The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Cannibalism concerns the eating of human flesh by other humans. This has been practiced ritually by various tribes historically. There have been recorded cases of true-life serial killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer, Andrei Chikatilo, Albert Fish and in recent years the notoriety that circulated around Armin Meiwes who engaged in the act as part of a fetish.
On screen, cannibalism is depicted as the habit of serial killers or backwoods families. There have also been a number of treatments about killers who regard the consumption of human flesh as a gourmet delicacy, the most famous of these being Hannibal Lecter.
Other treatments show it as a necessity in harsh survivalist situations such as the American Frontier or in post-apocalyptic futures where there is nothing else to eat.
The Italian cannibal film of the 1970s depicted in gore-drenched detail the activities of various primitive tribes and contains some of the most extreme horror scenes ever placed on screen.
The first film from South Park‘s creator Trey Parker, a willfully absurd musical based on the story of a true-life cannibal. Amateurish but worth seeing by completists
English-language version of the Korean zombie film #Alive about a guy stranded in an apartment during the zombie apocalypse trying to communicate with the girl across the street
From the notorious 1970s/80s period of Italian cinema, this was listed as one of the notorious Video Nasties. This features a lone cannibal killer amok on a Greek island amid plentiful gore
A drifter who likes killing tattooed girls and a girl who enjoys eating the flesh of victims meet and love blossoms. Where you expect this to go in the direction of something like Natural Born Killers, it fizzles out
Ana Lily Amirpour caught attention with A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. She makes her second film here, set in a desert prison of cannibals and scavengers, sort of Escape from New York by way of The Burning Man Festival
Another in the mid-2000s fad for 1970s remakes. This revives what has been cited as the first slasher film but throws most of the original out and turns the rest into a gore-drenched slasher film
Wonderfully demented and outrageously over-the-top splatter comedy from Jackie Kong that originally started out intended to be a sequel to Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast
Blood Feast was the world’s first splatter film. This is a remake with a better budget but suffers a tameness that fails to come anywhere near the go-for-broke rawness of the original
Oddball Australian Backwoods Brutality film with a man imprisoned by a strange family in Finland who intend to feed him to their hulking son
This is like a Western version of The Hills Have Eyes. Exceptionally written – slow, sombre and character-driven, containing one of Kurt Russell’s best performances, before emerging into a brutal horror survival story
Suspiria director Luca Guadagnino sinks his teeth into making a film about cannibalism. Forget the Young Adult label the film was sold with, this is quite an impressive work
Denzel Washington as an enigmatic Man With No Name wandering the post-holocaust apocalyptic landscape. This follows the cliches of the genre before it bizarrely morphs into a Biblical allegory partway through
This adaptation of a Harlan Ellison story is a B-budget delight that zings with witty dialogue and a young, unknown Don Johnson giving a very funny performance as the titular boy roaming the post-apocalyptic landscape with his dog
Remarkable little film where a couple go for a jog only to find they are trapped on the same stretch of trail in the woods by the lake where time starts looping around on itself in strange and increasingly sinister ways
This Spanish film about a cannibal serial killer is almost exactly the opposite of anything we expect of a horror film – a film of muted silences filled with lurking secrets. A fascinating work
Entry in the notorious Italian cannibal genre of the late 70s/early 80s. Here the recent hits of Dawn of the Dead and Apocalypse Now are merged in a plot involving zombified Vietnam veterans
A film that fairly much sells you in its deliberately ridiculous title concept – a cannibal who sets out to find success as a stand-up comedian.
