Last Cannibal World

Unlike Cannibal Holocaust (1980), an Italian exploitation, horror, pseudo-snuff film, which in most part is unwatchable for its shamelessly exaggerated content (which itself made it infamous), Last Cannibal World (1977) is better film, as better as a film of this kind can be. It remains an exploitation film, but it pretends to tell a real-life story, and clocks itself in the garb of an action-adventure film, only that the setting has been changed from Africa to Philippines.

Last Cannibal World claims to tell a true story, which you doubt very much; there’s nothing much a story anyway. A group of oil prospects lands in an uninhabited island, to find among other things, an earlier team who had gone missing. Conveniently, they are lost in the jungle. While others are killed two survives, Robert and Rolf, and one of them, Robert, is captured by a tribe of cannibals. They bind Robert, undress him, make him a ritual sacrifice, along with a hornbill, and then put him in a prison. After suffering for several days, and witnessing the ‘barbaric’ rituals of the primitive tribe, where they kill a man and eats him, Robert, still without clothes, escapes, and takes a tribal girl hostage. The rest of the film follows them as they find Rolf and make way to their plane, and the tribal girl is raped, by Robert, and then killed and eaten, by the cannibals, and everyone goes home.

Yes, there are all those exploitation images, along with the notions of coloniser vs natives, and women as commodities, and so on. Yet, the film is fun; if you can see it with the right attitude.

Unlike Cannibal Holocaust, which I found abominable, because of the images it glories, especially the scene when a white man rapes a tribal girl just because he could. It tell the story of four American youngsters, then boys and one girl, goes to an uncharted country looking for lost civilization. And then, they are lost. As rescue team is sent, which confirms that they are dead and find a video tape they made. The film is allegedly based on the videotape. It’s all gimmick to show torture. In that sense, you can call the film the beginning of torture porn — made popular by a film series titled, ‘Saw’...

More on Last Cannibal World is here, and here.
More on Cannibal Holocause here.