Cannibal Ferox
(aka Make them die slowly)
(aka Woman from deep river)

Umberto Lenzi (1981, Italy)

Cast: Giovanni Lombardo Radice, Lorraine De Selle, Danilo Mattei, Zora Kerova, Walter Lucchini, Meg Fleming

Plot:
Anthropologists take a trip to the jungles of Colombia to study native cannibals. Instead, they find a band of drug dealers, using the natives to harvest the cocoa leaf. After awhile, the natives are tired of being tortured slaves, and turn on their masters, as well as the anthropologists, thus filling the screen with gruesome splatter!

Appreciation: was gonna give a 7 but I’ll give a 6/10 for the gratuitous animal torture.
I was anxious to see this one, having heard so much about it, many positive critics as well as many negative ones. It ended up being not as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, I actually enjoyed most of it.
First off, I was surprised by the quality of the tape, i.e. I thought it was a much lower budget film. The directing looked amateurish. For example, the constant abuse of zoom-in and zoom-out was irritating me at first, but I found it quite funny after a while. The plot-line was laughable, in many ways. I mean, who the hell would go in the middle of the jungle to find out if there are really cannibals? Why would people want to stay just for fun in a temporarily half-deserted cannibal village? Also, can someone explain how you can prove the whole world that cannibalism don’t exist just by checking out some random tribe? And right in the middle of the movie, when it gets to the "serious stuff" it just cuts and the next scene we are in New York. WTF? Doesn’t make much sense, does it?
Hey, its an italian horror movie, who the hell cares about making sense, as long as there’s gore to compensate. Now that’s the problem here. The FX are really well made and inventive, there is particularly one breast-taking scene (haha.. had to say this). If you’re gonna see a cannibal movie, you expect to see plenty of gruesome gore. In the first half of the movie that is substituted by some gratuitous animal deaths worthy of Discovery Channel. Those (totally pointless) scenes are actually more chocking than the rest of the cannibal scenes. The last half has some nice gore but not enough to make the viewer forget about the downsides of the movie.
Other than that, the soundtrack was real good and the acting solid.

Other suggestions: Ebola Syndrome, Cannibal Holocaust