Along with Cannibal Holocaust, this was the most notorious and extreme of the Italian cannibal film fad of the 70s/early 80s. The film becomes a catalogue of violent savageries that are not recommended for the faint of heart
Legendary Canucksploitation film from Ivan Reitman about a cannibal hotel. This has gained a cult reputation. Seen it seems to lack the essential trashiness that justifies its reputation
THE most extreme film covered on this site. The defining work of the notorious Italian cannibal genre, a pseudo-documentary work that features stomach churning tortures, guttings and actual animal mutilations
This creates a fascinatingly different future – a world of grim survivalism amid a new Ice Age in the aftermath of Global Warming. The look of the film is fantastic, only to fritter it on an action focus and Mad Max cliches
Peer Greeaway’s finest film, an elegant, surrealistic satire on fine dining with Michael Gambon as the mob boss owner of a restaurant with Helen Mirren as his unfaithful wife
From the Films That Could Never Get Made Today file – an exploitation classic about an obese woman who goes on a killing spree. This comes with a level of derangement that leaves you puzzled why this has never become a cult classic
Best TV of the year. A mini-series that offers an absolutely compulsive dive into the disturbing mind of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and an exactingly detailed charting of his crimes. Evan Peters shines in the title role
The Woman was one of the least likely films to ever warrant a sequel. But this is what we get here and directed/written by no less than Pollyanna McIntosh who played The Woman in the original
A post-holocaust film that takes its tone from the bleak survivalism of The Road. Much focus on the grim harshness of trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world but there nothing particularly original in the film’s treatment
Film about cannibalistic survivors of a cave-in who lurk in the tunnels beneath the London Underground, this has gained a reasonable cult following over the years
A Woody Allen film in which he plays a writer on his way to receive an award. The film drifts in and out of a series of vignettes and stories he has written, including a number of fantastic interludes, with highly amusing effect
The first of the Italian cannibal films, which became the most extreme niche in the horror genre. This acts more as a cod-anthropological study about the natives but does come with its fair share of stomach-churning scenes
In their debut, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro make an hilariously eccentric and unclassifiable film about the inhabitants of a strange apartment building
A young couple are invited to a posh dinner party, only to find that sinister and deadly things lurk not far beneath the niceties before things get really strange. A directorial outing for actor Miles Doleac
One of the classics of mad scientist cinema. A wonderful potboiler of elements with Fay Wray and Lionel Atwill on the track of a cannibal killer who has created an artificial flesh. From the director of Casablanca, no less
Solidly effective work of post-holocaust survivalism with a couple on a 400 mile journey where they have to pass through territories held by various gangs
Excellent horror from Fruit Chan about a middle-aged actress seeking a backstreet age rejuvenation treatment. Great performances and directed with a queasy discomfort
The sight of the normally super-offensive and un-PC Troma Films trying to adjust to the post-#MeToo and Cancel Culture era while making a film about high school cannibalism is a bizarre one indeed
Rather peculiar film about a man who becomes a cannibal whenever he sleepwalks and an artist who finds inspiration at the sight of the dead bodies. This taps a rich vein of black comedy
One of the most bizarre efforts from 1970s Euro trash cinema – a cross between the softcore Emmanuelle films and the Italian cannibal film. It seems perverse to be watching beautiful bodies one minute and next showing their insides being spilled
British director Charlie Steeds delivers a well tuned homage to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that gets it right in ways that most of the Texas Chainsaw sequels don’t
Excellent slow burn film that becomes a work of Folk Horror. This is focused around preparations for a dinner party joined by a mystery waitress where you just know things are going to go badly wrong
The one really good film from Brett Leonard, director of The Lawnmower Man, this delves into the fetish community of feederism and determines to push the material to something provocative
Matthew Bright’s even better sequel to Freeway where he conducts an outrageous and quite brilliant modernisation of Hansel and Gretel now recast with two juvenile delinquents on the run
Strong and effective film in which Daisy Edgar-Jones is charmed becomes involved with Sebastian Stan, only for him to imprison her, intending to sell her flesh as meat
New Zealand comedy in which a teenage daughter discovers that her father Temuera Morrison is a modern-day Maori cannibal cultist. Everything is given a very broad playing
One of the notorious 1970s Nazisploitation films, this Italian-made entry is one work that crosses way over taboo lines and makes for extreme watching
Latter day Anglo-horror film from Freddie Francis that assembles many Hammer regulars in a story where Peter Cushing keeps a cannibalistic son on his country estate
Three psychos who imprison the employees of a restaurant announcing they are going to kill and then cook all of them as a gourmet meal. A film made with a devastatingly black sense of humour
Eli Roth pays homage to the Italian cannibal films of the 70/80s, the most extreme genre ever put on film. While not uninteresting, rendered on a studio budget and passed uncut by the MPAA, this never touches the raw savagery of the originals
Undeniably effective film set in Manchester where a young man is drawn into a secret world of people that live on the periphery of society and enjoy eating human flesh.
