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Cannibal Apocalypse merges about eight or nine different subgenres together … yet somehow, it all works!
Cannibal Apocalypse is definitely one of the most inventive zombie flicks of the ‘80s!
Cannibal Apocalypse walked so The Walking Dead … well, could walk, I guess.
Decades before the AMC series became a cable television juggernaut, this still relatively obscure 1980 exploitation flick gave us the first zombies to overrun Atlanta. And yes, the film actually was shot on location in Atlanta, even if it is a classical Italian zombie flick by every other metric.
This film was made by sort of an exploitation movie dream team. The story was penned by Dardano Sacchetti, who wrote a ton of Lucio Fulci classics including The Beyond, Zombie and The New York Ripper AND the first two Demons movies. Furthermore, it was directed by Antonio Margheriti, who helmed a bajillion cult classic, dubbed-to-death drive-in favorites like Yor, The Hunter From The Future and Jungle Raiders. And who do we have portraying our leading man in Cannibal Apocalypse? Why, none other than John Saxon himself — and if you don’t know him as Nancy’s dad in Elm Street, you probably recognize him from Enter the Dragon, Black Christmas or The Appaloosa.
Yeah, the film may have the word “cannibal” in its title but this is obviously a zombie movie in the vein of something like The Crazies or Shivers. But it’s a very different kind of zombie movie that merges a whole bunch of disparate subgenres together. It’s a war movie, it’s a procedural cop movie, it’s an action movie and towards the end it turns into an all out siege movie. And the entire time, we’ve got people having their skin chewed off and the tongues ripped out of their skulls nonstop. There’s not really a surprise that this thing wound up on the United Kingdom’s infamous “Video Nasty” lists back in the day; but what’s an even bigger surprise is that Cannibal Apocalypse is unironically an enjoyable hybrid horror movie, and one that feels pretty far ahead of its time to boot.
This isn’t another shameless Dawn of the Dead clone. Really, it probably has more in common with a movie like Assault on Precinct 13 or the Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake from the ‘70s. You’ll also find elements of Apocalypse Now, Dirty Harry and even Lolita (regrettably) wedged into the story. It might sound like a mess, but it’s an unusually coherent movie for a flick of its type. Not that it means Cannibal Apocalypse is a predictable movie by any stretch. Because it certainly isn’t.
The film begins with a flashback to ‘Nam (yes, complete with obvious stock footage that’s not even the same grade of film stock as the rest of the movie.) We watch Saxon and his platoon sneak their way into a Viet Cong stronghold on a P.O.W. rescue mission — which is basically just an excuse to watch a million squibs explode and a sequence where a woman is set on fire. Once the troops finally do find the prisoners of war, they’re shocked to find out they’ve become full-blown cannibals with an insatiable hunger for human skin. So naturally, they just kind of play it off and figure nothing bad will happen stateside when they bring them back home.
The first sign that things aren’t going well is when one of those P.O.W.s lurches his way into a movie theater, catches a couple making out and decides to turn them into a mincemeat. Since the movie is in Atlanta, he hides out in a furniture store right across the street, gets into a shootout with a generic motorcycle gang and winds up getting an entire SWAT time called in … and in a wild coincidence, his old squad leader Saxon just so happens to be the hostage negotiator. One thing leads to another, the wacko cannibal is taken in for “surveillance” and then this movie starts getting REALLY weird.
You see, Saxon is stuck in an ailing marriage and the girl next door really wants to jump his bones. The problem there is she’s DEFINITELY supposed to be a high school student and old Johnny can’t hide his sexual predator tendencies for much longer. There’s a major subplot I could spoil for you, but I’m not gonna … for a LOT of reasons, really.
Saxon ends up visiting the two cannibals from ‘Nam at some underground psychiatric hospital. We finally get a little exposition on what’s causing their condition, but right after they turn their incisors towards a female scientist and … well, let’s just say this movie may begin with two cannibals, but it doesn’t END with just two cannibals. Slowly but surely the ranks of the flesh munchers increases, to the point we’ve got an entire army of skin chewers sulking around in the sewers of Atlanta, destined for a climactic showdown with a paramilitary force armed with flamethrowers. Needless to say — things get chaotic, and they get chaotic FAST.
Like a lot of people I avoided Cannibal Apocalypse for years and years, simply because I thought it was some watered down ripoff of Cannibal Holocaust or Cannibal Ferox. But no, Cannibal Apocalypse is its own beast and it’s WAY better (and more messed up) than I ever could’ve anticipated. It’s definitely one of the more original takes on the whole zombie shtick we got in the early ‘80s and it almost portends later flicks like Return of the Living Dead and Land of the Dead, where the zombies were anything but mindless ghouls. It’s not every day I found myself “gee, I wish somebody would remake this movie,” but in the case of Cannibal Apocalypse, I think there’s more than enough fertile ground for an update. I mean, the original was filmed in Atlanta and not a single Waffle House got attacked at 2 in the morning; that’s the kind of cinematic oversight that needs correction as soon as possible.
You go into something like Cannibal Apocalypse with rock-bottom expectations but it steadily begins to win you over. It’s so excessive and over the top that you can’t help but laugh at all, from the preposterously inappropriate disco soundtrack to all of the police chief’s hyper-profane and hyper-cliche musings. At a time when many horror movies were painfully paint by numbers, Cannibal Apocalypse keeps you on your toes and hits you with so many out of left field swerves it almost becomes an inadvertent master class on subverting audience expectations. Pretty much anything can happen during any five-minute stretch of the film and, for the most part, it totally does.
It’s pretty easy to roll the dice on an early ‘80s, no-budget zombie movie — usually but not always made by European shlockmeisters — and completely strike out. But Cannibal Apocalypse is well worth watching, especially if you want to see a take on the tried-and-true zombie formula that hasn’t been done to death a gazillion times. It’s absurd, it’s comically violent, it has egregious values dissonance and on top of everything else, it’s got some excellent cannibal action going on. This movie has “guilty pleasure” written all over it and if you don’t have anything else going on this weekend you could do a LOT worse than this one. Heck, you might even make it part of an Antonio Margheriti double feature; might I recommend pairing it with Mr. Hercules Against Karate?
