Best movie of this year hands down!

Memorable, crazy movie

Let's be realistic.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Antropophagus is a 1980 Italian Monster/Slasher movie directed by Joe D'amato. Its about some random tools going around Europe that decide to stop by some island near Greece or something. When they arrive, nobodies there cause they were all killed by some wrinkly cannibal dude who had to eat his family or whatever. This movie isn't that bad for an 80s grindhouse flick, though it does have some pretty slow moments. The movie makes up for it though with atmospheric scenery and gory killings. The Antropaphagus chops, eats, and tears through his victims. The fetus eating scene is pretty depraved and degrading to watch, which makes it pretty cool. Overall, the only people who could really enjoy this are die-hard exploitation fans and gorehounds, so if your one of those, check it out, but if your looking for high-class entertainment or the meaning of life, go somewhere else.

I originally watched this on SKY a few years back and I enjoyed it then as I did this time around.That's right I said I enjoyed it and judging by low scores on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, I think I'm in the minority.The worst thing about this film is the soundtrack. To say it's dreadful would be doing an injustice to the term understatement. There are a couple of scenes where the music sets the mood perfectly... but it is only a couple. The rest of the time the audience is assailed with a manic Wurlitzer pianist - I actually had a vision of an old time theatre (back in the silent movie days) and a man, half-crossed between The Phantom Of The Opera and The Joker, going insane of the ebony and ivories... all it lacked was a maniacal laugh.Apart from that what the writers Joe D'Amato (Director) and George Eastman (Actor) give the audience is a new take on both the Cannibal and Zombie legends, by giving you Nikos Karamanlis, a man turned beast who is something other than alive and with a penchant for human flesh. He acquired this evil and unnatural taste after he and his family were shipwrecked... when you're miles from anywhere and starving you have to eat.This is so much better than his follow on movie Absurd, which also fell foul of the dreaded Video Nasty title and banning. The acting is above average. Tisa Farrow (Mia Farrow's sister) who gave a well-disposed portrayal of Julie, a student on her way to a Greek island and summer job. Along with Saverio Vallone who gives an affable portrayal of Andy, the unheralded leader of the group, these two hold the film together. Even the mostly silent Eastman as The Beast does a decent job of being menacing and actually uses his size and facial features to add power and unease (wish he'd done the same in Absurd)For the time the effects are more than passable, the only let down is Eastman's "Beast" face as it looks like somebody has spilt cold porridge over him. Most of the dead look nasty enough, with decaying skin and maggots writhing in eye sockets. The scene with the rats would have looked more realistic had they not covered a skeleton in spam... they could have added more blood to disguise the fact - go Herschell-Lewis on them.One thing that did impress me is most of the scenes are shot in daylight and D'Amato still builds a sense of tension and unease. The scene where Arnold is looking for his pregnant wife Maggie and stumbles into a clearing by a ruinated abbey sent a shiver down my spine. You can actually feel something watching him.There is more to this film than I originally thought and I would recommend it to all horror fans who haven't seen it yet. And I will be watching this again in the future.

"Anthropophagus", in my opinion is a misunderstood flick. I've mostly seen reviews in which a couple of particular scenes are mentioned and not much else, those being the fetus scene and the killer's death. While these scenes are the highlights, I believe it offers more.The setting of the film is absolutely beautiful, with the island location being showcased almost as much as the characters themselves. While I can not argue that it is slow at times, the film focuses on atmosphere, and a mid section that is almost "gothic", at night during a storm in the abandoned mansion. The film pulls no punches, as pregnant and blind women are disembodied and disemboweled without any remorse. The scene where the killer is seen inside the locked room after the door closes and all is thought to be safe is particularly effective.While none of the stranded tourists are particularly memorable, the cast is diverse enough to keep the story going, and their relationships and troubles with one another add to the mayhem. The movie is almost post-apocalyptic and hopeless in tone, since the island is all but deserted and the group is trapped without modern fixings."Anthropophagus" is a gruesome shocker, and also basically a slasher, but has more mood and setting than people often give it credit for.

Anthropophagus (or The Grim Reaper, which is a cooler title) is a mostly terrible, unspectacular, and uneventful horror film that slowly stalls through it's non-plot, with some minor chasing and bloodshed during its brief conclusion. On most grounds, it is an undeniable failure. While it features the same goofy problems of every Italian horror flick from this period (terrible dubbing, bland acting in service of non-characters, and a story and sequence of events that don't seem to have been thought out in any logical fashion), this film creates a bigger sin than others of its ilk; it's about absolutely nothing for most of its scant runtime. Most Italian splatter flicks from this era are garbage, but entertaining garbage, and occasionally well-shot and insane garbage. But this film seems to exist in some sort of narrative black hole.The film follows a group of 6 boring tourists who travel to a small island for some bland fun: Tisa Farrow (who was briefly bitten by the acting bug just like her look-a-like sister Mia minus having, you know, any talent and never becoming famous), this guy who I think is supposed to be the male lead, but he doesn't do much and disappears for the entire last act of the movie (only to show up in the last 5 seconds to save the day!), this other guy who looks EXACTLY like the other guy, even down to having the same face and wearing the exact same clothes, he has a pregnant wife (uh oh!), this guy who is younger than the other two guys who falls in love with Tisa Farrow's charm and beauty, and Zora Kerova who completes the pointless love triangle by being in love with younger guy. Zora also acts as the one person who has a bad feeling about their trip to the island, as every one of these movies requires the crazy hysterical skeptic who turns out to be right about the evil amongst them. It's an easy way to work around characterization. Anyway, after an underwhelming opening kill, it takes the film almost an hour before the killer shows up and one of the central cast members is killed. An hour. It's amazing how long the characters are safe for in this film. They wander around, sleep in a spooky house during a thunderstorm, and wander around some more outside, and everyone is always A-OK, the killer is no where in sight. And then BOOM thunder reveals he's in the house with young guy and requisite blind girl. And the biggest surprise is that the cannibal maniac is actually kind of scary, genuinely.But his brief first appearance past the halfway mark of the film turns into another lengthy absence and he disappears for another half hour (!) only to show up again for the last 10 mins. D'Amato must have been going for a less is more approach, and normally I'd agree, but when the rest of the film is so static and uneventful and not particularly effective at sustaining any consistent mood or dread (though there are occasional moments that are decent at building this), it seems like an odd choice. D'Amato, the epitome of the lowest dreck of Italian cinema, and from what I read more interested in the business side of filmmaking than the artistic, either was genuinely trying to make a spooky film that didn't rely on only gore and sex (in fact, there's no sex or nudity to speak of), or they had no budget and most of the film is filler. There's no doubt the film is meandering and boring for 90% of its runtime, and the characters somehow feel like mannequins AND are blandly over-developed ("I sometimes work at a TV studio" "I'm in pharmacy, only 2 more tests and I have my degree").So it's a waste of time....except that killer is eerie! He's barely in the movie, but maybe that makes his appearance more effective. The make-up work is on the cheap side (as is all the gore), so some shots of him look better than others. But I must admit the chase/well climax kind of works because he is genuinely intimidating and threatening looking, and the music is actually kind of cool. It's an odd film because it is SO bland and uneventful, it doesn't seem right to suddenly have the cast be attacked by a giant scary madman with a gross face. A cast this minor and a plot this scant and atmosphere this lacking should feature a predictably lame villain, but in this case he's actually scary. And that well climax is a cool idea and is pretty suspenseful, though it doesn't milk the idea to its full potential, and then is kind of ruined by the film's stupidly abrupt ending.And disappointingly, most of the characters get off easy and get pretty minor deaths (except of course for the pregnant woman whose fate is the only one in bad taste, therefore it's the only memorable one). Zora Kerova is practically killed humanely for this type of movie (merely gets her throat slit, off screen I should add).So it's almost a complete waste of time, except for that killer, who fascinates me. He's like an uncontrollable, rogue element who doesn't seem to belong in the film, which is what makes him so off-putting and eerie. He doesn't conceivably belong in the movie; he's too creepy of a killer for a movie this uninvolving and pedestrian. So in that way, the movie stayed with me, despite 90% being a real slog. Is it worth it? That depends on whether one wants to put the time in to watch a worthless film with an underused but uniquely unsettling killer. He deserves to be in a better film. Anthropophagus just screams for a remake.