THE DUKE ASCENDS
THE MOUNTAIN OF THE
CANNIBAL GOD
THE MOUNTAIN OF THE
CANNIBAL GOD
What might one expect to uncover in a filmic affair by the name
of Mountain Of The Cannibal God? A mountain, one would suppose,
might feature prominently. Similarly, I don't think anyone would
scoff were one to assume a flesh-eating deity might be mentioned
somewhere between the opening and closing credits, either.
Probably not going to be much good, one would muse, before
noting that it is most likely an Italian exploitation flick what
will have no end of gut-shredding cruelty.
of Mountain Of The Cannibal God? A mountain, one would suppose,
might feature prominently. Similarly, I don't think anyone would
scoff were one to assume a flesh-eating deity might be mentioned
somewhere between the opening and closing credits, either.
Probably not going to be much good, one would muse, before
noting that it is most likely an Italian exploitation flick what
will have no end of gut-shredding cruelty.
One needn’t necessarily consider the possibility that the
cinematography might be beautiful, that the camera might gaze
upon the lush jungle location like as if it were one of those
soap-opera women who get all naked for the FHM, or the MAXIM,
or the other “lifestyle” magazines.
One probably wouldn’t assume Ursula Andress, star of Dr. No and
Casino Royale, would have anything to do with it all. She most
certainly wouldn’t be naked, you’d be thinking, even if by some
chance she were involved.
Well think the fuck again, man, because not only is the
photography stunningly gorgeous, but also the woman from the
James Bond has the starring role, and not only does she do the
heroics in the jungle, but also finds time for a spot of the
old full-frontal, culminating in a bout of body-painting
involving a couple native lasses.
Not that The Duke cares a flying jot of fuck for the nudity or
the “sexing” when it comes to matters of cinema, but for folks
what ever wondered what that woman from the Sean Connery film
might look like in the nude, now they can put an end to the
speculation.
The catch, I’m afraid, is that you’ll also have to put up with
folks getting their sex organs cut the hell off in
close-up, and also some stuff with lizards being gutted and a
fair dose of the entrail-removal.
Mountain Of The Cannibal God, or La Montagna del dio cannibale,
was released in 1978, a full two years before the ultimate
cannibal flick of all ever, Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal
Holocaust, yet riding on the success of Deodato’s earlier,
similarly themed Ultimo mondo cannibale and Umberto Lenzi’s
Deep River Savages.
The Italian film industry, y’see, is nothing if not quick to
capitalize on a trend. No sooner had Romero let a load of
undead sons a bitches loose in a shopping mall, for example,
than theatres were throbbing with the pulsating synth scores of
a couple dozen off-shoots. Zombie Flesh Eaters, Zombie Creeping
Flesh, The Zombie Dead, The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue,
The Passion Of The Zombie, and countless other flicks what
dealt with the “zombie” were all rolled out in order that a
small fortune might be made now that the public were keen to
see a bunch of folks get eaten in the neck by green-faced,
decomposing fiends.
So, then, when producers noticed that a lot of folks were quite
fond of the jungle-adventures with the added guts and gore,
inspired in equal measure by Dawn Of The Dead and Mondo Cane, a
horde of the foul motherfuckers flooded the drive-in’s and
grindhouses. Needless to say, the quality of the pictures
varied somewhat, from Deodato’s aforementioned, sublimely
subversive Cannibal Holocaust, to Lenzi’s painfully pointless
Eaten Alive.
One needs to ask oneself, perhaps, why the Italians were so
fond of the old claret-flinging? The Italians have been
responsible, in fact, for the majority of the most disturbing,
relentlessly violent, uncomfortable and punishing flicks ever
made, from Salo to Suspiria and beyond The Beyond. Was it
anything to do with the still-fresh memories of fascist
dictatorship, so real in its own horrors that only the most
extreme of fictional offerings could provide any catharsis? If
so, why are there so few German examples of such carnivorous
carnage? Maybe it was just a hunch that the more visceral a
horror flick, the more money it made? Who knows?
