Marcos, a slaughterhouse worker, accidentally kills a taxi driver which sets into effect a domino effect of further murders.

The original title of this Spanish film is La Semana Del Asesino which translates as Week of the Killer. The title The Cannibal Man is a bit misleading as there’s no cannibalism herein (sorry to disappoint). But if you think this means that the film won’t deliver, you’re very much wrong. The kills in this film are something else, gory as fuck and extremely well executed (pun not intended). In fact, after all of the Video Nasties furore died down and the film was resubmitted for reclassification after being banned for so long, a sequence in which a character’s throat is slashed was cut by the BBFC.

There’s so much to love about this film. Firstly, the clothes and look of the characters is something else. It was made in a time period in which men had impossibly huge sideburns (Marcos looks like Wolverine) and the women were tanned and wore thick, brightly coloured eye makeup (think the female lead of Russ Meyer’s Vixen). The locales used are also just as easy on the eye.

The Cannibal Man also feels more like an arthouse film than a cheap horror shocker, which goes to show that the Video Nasties list contained an eclectic bunch of films with the DPP indiscriminately including anything they thought was corrupting, even though they hadn’t actually seen them. The camerawork here veers between being (dependent on the scene) graceful, voyeuristic and, at other times, just plain beautiful. Check out the swimming pool scene.

The real life slaughterhouse scenes will make you want to become vegetarian with a very graphic scene of a cow’s throat being slit (a foreshadowing) whilst the blood spurting out is captured in a bucket (yes, I thought of the black pudding I love so dearly and if I’d ever eat it again). Marcos is tellingly seen eating a sandwich whilst he watches this being carried out.

Add to the mix a subtext involving an openly homosexual neighbour (very daring for 1972) and you have a very unique, fantastic film experience.

The only downside about the film that I can report on was the dubbing in the version I watched. It was so bad! It was like it wasn’t synced up with the film properly and so lines were delivered a little after they had been delivered in their original Spanish. Maybe next time, I’ll try to find a version in it’s original Spanish but with English subtitles instead.

4 out of 5 stars