FRANCO FEBRUARY - DAY 29! DEVIL HUNTER (1980) (Severin Films BLu-ray Review)

CANNIBAL TERROR (1981) / DEVIL HUNTER (1980) 

Label: Severin Films

Region Code: Region FREE

Duration: 93 Minutes / 102 Minutes

Rating: Unrated

Audio: English 2.0 PCM Uncompressed, Spanish 2.0 PCM Uncompressed 

Video: 1080p HD Widescreen 

Director: Alain Deruelle / Jess Franco

Cast: Robert Foster, Pamela Stanford, Burt Altman / Ursula Fellner, Al Cliver, Robert Foster, Gisela Hahn

CANNIBAL TERROR (1981)

There are awful b-movies and then there's Alain Deruell's Cannibal Terror, a French/Spanish co-production that is just mind-numbingly dumb from start to finish, with a minimal plot that involves a pair of kidnappers and a kind hearted whore who abduct the adolescent daughter of a wealthy couple. Afterward they head for the jungle with the kid while they wait for the ransom, but wouldn't you just know it... their headed for cannibal country!

The movie is straight-up horrible beginning with a cast of truly wooden stiffs. At least one of which, actress Sylvia Solar, being kind enough to bare her ample bosom on more than one occasion, enough to spice it up a bit but not enough to save it from trash cinema Armageddon. There's a rope bondage rape scene that is a thing of true b-movie bullshit, a scenario so traumatic the victim finds herself dancing topless in the very next scene in front of the man who raped her just moments ago, standard b-movie logic.

The stand-ins for the "cannibals" are pale-skinned actors with moustaches and lamb-chops, their faces are painted with dayglow grease paint leaving them looking more like Ziggy Stardust rejects than the flesh-hungry cannibals they're meant to be. Some of whom are very obviously laughing through the more "gruesome" gut-munching scenes, if you look closely several of the young child actors playing cannibals can be seen wearing tennis shoes, yup, it's that sort of production, a Eurocine cheapie for sure.The gut-munching is like most everything else in the movie, horrible, with too few scenes of pale-skinned cannibals tearing away a pig intestines, it's amusing stuff, but this falls rather short of rivaling Cannibal Holocaust or Cannibal Ferox, in fact, this falls short of being as on par with those nineties era Bruno Mattei cannibal movies. Adding annoyance to injury is an awful score that at times feels like an epileptic organist scored it, and with a sound design that loops in a cycle of bird, duck and hissing reptile noises ad nauseum. This is pretty cheap and mighty awful and by several measures one of the worst cannibal movies I have suffered through yet, plodding along painfully with way too many scenes of walking through the jungle, this is the Lord of the Rings of cannibal films in that respect. 

Special Features:
- The Way Of All Flesh – Interview With Director Alain Deruelle in French with English Subtitles (3 Mins) HD
- Spicy Deleted Scene (2 Mins) HD
-Theatrical Trailer (3 Mins) HD

DEVIL HUNTER (1980) 

Onto the second feature on this disc I must say that I expected a bit more coming from Eurocult pioneer Jess Franco, a director who can be a bit odd, but who has made more than a handful of movies I dig quite a bit, usually of the erotic variety. Cannibalism is a genre he did not dabble in very often from what I can see, and unfortunately I can see why, but just to put it into perspective this is nowhere near as brain-burning awful as the first half of this double bill, Cannibal Terror.

This time out we again have another kidnap gone wrong scenario, when actress Laura Crawford (Ursula Buchfellner, Hellhole Women, a.k.a. Sadomania) is whisked away by thugs into the South American jungle. There they encounter a tribe who are not so much cannibals themselves as they are sacrificing victims to a nude, bug-eyed, cannibal God who stalks the jungle in search of naked prey, natch.