As a cannibal exploitation flick, Sergio Martino’s Mountain… is
certainly tamer than most, which is not to say it doesn’t have
its fair share of ghastly limb-lopping and organ-chewing.
Compared to, say, The Exorcist, it’s a relentlessly sadistic
onslaught. Compared to Cannibal Ferox, it’s basically a gung-ho
jungle adventure with a particularly messy finale.
The cannibals themselves don’t even show up until the last
twenty minutes, so any gore hitherto is of the fairly tame
knife-stuck-in-leg variety, with a couple notable exceptions,
what will be discussed in a minute.
What happens is that Ursula Andress goes looking for her
husband, on account of the daft bugger went snooping around in
New Guinea (an unfathomably unexplored and barbaric region, the
opening titles assure us), and has disappeared amidst the
trees, grass, snakes etc.
Andress and her less-than-pleasant brother enlist the services
of another explorer type, one what looks like a young Oliver
Reed, in fact, to help find this wandering spouse.
The explorer, though, is apprehensive, considering that such a
jaunt will take them to the mountain of the title, an area
shrouded in superstition and hazard. “It’d be hard enough for a
man”, he explains, “It’d be impossible for a woman.”
Such PC concerns are soon flung the hell aside, though, on
account of there are guts to be shredded, and there’s scarce
hope of a decapitation in this stuffy old office, is what.
15 minutes in, we get the first taste of gore, and it is
decidedly repellent.
The cannibal flicks, y’see, were generally a low budget bunch.
In order to provide sufficient savagery, then, filmmakers had
to either concoct costly special effects, or grab a nearby
monkey and rip it the hell apart. Most took the latter option.
You might argue that Cannibal Holocaust exhibited such ghastly
disregard for life in order to convince the viewer that all the
human-slaying was similarly authentic. I mean come on, you’ve
saw a giant turtle get dismembered, and it was obviously real,
so who would argue that the burning, raping, castrating wasn’t
just as authentic?
Even Coppola cut the hell out of a buffalo for the sake of a
suitably shocking crescendo in Apocalypse Now. No one feels the
need to debate that particular bout of animal-slaughter when
discussing the merits of Coppola’s film about a bloke listens
to The Doors and then goes mad.
The difference, don’t you know, is that Apocalypse Now is a
“legitimate” film, with Oscars and everything. Don’t go
comparing sleazy jungle flicks to that film about The Nam,
Duke, that’d be insane is what.
The Duke, however, happens to think that even in the cases of
Deodato or Coppola, the slaughtering of animals for art,
however worthy the piece may be, is indefensible.
But Duke, they cry, that’s what those tribes are really like,
don’t you know. It’s a ritual.
The “authenticity” defense falls on its arse, though, when one
considers the dozens of decapitations onscreen, and yet those
actors are still popping the fuck up all over the damn place.
Shit, look at that. That’s a good three, four paragraphs handed
over to contextual analysis and aesthetic critique and so on
when all a man meant to do was tell you about a tarantula gets
beats to hell, its legs continuing to writhe although the guts
are smeared around them, and then a lizard gets stabbed,
skinned, gutted and eaten, by way of apologizing to some Gods
or other for the bout of arachnid abuse.
Sickening, man. And like I said a while ago, back in the
midst's of a few sentences back, this kind of hoopla was
utilized, in part, because filmmakers were too skint and too
lacking in imagination to concoct fictional mayhem on such a
scale. Martino, though, that son of a bitch had a shit-load of
the green to play with. He hadn’t even the old “but we couldn’t
afford proper effects” shtick to fall back on. Look at the
widescreen imagery. Look at that woman from the Mr Bond. You
telling me you’re skint? Fuck off. You’re like Mr Burns the
time he pretended he had no money and then the damn roof caved
in due to the weight of the bank notes.
