Yeah! Finally, finally an exploitation movie that lives up to it's hype! Cannibal Mercenary is as fun, gory, violent and crazy as I've heard through the years. And it's actually quite well made and has some ambitions to be something more than just a one-take-quickie!
Lek Songphon (I think) plays Wilson, a depressed and hardhitting soldier that's accepts one final job. He's deeply disturbed by his experiences in Vietnam, but goes out in the jungle again so he can get money and save his sick daughter. He gathers his old gang of misfits, a sex-maniac, a wife-killer and so on, and they starts the journey. On their way they meed a lot of vietcongs, innocent villagers and traitors... and finally the main bad guy!
It's a simple storyline, but for once it has a lot of energy. The budget is of course low, but the director fills the movie with a lot of action, gore, fights and good acting (not kidding!). Lek Songphon makes a very fine performance as the haunted leader of the group and stays realistic in his acting. I'm not sure if he's really Lek Songphon, but I recognize his face so much and I can't place it. He must have continued with acting after this, I've seen him somewhere...
Cannibal Mercenary really goes where no other movie has gone before when it comes to violence. There's a lot of violence, and everything is more graphic than expected. There's decapitations, throatslits, a lot of squibs, eye-rippings, skullcrushings and a very, very strange scene where a deformed man is peeing on a man and then rubbing his crotch against his face, licking his lips in some kind of sexual excitement - and he's one of the good guys! The gore is good to. Not realistic, but very nasty and very bloody.
This movie is out on a cut german dvd (as "Jungle Killers: The Jaguar Project"), avoid that one. Download it or buy a bootleg, because I guess it won't come out on a legal, uncut dvd for quite a while. Which is a pity, because it deserves to be seen by more people.
The cover is from When the Vietnam War raged... in the Philippines.
2 comments:
Did you notice that in the scene where they put the stake in the guys head they ripped music from Dawn of the dead? :)
Oh yeah, it was a lovely detail :) So you've seen it now? What did you think?
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