The immediate sequel to The Silence of the Lambs. Anthony Hopkins is back but Jodie Foster is not. Ridley Scott takes the director’s chair and creates a slick film but it lacks the compulsive grip the original held
Building on the successes of the Hannibal Lecter films, this is a prequel that goes back sets out to tell an origin story of how the young teenage Hannibal came to be who he was during World War II
Amid the 2010s spate of fairytales rewritten as dark adult fantasies, this was a quite good mockbuster copy from The Asylum. From the director of Sharknado, this is Hansel and Gretel by way of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
There feels like there should be something tongue-in-cheek about the idea of a killer crocodile film set in the British lakelands. Surprisingly, this plays itself seriously
A Roland Emmerich produced film that takes place in a future that has been catastrophically affected by a ten-degree rise in temperatures worldwide
A psycho-thriller about birdwatching? Adapted from a stage play, this takes place on a single set consisting of only two men in a hut talking. The nuances of dialogue hold great subtlety and the film arrives at an effective twist ending
One of the early mockbusters from The Asylum about a in-bred family of cannibals that live in a cave. This was made to come out the same time as the remake of The Hills Have Eyes
Bill Zebub is possibly the most offensive filmmaker at work today. This largely plotless film features topless Nazi women fighting cannibal tribes, giant bugs and a Bigfoot
Eli Roth’s sequel to his earlier hit, this emerges as a pallid copy of its predecessor, having merely changed the sexes of the protagonists and lacking the original’s gut-churning impact
Throwback to 1950s films like The Quatermass Xperiment with Alex Rebar as an astronaut infected with a condition that causes his flesh to melt. A B movie boosted by great melting effects from Rick Baker
The Italian cannibal film is the most extreme genre ever seen on screen. An earlier effort from the director of Cannibal Holocaust, this is from when they were still pretending to be anthropological films but delivers the gut-munching goods
In the same vein as Grindhouse, this is an anthology that consists of two longer stories, all set around the gimmick of a tv horror host playing a double-bill. A third story about the host and his assistant plays in between this along with several mocked-up parody trailers
This starts out seeming like it is going to be a regular Backwoods Brutality films before expectations are abruptly turned on their head
Low-budget psycho film that nevertheless comes out as interestingly twisted. Keith Collins makes for a disturbing central character, obsessed with seducing women, boasting to us about his methods, then imprisoning them and serving up their flesh as meat for he and his aunt
Studio-backed attempt to enter the Backwoods Brutality genre ends up as an uncertain black comedy that fails to push the envelope anywhere near what its models do
Darren Aronofsky’s surreal drama wildly divided critics – many panned, while others called it the Best Film of the Year – and was a box-office flop with general audiences. Naturally, what I thought the film was about was completely different to what Aronofsky stated the film was about
Nicolas Winding Refn makes a horror film set in the L.A. modelling world. A film of hypnotic surfaces that glitter with a troubling undertow, the result is like Valley of the Dolls as remade by Dario Argento
A True Crime film loosely based on an incident in Russia in the 1990s where a man and his mother killed homeless people and ate their flesh. This pushes the material into an admirably grim and disturbing place
Strong and at times quite brutal film about a feral cannibal family. The controversial The Woman was a better-known sequel
Bizarre black comedy directed by actor Bob Balaban that takes place in a paranoid parody of 1950s normalcy about a boy who believes his parents are cannibals
A Backwoods Brutality entry from the increasingly underrated Adam Mason where the entire film has been shot in a single take. Often brutal but much of the film seems monotonous with indulgent improvised performances allowed to dominate the show
A stunningly allegorical film that falls somewhere between Cube and High-Rise where people are trapped in a prison and forced to fight over food as a banquet table passes down the levels each day, resulting in a society where those at the top claim superiority over those below.
