31 Days of Horror Day 08 Anthropophagus

Title-Anthropophagous
Source-Midnight Video VHS

Also known as The Grim Reaper,Anthropophagous is an infamous film from Italian director Joe D'Amato. It is a movie that has suffered from being censored many times in various countries. In the States the first release ,known under the title Grim Reaper,was heavily cut. I had heard for years about all the stuff that was cut.

Then in the mid 90s at a con I found someone selling copies of Midnight Video's full uncut version of the movie. Midnight Video used many sources to make what was the first fully uncut version in  English. The main source was a Japanese VHS release.So lots of the film on this VHS has Japanese subtitles on the bottom of the screen. But even that Japanese VHS was missing two scenes. The first is a pre-credits of a couple being attacked on a beach,which sadly is in French with no subtitles. The other scene is from near the end of the film. It is the famous ending shot of the killer eating his own disemboweled intestines,which supposedly was only ever released on a hard to find VHS that came out in Venezuela. The only other scene in this version that wasn't in the Grim Reaper release is when the killer kills a pregnant woman then eats her fetus.

A group of young adults are on a cruise in their yacht during the summer. They agree to take a young American woman to a Greek island. They get to the island and there is no one there. And the telegraph line has been cut. Our young adults leave the pregnant member of their group on the boat and go explore the island.

On the  island they find a young blind girl. Who keeps telling them about an evil presence on the island. One by one the leads are attacked and killed by the title killer. Played by George Eastman aka Luigi Montefiori. Who is the son of a wealthy family. He got shipwrecked on the island.Becoming a cannibal after eating his wife and son.

It seems Midnight Video spent right at 3 years assembling their cut of this movie. Most of this version is made up of footage from the previously mentioned Japanese VHS. For some reason that VHS had audio in French. So the people at Midnight Video took the video from the Japanese VHS and married it with a English soundtrack. I admire all the work they did back then. In the days before we had easy to get audio and video editing software doing stuff like that was very hard to do and very very time consuming. Of course since this VHS came out there has been a few DVD releases. All of which now make this VHS look like crap. But back in the mid 90s this was the best you could do.

Honestly Anthropophagus is worth seeing if you are interested in late 70s/early 80s Italian gore movies. And thanks to Youtube you don't have to spend a bunch of money on the movie. I paid IIRC 30 bucks for the VHS. And I bet the DVD was about that price when it came out.

Here is the trailer. It isn't safe for work. But it does give you a good idea of what the film is about.

                                     

Anthropophagus gets a C+.