Sorry readers. That lying motherfucker just got The Duke worked
up like you wouldn’t believe, even if it were presented in a
documentary fashion with real live animal guts.
I mean Evil Dead was made for, what, couple quid and a hand-
job, I believe, and they didn’t have to run out and grab a
lizard for to cut the guts out of.
So, then, what we can deduce from this, is that if one has
moral aversion to such atrocity, then one may well fail to
enjoy the reminder of this here film about the Mountain What
Has Something About Cannibals, also released as Prisoner Of The
Cannibal God and Slave Of The Cannibal God, although, sadly,
neither A Couple Folks Look For A Mountain or Ursula Versus The
Cannibals or even Bond-Girl Of The Cannibal God ever appear to
have been suggested. That’s a couple points lost there,
Italians.
It would be a crime, though, albeit a thoroughly justifiable
one, if folks just wrote this off as a load of garbage without
giving it a fair shot. As jungle-adventure cannibal type flicks
go, it’s certainly one of the best, and has both the production
values and the level-of-talent required to ensure that, even
when dealing with little more than folks walking through a load
of trees, it remains captivating and eerily beautiful.
It also illustrates just how close the cannibal genre comes, on
a thematic level, to those film-noir type affairs what everyone
loves.
Like Film Noir, the cannibal cinema usually involves a wayward
sibling or lover, someone who must be located, for which the
services of a professional are required, yet enlisted via less-
than-professional means.
Folks wander around and pick up clues here and there, get
misdirected, and before you know it, it turns out that the
whole thing was a sham, stinking with the rancid slurry of
corruption, and probably that the woman involved is far from
the naive waif what you imagined, but is in fact a cold-hearted
vixen out to fleece any motherfucker daft enough to assist her.
There are no good guys in the cannibal flicks, just folks who
are less repellent than the others.
It’s like The Maltese Falcon, except the falcon would probably
only last five minutes before someone cut it open by way of a
ritual.
Also like those Noir-pictures, the most interesting aspect of
the cannibal flick is the political subtext, the attacks on
colonialism or sensationalism or media ethics that propel
Cannibal Holocaust throughout its 90 minutes of chaos. In the
best examples, the cannibals are not savages out to kill and
devour anyone what crosses their vaguely-designated path, but
rather a group of individuals raped and tortured by marauding
Europeans who seek to exploit both their customs and their
resources for their own gain.
Mountain, alas, has none of this subtext. It yacks a bit about
ecological concerns, and the plundering of the rainforests, but
the most heinous crime committed by the adventurers is to kill
that spider mentioned earlier, a crime which seems less-than-
comparable to the rape and murder depicted in similar fare.
As such, the cannibals here are in fact the beings of
colonialist myth, the tribes who capture innocents and perform
ungodly rites upon them, who lay in wait for glimpses of white
flesh for to tear into with dentally-challenged molars.
The result is that whilst Mountain is one of the more enjoyable
and glossy entries in the short-lived but expansive genre, it
is also one of the shallowest.
Even Eaten Alive, a film assembled from chunks of earlier works
and pasted together with all the precision of a fingerless two
year old flinging shit against a wall, even it managed to say
something of some intellectual worth amidst all the mediocrity.
Mountain says nothing, which would be forgivable if it didn’t
try awful hard to convince you that it was, in fact, saying not
only something, but something of terrible import.
When Sergio Leone saw Cannibal Holocaust, he was inspired to
scribble a note to the director;
“Dear Ruggero”, he said. “What a movie! The second part is a
masterpiece of cinematographic realism but everything seems so
real that I think you will get in trouble with all the world.”
And what, pray tell, might he have written to Martino, the man
behind the Mountain? Not a damn thing, as far as anyone can
tell. Like the rest of the world, Leone paid little attention
to what is undoubtedly a highly accomplished film in terms of
photography and composition and what not, but a vacuous and
therefore fairly indefensible one all the same.
And yet, it remains strangely endearing, enjoyable even, and
certainly less of an assault on the viewer than Holocaust or
Ferox, despite the close-up willy-removal and heads-on-rocks.
