Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #137530 in DVD
• Released on: 2000-05-23
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 90 minutes

Amazon.com
A hot-tempered blue-collar butcher kills just one man, a bullying taxi driver whom surely no one will miss, and by the end of the week winds up with a veritable stockyard of corpses in his tiny home during a Spanish summer heat wave. It all starts when Marco's girlfriend insists he go to the police, and he strangles her to keep her quiet. Soon everyone he cares for is dropping by the increasingly crowded house looking for one victim or another, and Marco, as out of control as a rabid dog, keeps on killing, one cover-up leading to another. The stinking pile of bodies soon has all the neighborhood dogs smacking their lips, until he starts dropping his fetid victims into the slaughterhouse grinder, piece by piece. Though it sounds more like a farce than a humid thriller, it's neither a black comedy nor a gory bloodfest (despite the misleading title, there is no cannibal in this picture). Marco turns from macho hothead to doleful wretch as he numbly executes each successive victim as if it's a tortured chore demanded by mocking gods. Writer-director Eloy de la Iglesia doesn't shirk on the dirty deeds--one unlucky fellow gets a cleaver full on the face--but this is less a spectacle than a woebegone portrait of the spiritual disintegration of an angry antihero. --Sean Axmaker

Review
"A Very Tense, Claustrophobic Thriller... Very Reminiscent Of Polanski's REPULSION!" --DVD Drive-In

Customer Reviews

Where's the beef?
Real slaughterhouse footage and scenes of dirty urban slums set the tone for this stark and obsessive Spanish horror flick. A slaughterhouse employee named Marcos gets attacked by a cabdriver who takes objection when he and his girlfriend are making out in the back seat, and Marcos kills him. This sets in motion a week of killing, first to cover up the cabdriver's death, and afterward to keep the bodies piling up in his bedroom a secret. He tries to dispose of the body parts at the slaughterhouse, but he can't do it fast enough and soon the stench of the corpses is becoming a problem, and Marcos slips further and further into madness. Weird, pseudo-sleazy film that works even though it doesn't even attempt to live up to its title - there's *no cannibalism*. The dubbing is pretty bad and there's not much gore (most of the nastiness happens off-screen), but there's plenty of atmosphere and a sense of desperation builds in Marco's apartment. The DVD looks great except there is a little "film flicker" in a few scenes - nothing bad though. It's not big on splatter, but it's still worth a look for Eurohorror fans.

Old Fashioned Gore, Italian style.
This one needs a newly restored digital release, but if you like a bit of slaughter house humor and screaming young women, go for this one. Eloy de la Iglesia does it a bit differently, and as usual, interestingly. Not for kids or the squeamish. Great for Halloween parties. Get it now and invite the neighbors over!

Cannibal Man (1971) d: De La Iglesia, Eloy
This film is one of the better-directed movies that made it onto the Video Nasties list. A gloomy and depressing Spanish movie much in the style of Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer (1989). The movie tells the story of Marcos, a disturbed young man (Vincente Parra) who has been very desensitized by his job in a local slaughterhouse. He gets tired of butchering cows and starts killing people! One night while out on a date he goes "postal" and kills a cab driver in a heated argument. He later strangles his girlfriend (who witnessed the murder), then kills his brother for trying to convince him to turn himself in. He also cuts his brother's fiancée's throat when she discovers the bodies under the bed in his apartment. Her father comes looking for her, and in one of the gorier scenes, he is hit with a cleaver to the face. After slaughtering a woman who comes to visit his apartment things begin to literally stink, and the local dogs start hanging around. (Be sure to check out how many times dogs appear in this film, very strange indeed). The killer unsuccessfully takes his victims to work with him, and tries to turn them into hamburger. Realizing that plan was not going to work, Marcos finally turns himself in when a homosexual neighbor offers to help with the disposal of the bodies in trade for...favors. I enjoyed this one, but it left me with a weird dark feeling.