesn't really come into it until the ending, which sees the last two survivors of the party getting captured and held prisoner by the white-painted natives. The film even includes a cannibal dwarf, which must be a first! There's nothing like a good healthy dollop of exploitation to keep people watching. In the film's one clever idea, Andress' husband is discovered tied to a stake, his body believed to be that of a god. You see, the natives think that the Geiger counter attached to his belt is the man's everlasting heart, and due to uranium in the vicinity, it's constantly going wild. This makes for a cool image, and is about the only originality you'll find here. For fans of adventure treks or Italian exploitation cinema, this passes the time nicely but never proves to be anything exceptional.

Wizard-8 Potential viewers, beware, because some prints of this movie, including the one that I watched, completely eliminate the Ursula Andress nude sequences. But even if you get to see an uncut version, chances are you'll still fall asleep long before the movie reaches the end. There isn't much action or anything else exciting in the movie - most of the movie consists of the protagonists making a (very) long slog through jungle terrain. What's worse is that the protagonists are very annoying and unlikable people, especially Antonio Marsina, who plays the brother of Andress' character. And you'll wonder why someone as talented as Stacy Keach is doing here. Hopefully he was just there for the money, and also maybe because his character makes his exit some time before the end. I think even fans of Italian cannibal movies made around this time will find this movie a big bore.

Scarecrow-88 Ursula Andress is the wife of a British archaeologist who has been missing since going on an expedition into a New Guinea jungle and desires to find his whereabouts. She enlists the aid of Stacy Keach, another professor / archaeologist, renowned but eccentric and just a little aloof. Andress' brother, Antonio Marsina, insists on accompanying them and they set off for a specific island which just might contain a cannibalistic tribe known as the Puka. Keach harbors a secret, he was once associated with the Puka and suffers horrible nightmares as a result, emotionally scarred for participating in their tribal ceremonies in order to co-exist with them and survive. While on the island, Andress, Keach, and Marsini encounter a mission operated by a priest who leads a group of people which inhabit it. Andress is almost killed by a Puka hunter, covered in chalk and wearing a hardened mask carved from tree trunk, saved by Claudio Cassinelli, an outsider who has lived on the island for some time. Cassinelli reluctantly agrees to lead Andress, Keach(..whose knee was crushed by the stone battle ax from the Puka warrior who just so happened to be his guide and helper), and Marsini to the mountain..facing unprecedented trials and danger along the way, including violent rapids and a scary ascent up a waterfall mountain. Soon Cassinelli will discover to his horror Andress and Marsini's true motives for ascending up the mountain..Relatively well made and exciting adventure, featuring exotic locales and numerous elements which will definitely attract the cannibal genre crowd. Martino includes excerpts of animal violence, particularly a sickening act where we see a lengthly sequence showing a monkey's head caught in the mouth of a python(..the fact that this was purposely committed by the crew makes it a pretty repulsive scene, completely inappropriate and incorrigible). Groovy croc attack on one of Keach's guides(..biting the poor guy's arm off), along with an animal trap seizing another member of his crew, causing sharpened stones to stab him multiple times while hanging upside down and powerless. You also have a beheading and castration, along with a disemboweling, including a cracked skull revealing damaged brains. Cassinelli is extraordinary as the man Andress depends on, assuming the heroic role that seemed meant for Keach, who isn't quite the same after the attack that leaves him crippled / wounded. As expected, the intended audience get their shocking "dinner scene" as the cannibal tribe have a grand feast after removing organs and guts from a murdered human. Andress is stripped of her clothes and is completely naked, being prepared by the Puka, "painted" and ward-robed as their goddess, even forced to eat human meat! Keach is fascinating to watch, expressing underlying emotional distress and determination. The film establishes him in the early going as the leader of the expedition, with Cassinelli entering the picture midway through. Cassinelli has this terrific scene where he is able to secure snakes which offer possible harm to Andress and Marsina. The film's true villain is Marsina who slowly reveals himself to be a self-absorbed cretin, letting someone die because he was holding him back in his personal quest to satiate his avarice.While I found some of the violent animal footage effective, if tiresome, I thought the monkey being devoured by the python was rather too gratuitous, and while I don't want to beat a dead horse, the way this is executed by Martino and his handlers is not only inhumane, but despicable.