Peter (Al Cliver, The Beyond) is hired by the movie studio to recover the kidnapped starlet and heads into the jungle to do just that... and there you have the whole movie in a nutshell. This time out the native people are slightly more realistic in appearance than in Cannibal Terror, but not less stereotyped and exploited by Franco for his own movie. There's plenty of blond eye candy by way of a mostly nude Ursula Buchfellner and loads of dancing ebony-skinned natives, Franco's a bit out of his element here but ticks to what he knows, naked people and weird scenarios.

Franco manages to squeeze a watchable movie out of this one with some decent cheapie production value and some much appreciated nudity, but falls woefully short of the seminal Cannibal Ferox and Cannibal Holocaust, but it does manage to be trashy fun that is at least competently made, which is more than I can say about Cannibal Terror.

Special Features:
- Sexo Canibal – Interview With Director Jess Franco (17 Mins) HD
- Spirit Of The B Hive – Interview With Actor Bertrand Altman (11 Mins) HDAudio/Video: Severin have done a fine job of bringing these trashy cannibal terrors to Blu-ray with new HD transfers, they appear properly polished without having been overly manipulated, while the source material limits just how good these are gonna look in HD they do a damn fine job, all things considered. Audio comes by way of both English and Spanish uncompressed PCM 2.0 Mono with no subtitle option available for either version. The Blu-ray errantly lists the audio options as English and French, while I may have flunked both French and Spanish back in my school days the track certainly didn't sound French to me.

Extras for Cannibal Terror are a deleted scene with some more nudity, a 20-minute interview with director Alain Deruelle and trailer for the movie. Extras for Devil Hunter include a fun interview with the typically chain-smoking director as he discusses cannibal movies and how he doesn't care for them, speaking a bit about Ruggero Deodato's iconic cannibal movie and discussing a few of the actresses on the movie. There's also an interview with actor/stuntman Bertrand Altman who speaks about transitioning from stuntman to actor, and his experience on this movie and others.

While I do think these are some of the worst cannibal movies I have seen to date I do applaud Severin Films for putting them together on a reasonably priced double feature disc with some decent extras. If bad cinema gives you a chubby you best get out the Kleenex, it's gonna be a sticky night.  

EMANUELLE: BLACK VELVET (1976) (Full Moon Blu-ray Review)

EMANUELLE: BLACK VELVET (1976) 

aka BLACK EMMANUELLE, WHITE EMMANUELLE

aka VELUTTO NERO

Label: Full Moon Features
Region Code: Region-Free
Rating: Unrated
Duration: 93 Minutes
Audio: English Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo and 5.1 Surround with No Subtitles Options
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (2.35:1)
Director: Brunello Rondi
Cast: Gabriele Tinti, Laura Gemser, Nieves Navarro, Al Cliver, Annie Belle

Directed by frequent Federico Fellini co-writer Brunello Rondi (8 1/2, La Dolce Vita) the softcore flick Emanuelle: Black Velvet (1976) again stars the gorgeous cult-goddess Laura Gemser (Women's Prison Massacre), but not as the usual intrepid, horny photographer named Emanuelle, for some odd reason in this entry she portrays a horny fashion model named Laura, on a photo shoot with her knock-out gal pal Pina (Annie Belle, Absurd) in Egypt, along with her fashion photographer boyfriend Carlo (Gabrielle Tinti, Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals). Carlo is a bit of a mean-spirited tyrant, regularly calling her a bitch, forcing her to pose semi-nude next to the carcass of a dead dog, a huge pile of dung, and later demanding she cozy up to the corpses of massacred Arabs that they happen upon in the desert. After all that he then rapes her when she gets a bit too mouthy for his liking, which in true Emanuelle/

exploitation fashion turns into a semi-consensual male fantasy. 

