After seeing D'Amato's Beyond the Darkness and hearing about how rough and gory "Anthropophagus" was, I was particularly excited when I stumbled upon a copy of it at my local used film store. What extreme horror and death awaited me? Would I be able to handle it?

Much to my surprise, the film ended up being kind of a derivative slasher. There's a crazy killer offing crazy kids one by crazy one, plus there is a crazy final girl that ends up finding some crazy way to kill the crazy killer. The only difference? The killer likes human flesh. Crazy!

Is it gory? Well...not really, actually. There are some gory scenes, the most (in)famous one being the fetus ripped from the woman's womb and being eaten by the monster cannibal guy, but nothing so tremendously bad to deserve it being banned all over the place. Tisa Farrow, who had just been in Zombie, serves as a reminder of what a real splatter-fest looks like as she runs around in terror.

Does it set up a great atmosphere like Beyond the Darkness? Well, again not really. There are a few good points, like when two of the characters (one of which is blind) are running up a flight of stairs escaping the monster man, and the camera stays right at their faces as they flee; another scene where Tisa Farrow is hanging by a rope, trying to climb some stairs to escape the hungry cannibal. Most of the film consists of generally pointless scenes that try and set-up some sort of reason to care for the characters, but end up falling flat. The problem is, there isn't anything there to care about. What they set up for the characters is: they are friends who are on an island. Some like each other, some are jealous of each other. The End. Then they die. So for me, it was way too much Scooby-Doo wandering around that ultimately serves no purpose.

When the killer finally makes his appearance about three and a half fourths into the movie, it is a welcome relief from all the dullness that had been permeating. Though it's supposed to be serious, Eastman makes the guy so nutso that it's really kind of funny. His backstory is complete nonsense (that we get in a quick flashback that apparently plays on a cavern wall) and really only made me irritated because of what could've been. A guy going crazy because his family was adrift at sea and he ate them to survive? How can you screw that up? Well, watch this movie and find out. I mean, a jumping cat scare? That involves a piano? Really? Plus a corpse that apparently becomes a frog that jumps across the room to get a cheap shriek scare?

I know I'm giving this movie a hard time, and unfortunately a lot of that comes from the hyped up reputation it got, but the movie wasn't really that big of a damn deal. Once it got going I somewhat enjoyed it, and any movie that has a final scene where someone eats their own intestines gets at least a few points from me, but for the most part it reeks of wasted potential. When one of the writers (Eastman, who played Crazy Killer Man) mentions that he wasn't too proud of the final product, there is something wrong.

One interesting point: On the documentary that comes with the movie, D'Amato (real name Aristide Massaccesi, R.I.P.) says that the caves they shot in (in Greece) had real ancient bones in them. They brought in some fake plastic ones to amp up the scenery, but when they returned the plastic ones, they ended up packing up the bones from the ancient burial grounds as well! So at the time of the interview Massaccesi had some ancient Christian bones in his basement.

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