It has a female character who is often mistreated by her
sibling, but who is nonetheless a strong, determined and
memorable creation. In this respect, if none other, it serves
to provide a hint of progression in an area in which most
filmmakers of the genre and the period tend to prefer
chauvinistic traditionalism.
If only this consideration had stretched to the rest of the
production.
Drop The Duke A Line Via Electronical Email
Check Out The Duke's Best 13 Horrors Of All-
Ever
cinematography might be beautiful, that the camera might gaze
upon the lush jungle location like as if it were one of those
soap-opera women who get all naked for the FHM, or the MAXIM,
or the other “lifestyle” magazines.
One probably wouldn’t assume Ursula Andress, star of Dr. No and
Casino Royale, would have anything to do with it all. She most
certainly wouldn’t be naked, you’d be thinking, even if by some
chance she were involved.
Well think the fuck again, man, because not only is the
photography stunningly gorgeous, but also the woman from the
James Bond has the starring role, and not only does she do the
heroics in the jungle, but also finds time for a spot of the
old full-frontal, culminating in a bout of body-painting
involving a couple native lasses.
Not that The Duke cares a flying jot of fuck for the nudity or
the “sexing” when it comes to matters of cinema, but for folks
what ever wondered what that woman from the Sean Connery film
might look like in the nude, now they can put an end to the
speculation.
The catch, I’m afraid, is that you’ll also have to put up with
folks getting their sex organs cut the hell off in
close-up, and also some stuff with lizards being gutted and a
fair dose of the entrail-removal.
Mountain Of The Cannibal God, or La Montagna del dio cannibale,
was released in 1978, a full two years before the ultimate
cannibal flick of all ever, Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal
Holocaust, yet riding on the success of Deodato’s earlier,
similarly themed Ultimo mondo cannibale and Umberto Lenzi’s
Deep River Savages.
The Italian film industry, y’see, is nothing if not quick to
capitalize on a trend. No sooner had Romero let a load of
undead sons a bitches loose in a shopping mall, for example,
than theatres were throbbing with the pulsating synth scores of
a couple dozen off-shoots. Zombie Flesh Eaters, Zombie Creeping
Flesh, The Zombie Dead, The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue,
The Passion Of The Zombie, and countless other flicks what
dealt with the “zombie” were all rolled out in order that a
small fortune might be made now that the public were keen to
see a bunch of folks get eaten in the neck by green-faced,
decomposing fiends.
So, then, when producers noticed that a lot of folks were quite
fond of the jungle-adventures with the added guts and gore,
inspired in equal measure by Dawn Of The Dead and Mondo Cane, a
horde of the foul motherfuckers flooded the drive-in’s and
grindhouses. Needless to say, the quality of the pictures
varied somewhat, from Deodato’s aforementioned, sublimely
subversive Cannibal Holocaust, to Lenzi’s painfully pointless
Eaten Alive.
One needs to ask oneself, perhaps, why the Italians were so
fond of the old claret-flinging? The Italians have been
responsible, in fact, for the majority of the most disturbing,
relentlessly violent, uncomfortable and punishing flicks ever
made, from Salo to Suspiria and beyond The Beyond. Was it
anything to do with the still-fresh memories of fascist
dictatorship, so real in its own horrors that only the most
extreme of fictional offerings could provide any catharsis? If
so, why are there so few German examples of such carnivorous
carnage? Maybe it was just a hunch that the more visceral a
horror flick, the more money it made? Who knows?
As a cannibal exploitation flick, Sergio Martino’s Mountain… is
certainly tamer than most, which is not to say it doesn’t have
its fair share of ghastly limb-lopping and organ-chewing.
Compared to, say, The Exorcist, it’s a relentlessly sadistic
onslaught. Compared to Cannibal Ferox, it’s basically a gung-ho
jungle adventure with a particularly messy finale.