When the women grow tired of Carlos' cruel treatment they strand him in the desert and drive to the estate of Pina's mother Crystal  (Nieves Navarro, Sex and Black Magic) and equally promiscuous sister Magda (Ziggy Zanger, Black Cobra). The mother is in the thrall of younger mystic guru named Horatio (Al Cliver, Fulci's Zombie), and both she and Magda are banging the hired help, a lucky fella named Ali (Tarek Al Nancy, The Braves). Rounding out the circle is a failed actor turned charlatan spiritual leader named Hal (Feodor Chaliapin Jr., Inferno), who seems to have a predilection for teenage boys. 

This entry is even more plotless than most of the other Black Emanuell entries, but what it has going for it is some arthouse style and attractive Egyptian desert scenery courtesy of cinematographer Gastone di Giovanni, The Night Evelyn Came Out of Her Grave), with editing by Bruno Mattei (Rats: Night of Terror), accentuated by a moody, atmospheric score from composer Alberto Baldan Bembo (Nude For Satan).

The casting is also rather interesting as well, onscreen we have a pair of real-life Euro-cult couples by way of Gemser and Tinto, and Belle and Cliver. Sadly, neither of which elevates the bland hook-ups in this flick, much like Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade the sensuality of the softcore thrills are pretty flaccid and without chemistry, but both Laura Gemser and short-cut blonde Annie Belle are both outstanding beauties, and their nude time onscreen solo and together does not go unappreciated! Something I thought was weird was that Gemser loses a lot of the agency of her previous Black Emanuelle films, the character is not as strong, and actually does not have all that much to do except look splendid for the camera, which she does. We also have Lucio Fulci regular Al Cliver (The Beyond) who plays his mystic like a too-stoned hippie lost in his own thoughts, but somehow it works for the character and for the vibe of the film. 

Lacking a coherent story, there is no story here, the film just sort of washes over you, with a few sequences that comes off like a fever dream. The best of the bunch being a ritual ceremony in an Egyptian temple where Horatio has hypnotized everyone, and Gemser's character inexplicably sacrifices a goat and then drinks its blood before erupting into an erotic spasm of the floor, then attempting to burn her face off with a torch! For my money there's just not enough of these sort of shocker moments, but Gemser being forced to pose nude with a decaying dead pooch was pretty bizarre, as was seeing Nieves Navarro catch a face full of spunk during an otherwise unremarkable softcore blowjob.

Audio/Video: Emanuelle: Black Velvet (1976) arrives on region-free Blu-ray from Full Moon Features in 1080p, advertised as being remastered from the originally camera negative. Colors and skin tones look natural, black levels are adequate, and there is a layer of grain but it looks to have been at least partially scrubbed away. 

Audio comes by way of English dubbed Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo and 5.1 surround. This is the longer European version and, as such, will occasionally lapse into Italian language with English subtitles where there is no English-dub, but there are no subtitles for the English dialogue. Its beyond time for Full Moon to get onboard with uncompressed audio and subtitles across their catalog. The dubbed-dialogue at times has an odd echoey quality, as of the dub were recorded in a bathroom or large room, its not ruinous but its there. That said, the dialogue was never hard to understand, though the Foley work goes a bit overboard with the howling wind, but the weird, cool score from Alberto Baldan Bembo sounds fine in the mix. The only extras are 8-minutes of euro-cult trailers. 

Special Features:

- Trailers: Barbed Wire Dolls (1 min), Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun (3 min), Naked Girl Murdered in the Park (1 min),  Satanic Sisters (1 min), Voodoo Passion (1 min), Women in Cell Block 9 (1 min) 

Emanuelle: Black Velvet (1976), much like Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade (1978), is not the cream of the BLack Emanuelle series, but it is a offbeat, artfully lensed entry that seems to be going for more of an erotic arthouse vibe than most of these flicks attempt, and I kind of love that about it. If you're a fan of smutty Euro-cult this is an interesting entry, and seeing Laura Gemser and Annie Belle onscreen together is a absolute fire, and it's got enough weird stuff in it, like Gemser drinking sacrificial goat blood, to keep the exploitation fans happy.  

More screenshots from the Blu-ray: