Devil Hunter (1980 Review)
aka Sexo caníbal
aka Mandingo Manhunter (My personal favorite!)
Director: Jesus “Jess” Franco
Cast: Ursula Fellner, Al Cliver, Robert Foster, Burt Altman, Gisela Hahn, Victoria Adams
Severin Films / Color / NTSC R1 / Unrated / Widescreen 1.85:1 (Anamorphic) / Dolby Digital Mono / English Dubbing / 89 mins / Purchase
Extremely prolific filmmaker Jess Franco is the quintessential Euro-sleaze auteur. He has covered everything from zombies, slashers, the supernatural, S&M, straight erotica and so much more. His style is very strange, divisive and always controversial. Some would call him a hack. Some a visionary. And still some a perverted old man with a zoom lens fetish. I say that he is all of these things and I love him for all of them. Having seen a slew of his large library of films I can say that I have rarely been bored and almost always can take something away from the movie that leaves me wanting to see the next one. Thanks to Severin Films I can do just that with the jungle cannibal nude-fest, Devil Hunter!
A beautiful model/actress is kidnapped and whisked off to the jungle to be held for ransom. Unknown to the group of kidnappers, there is a tribe of jungle folks who would just love to get their hands on the white women and feed them to their buck naked, bloodshot and bug-eyed “god”. Our hero is summoned to the jungle to take the money to the captors in exchange for the half naked celebrity but he gets double-crossed for his troubles when they try and shoot him and take the money. Instead he gets away and in the ensuing melee, so does the girl. But she doesn’t get far as she is then nabbed by the tribespeople. From there, the two battling sides hunt each other and for the girl while being tracked by the beastly god of the jungle.
Nudity abounds in this contribution to the late ’70s/early ’80s cannibal/jungle sub-genre. Not only are we deluged with the female form in all shades of flesh tones, but the god of the tribe is completely naked with his twig and berries a-flopping in the wind. He even does hand-to-hand combat with another man in one scene… oh, lordy the gayness that ensued. But back to the women; From the opening frames to the last, there were ass-tons of boobies, tushies and bushies. Ursula Fellner aka Ursula Buchfellner from Sadomania fame is smoking hot as the damsel in distress and Aline Mess as the tribal priestess was smoldering. Never let it be said that Uncle Jess doesn’t have taste.
It wouldn’t be a Franco film without the snail’s pace, the long drawn out sequences of people just walking through the scenery, and the extreme close-ups (especially of the lady’s hairy muffs in this case). Of course if you are already a fan, you know that this is the small price you pay to see the “master” at work. Obviously this is low budget film making so the monster and gore effects are basically putty and spaghetti sauce. Speaking of the monster/god thingy… a naked black man with blood shot eyes does not a monster make. Well, maybe if it’s from smoking some bad crack… Oh, please, if Jess Franco is allowed to make a movie basically portraying blacks as predators hunting nubile white flesh, then I’m allowed to make a joke!
Now is usually around the time that I tell you how good the picture quality from Severin is, but unfortunately that isn’t the case this time. The transfer is pretty clean but the contrast seems to be very low in a lot of scenes causing a graying effect. In turn the colors are muted and it all seems to be washed together. The sound is also not up to par as most of the time it sounds muddy and distorted. I thought that maybe my settings on my TV and surround were all wrong, but I adjusted everything to make up for the shortcomings, but to no avail. Don’t let this keep you from seeing and owning this movie. It’s worth not having a perfect picture to see this sleazy cannibal classic.
UPDATE (11/13/08): I have since found out that the poor picture quality is due to the actual production value of the movie and not Severin’s transfer. Thank god!