The cannibals themselves don’t even show up until the last
twenty minutes, so any gore hitherto is of the fairly tame
knife-stuck-in-leg variety, with a couple notable exceptions,
what will be discussed in a minute.
What happens is that Ursula Andress goes looking for her
husband, on account of the daft bugger went snooping around in
New Guinea (an unfathomably unexplored and barbaric region, the
opening titles assure us), and has disappeared amidst the
trees, grass, snakes etc.
Andress and her less-than-pleasant brother enlist the services
of another explorer type, one what looks like a young Oliver
Reed, in fact, to help find this wandering spouse.
The explorer, though, is apprehensive, considering that such a
jaunt will take them to the mountain of the title, an area
shrouded in superstition and hazard. “It’d be hard enough for a
man”, he explains, “It’d be impossible for a woman.”
Such PC concerns are soon flung the hell aside, though, on
account of there are guts to be shredded, and there’s scarce
hope of a decapitation in this stuffy old office, is what.
15 minutes in, we get the first taste of gore, and it is
decidedly repellent.
The cannibal flicks, y’see, were generally a low budget bunch.
In order to provide sufficient savagery, then, filmmakers had
to either concoct costly special effects, or grab a nearby
monkey and rip it the hell apart. Most took the latter option.
You might argue that Cannibal Holocaust exhibited such ghastly
disregard for life in order to convince the viewer that all the
human-slaying was similarly authentic. I mean come on, you’ve
saw a giant turtle get dismembered, and it was obviously real,
so who would argue that the burning, raping, castrating wasn’t
just as authentic?
Even Coppola cut the hell out of a buffalo for the sake of a
suitably shocking crescendo in Apocalypse Now. No one feels the
need to debate that particular bout of animal-slaughter when
discussing the merits of Coppola’s film about a bloke listens
to The Doors and then goes mad.
The difference, don’t you know, is that Apocalypse Now is a
“legitimate” film, with Oscars and everything. Don’t go
comparing sleazy jungle flicks to that film about The Nam,
Duke, that’d be insane is what.
The Duke, however, happens to think that even in the cases of
Deodato or Coppola, the slaughtering of animals for art,
however worthy the piece may be, is indefensible.
But Duke, they cry, that’s what those tribes are really like,
don’t you know. It’s a ritual.
The “authenticity” defense falls on its arse, though, when one
considers the dozens of decapitations onscreen, and yet those
actors are still popping the fuck up all over the damn place.
Shit, look at that. That’s a good three, four paragraphs handed
over to contextual analysis and aesthetic critique and so on
when all a man meant to do was tell you about a tarantula gets
beats to hell, its legs continuing to writhe although the guts
are smeared around them, and then a lizard gets stabbed,
skinned, gutted and eaten, by way of apologizing to some Gods
or other for the bout of arachnid abuse.
Sickening, man. And like I said a while ago, back in the
midst's of a few sentences back, this kind of hoopla was
utilized, in part, because filmmakers were too skint and too
lacking in imagination to concoct fictional mayhem on such a
scale. Martino, though, that son of a bitch had a shit-load of
the green to play with. He hadn’t even the old “but we couldn’t
afford proper effects” shtick to fall back on. Look at the
widescreen imagery. Look at that woman from the Mr Bond. You
telling me you’re skint? Fuck off. You’re like Mr Burns the
time he pretended he had no money and then the damn roof caved
in due to the weight of the bank notes.
Sorry readers. That lying motherfucker just got The Duke worked
up like you wouldn’t believe, even if it were presented in a
documentary fashion with real live animal guts.
I mean Evil Dead was made for, what, couple quid and a hand-
job, I believe, and they didn’t have to run out and grab a
lizard for to cut the guts out of.
So, then, what we can deduce from this, is that if one has
moral aversion to such atrocity, then one may well fail to
enjoy the reminder of this here film about the Mountain What
Has Something About Cannibals, also released as Prisoner Of The
Cannibal God and Slave Of The Cannibal God, although, sadly,
neither A Couple Folks Look For A Mountain or Ursula Versus The
Cannibals or even Bond-Girl Of The Cannibal God ever appear to
have been suggested. That’s a couple points lost there,
Italians.
