Cannibal Ferox

Cannibal Ferox, also known as Make Them Die Slowly, is a 1981 Italian cannibal exploitation horror film written and directed by Umberto Lenzi. Upon its release, the film's US distributor claimed it was "the most violent film ever made". Cannibal Ferox was also claimed to be "banned in 31 countries", some of which lifted their bans only recently.

Plot

The film begins in New York City. A man buys heroin from his dealer, Mike. The man meets two mobsters who are also looking for Mike, because he owes them $100,000. The mobsters shoot the man and leave him for dead.

In Paraguay, siblings Rudy and Gloria and their friend Pat prepare for a journey into the rain forest. They plan to prove Gloria's theory that cannibalism is a myth. The trio encounter Mike and his partner Joe. Joe is badly wounded; Mike explains that they were attacked by cannibals. During the night, Gloria goes missing and Rudy finds a native village while looking for her.

Due to Joe's injuries, the travelers decide to stay in the nearly deserted village. Mike seduces the naive Pat. In a cocaine-fueled rage, he encourages Pat to kill a native girl. She is unable to do it, so Mike kills the girl himself. In his dying moments, Joe reveals that he and Mike were responsible for the cannibals' aggression. They came to the region to exploit the natives for emeralds and cocaine, taking advantage of their trust in white men. One day, while high on cocaine, Mike brutally tortured and killed their native guide in full view of the tribe. A badly charred body, previously believed to be that of a different guide, is actually this native. Mike kidnapped a native girl to lead them out of the jungle, but the outsiders were followed and attacked.

Cannibalism

Cannibalism is the act or practice of humans eating the flesh or internal organs of other human beings. A person who practices cannibalism is called a cannibal. The expression cannibalism has been extended into zoology to mean one individual of a species consuming all or part of another individual of the same species as food, including sexual cannibalism.

The Island Carib people of the Lesser Antilles, from whom the word cannibalism derives, acquired a long-standing reputation as cannibals following the recording of their legends in the 17th century. Some controversy exists over the accuracy of these legends and the prevalence of actual cannibalism in the culture. Cannibalism was widespread in the past among humans in many parts of the world, continuing into the 19th century in some isolated South Pacific cultures, and to the present day in parts of tropical Africa. Cannibalism was practiced in New Guinea and in parts of the Solomon Islands, and flesh markets existed in some parts of Melanesia.Fiji was once known as the "Cannibal Isles". Cannibalism has been well documented around the world, from Fiji to the Amazon Basin to the Congo to Māori New Zealand.Neanderthals are believed to have practiced cannibalism, and Neanderthals may have been eaten by anatomically modern humans.

Mystery meat navigation

Mystery meat navigation (also known as MMN) is a disparaging term coined in 1998 by Vincent Flanders, author and designer of the website Web Pages That Suck, to describe a web page where the destination of the link is not visible until the user points their cursor at it. Such interfaces lack a user-centered design, emphasizing aesthetic appearance, white space, and the concealment of relevant information over basic practicality and functionality.

The epithet "mystery meat" refers to the meat products often served in American public school cafeterias whose forms have been so thoroughly reprocessed that their exact types can no longer be identified by their appearances: like them, the methods of MMN are clear to the producer but baffling to the consumer.

Flanders originally and temporarily described the phenomenon as Saturnic navigation in reference to the Saturn Corporation, whose company website epitomized this phenomenon. Flanders writes, "The typical form of MMN is represented by menus composed of unrevealing icons that are replaced with explicative text only when the mouse cursor hovers over them".

Umberto Lenzi

Umberto Lenzi (born 6 August 1931), is an Italian film director who was very active in Italian international co-production peplums, Eurospy films, spaghetti westerns, Macaroni Combat movies, Poliziotteschi films, cannibal films and giallo murder mysteries (in addition to writing many of the screenplays himself).

Life and career

Lenzi was born in Massa Marittima, Grosseto, southern Tuscany. He is the writer/director of two highly controversial exploitation films: Eaten Alive! (1980) and Cannibal Ferox (1981) as well as the director of the film adaptation of the Italian comic book Kriminal (1966). He was one of the first Italian directors to get involved in the giallo film craze (along with Mario Bava and Dario Argento), and his jungle adventure Man From Deep River is credited as being the film that started the Italian cannibal film genre later popularized by Ruggero Deodato, Jess Franco and others. Lenzi has claimed in interviews however that he was never too enamored of the cannibal films he made, being much prouder of his war films, his police crime films and his westerns. Lenzi has said in interviews that Man From Deep River was his best cannibal film (he said he only did the other two to make a quick buck), and his favorite gialli were Orgasmo and Seven Bloodstained Orchids (while he absolutely detested Spasmo). He said his Black Demons was another of his all-time favorites, a "potential masterpiece" marred only by the poor acting of the unattractive female lead he was forced to work with.