Fascinatingly bizarre psychotronic film about an innocent drawn into the secrets of sexual witchcraft. Bad filmmaking on almost every level
The debut of Canadian director Gerard Ciccoritti who should have become more well known, this goes for broke and becomes splendidly deranged
Film about the soldiers at a fort on the American frontier who have descended to cannibalism. A good set-up falls apart due to a comedy treatment
Undeniably shocking French film about a vegetarian girl who is required to eat raw animal meat during a university hazing ritual and thereafter becomes obsessed with eating human flesh
Following the success of the Hannibal Lecter films, Dino de Laurentiis smartly repackaged Thomas Harris’s earlier novel as a Hannibal Lecter prequel
Rebecca Hall gives an extraordinary performance of disturbed psychology as a woman dealing with a man from her past who may have eaten her child
The extraordinary poetry of Cormac McCarthy’s novel about a man trying to retain his humanity amid the harsh struggle for survival in a post-apocalyptic world is necessarily weakened in being translated to screen but the film still does a fine job of capturing the essence of the book
Film based on true-life German cannibal Armin Meiwes who met a man online and by mutual agreement killed and ate his body
A classic attention-grabbing title from the heyday of the exploitation film … After receiving a severed arm in the mail, a group of friends realise that a former friend has come seeking revenge for when they were trapped down a mine and agreed to cut off his arm because they had nothing to eat
This caught on in a big way with the public, created a fascination with serial killers and forensic psychology and was nominated for a host of awards. Personally, one finds it one of the more overrated films of modern vintage
Robert Rodriguez’s adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novels is groundbreaking and one of the most visually adventurous films in years. A trio of film noir-styled tales where he sets out to replicate the look of Miller’s comic panels
Another entry in the notorious Italian cannibal genre of the 70s. As with most of this genre, the film delights in pushing everything to gore-drenched extremes
The film mangles and fails to understand the fine Harry Harrison novel it is based on but in its own right creates an effective and worthwhile portrait of a badly overpopulated 21st Century New York
Bizarrely overwrought film in which a successful city lawyer is made prisoner by a backwoods voodoo priestess
Brazil’s Jose Mojica Marins became a cult figure for his Coffin Joe films; this is an anthology sold under the Coffin Joe banner. Without the Coffin Joe presence, all we have is a series of not very well directed pieces that linger on perversity, although the final segment does stand out memorably
Released before the Tim Burton version, this is a British tv production that offers a grimly realistic, non-musical historical portrait of Sweeney Todd with Ray Winstone in the title role
Tim Burton takes on the film version of the Stephen Sondhiem musical about a murderous barber featuring Johnny Depp in the title role. Disappointingly, Burton still makes the same film he always does
An anthology of horror tales from Indonesia, most being too short to make much distinction,, the exception being The Mo Brothers gore-drenched first film Dara
Film spinoff from the Tales from the Darkside tv series, this is an anthology of three horror tales, the result is a surprisingly slick and well made film
Director Freddie Francis had had great success making several of the Amicus horror anthologies then went independent to made another Amicus-styled anthology here with mixed results
The first sequel to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre where Tobe Hooper returns and pushes the series into an outrageously black sense of humour
Prequel to the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, which sets out to tell the origin story of the cannibal family. New director Jonathan Liebesman pushes the gore and sadism to Torture Porn extremes
Eli Roth’s homage to the slasher film that comes with a dark sense of humour and a series of novelty deaths that rival the best of the 80s slasher heyday
A horror anthology featuring episodes from seven different directors. As with other anthologies, the episodes vary in quality, ranging between the so-so, the mostly quite good and one standout segment, although it should be noted that not all are horror stories
Standout horror anthology designed to highlight episodes from three Asian directors – Hong Kong’s Fruit Chan, South Korea’s Park Chan-wook and Japan’s Takashi Miike – all of whom are on top form
A great example of the lurid sensationalism with which films of the so-called grindhouse era were sold, designed with a go-for-broke trashiness intended to get you in the door, something that is promptly let down by the shoddiness of the film itself
Live-action adaptation of a manga about a teenager who becomes part of a secret world of flesh-eating ghouls. The set-up comes with some imagination but the film suffers from an uninvolving story and a reliance on unconvincing CGI
Modest post-holocaust film that tries to do something different to the usual action derbies of Mad Max 2 et al, focusing on the survival efforts of a group of young people. It doesn’t entirely find them before throwing in standard wasteland crazies but the journey there is interesting
Acclaimed director Claire Denis makes a quite out there film in which people are obsessively driven to devour others during the act of sex
If there ever was a genre actually called grindhouse, this is a prime example. A sordid little film about an undertaker and two diner owners killing spree to drum up business and serve the remains as the special of the day n the diner