It would be a crime, though, albeit a thoroughly justifiable
one, if folks just wrote this off as a load of garbage without
giving it a fair shot. As jungle-adventure cannibal type flicks
go, it’s certainly one of the best, and has both the production
values and the level-of-talent required to ensure that, even
when dealing with little more than folks walking through a load
of trees, it remains captivating and eerily beautiful.
It also illustrates just how close the cannibal genre comes, on
a thematic level, to those film-noir type affairs what everyone
loves.
Like Film Noir, the cannibal cinema usually involves a wayward
sibling or lover, someone who must be located, for which the
services of a professional are required, yet enlisted via less-
than-professional means.
Folks wander around and pick up clues here and there, get
misdirected, and before you know it, it turns out that the
whole thing was a sham, stinking with the rancid slurry of
corruption, and probably that the woman involved is far from
the naive waif what you imagined, but is in fact a cold-hearted
vixen out to fleece any motherfucker daft enough to assist her.
There are no good guys in the cannibal flicks, just folks who
are less repellent than the others.
It’s like The Maltese Falcon, except the falcon would probably
only last five minutes before someone cut it open by way of a
ritual.
Also like those Noir-pictures, the most interesting aspect of
the cannibal flick is the political subtext, the attacks on
colonialism or sensationalism or media ethics that propel
Cannibal Holocaust throughout its 90 minutes of chaos. In the
best examples, the cannibals are not savages out to kill and
devour anyone what crosses their vaguely-designated path, but
rather a group of individuals raped and tortured by marauding
Europeans who seek to exploit both their customs and their
resources for their own gain.
Mountain, alas, has none of this subtext. It yacks a bit about
ecological concerns, and the plundering of the rainforests, but
the most heinous crime committed by the adventurers is to kill
that spider mentioned earlier, a crime which seems less-than-
comparable to the rape and murder depicted in similar fare.
As such, the cannibals here are in fact the beings of
colonialist myth, the tribes who capture innocents and perform
ungodly rites upon them, who lay in wait for glimpses of white
flesh for to tear into with dentally-challenged molars.
The result is that whilst Mountain is one of the more enjoyable
and glossy entries in the short-lived but expansive genre, it
is also one of the shallowest.
Even Eaten Alive, a film assembled from chunks of earlier works
and pasted together with all the precision of a fingerless two
year old flinging shit against a wall, even it managed to say
something of some intellectual worth amidst all the mediocrity.
Mountain says nothing, which would be forgivable if it didn’t
try awful hard to convince you that it was, in fact, saying not
only something, but something of terrible import.
When Sergio Leone saw Cannibal Holocaust, he was inspired to
scribble a note to the director;
“Dear Ruggero”, he said. “What a movie! The second part is a
masterpiece of cinematographic realism but everything seems so
real that I think you will get in trouble with all the world.”
And what, pray tell, might he have written to Martino, the man
behind the Mountain? Not a damn thing, as far as anyone can
tell. Like the rest of the world, Leone paid little attention
to what is undoubtedly a highly accomplished film in terms of
photography and composition and what not, but a vacuous and
therefore fairly indefensible one all the same.
And yet, it remains strangely endearing, enjoyable even, and
certainly less of an assault on the viewer than Holocaust or
Ferox, despite the close-up willy-removal and heads-on-rocks.
It has a female character who is often mistreated by her
sibling, but who is nonetheless a strong, determined and
memorable creation. In this respect, if none other, it serves
to provide a hint of progression in an area in which most
filmmakers of the genre and the period tend to prefer
chauvinistic traditionalism.
If only this consideration had stretched to the rest of the
production.
Drop The Duke A Line Via Electronical Email
Check Out The Duke's Best 13 Horrors Of All-
Ever
