While Italian-made cannibal gut munchers where on a cinematic high in the early 1980s, French producer Daniel Lesoeur decided he wanted to get in on the act as well. Produced for his family’s company Eurociné (prominent providers of all sorts of Euro sleaze), his cannibal epic was meant to capitalize on the extremely graphic efforts that the Italians had been doing successfully over the last couple of years, and the man hired to sit in the director’s chair was none other than Jess Franco. No lover of this gross-out jungle genre, Franco’s first outing in such cinematic territory is a laugh riot from beginning to end!

Professor Jeremy Taylor (Al Cliver from Lucio Fulci’s ZOMBIE) is exploring the Amazonian rivers by boat with wife Elisabeth (Pamela Stanford) and younger daughter Lana (Anouchka, daughter of the producer). Suddenly, the boat is ambushed by cannibals, Elizabeth is devoured, Lana is captured, and Jeremy escapes with half his arm hacked off for good eating. The traumatized professor ends up back in New York in the care of a sympathetic doctor named Ana (Lina Romay using her nom de plume “Candy Coster”), as he tries to convince her and several others of his wild story. For some unexplained reason, years pass before a jungle expedition to find his lost daughter is finally mounted by an annoying rich couple (Olivier Mathot and Shirley Knight, no, not the Shirley Knight) who organize it because they think it will be a hoot. Yeah, right! In the meantime, Lana is now grown up and bleach blonde in the form of Sabrina Siani (showcasing a magnificent derrière) and regarded as the “White Goddess” by the flesh-eating tribe lead by Yakake (Franco regular Robert Foster aka Antonio Mayans) who have no trouble knocking off (and feasting on) the dopey invading white hunters one by one.

Best known in the U.S. under its VHS title WHITE CANNIBAL QUEEN, Franco’s CANNIBALS is a ridiculous mess in which the viewer can ultimately get engulfed in its prevalent badness. The actual cannibal tribe are played by an odd mix of what appear to be Caucasians and Latinos, and their make-up and costumes are ludicrous. Some of them look like they’re painted up to cheer on their favorite football team, others appear to be auditioning to become a new member of rock group Kiss, and the rest just look like deranged mimes. Let’s put it this way, you’ve seen more threatening-looking natives on re-runs of “Gilligan’s Island.” The sets and costumes are also laughable, as it’s the most barren, peaceful looking jungle you’ll ever witness, and these cannibals march and dance around with plastic skulls (which Franco probably purchased in the Halloween isle at Woolworth’s) mounted on sticks.

Anybody expecting to be as grossed out as they were when squinting through the likes of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST or CANNIBAL FEROX, think again. While the Italians were masters at incredibly nasty graphic effects, here we just see the painted bozos chomping up butcher’s scraps off the bodies of their screaming victims, too unconvincing to be offensive and often shown in close-up and dragged out in irritating slow-mo (occasionally, for no particular reason, the picture turns to black & white for a matter of seconds). No thespian by any means, the bearded and blond Cliver is a likable enough hero, here trying to conceal his arm while his phony, oversized severed limb dangles about in a shirt sleeve. The dubbing is some of the funniest you’ll ever here, and the beautiful Sabrina Siani is as bland as burnt wheat toast. Franco himself makes an appearance as a Mr. Martin, a buffoon in a poncho who chats with a silly dubbed-in Southern accent.

Blue Underground presents CANNIBALS on DVD for the first time in the U.S. with an anamorphically enhanced transfer in a 1.66:1 aspect ratio. The image is very clean and even with the original film stock varying in quality from scene to scene, colors are mostly solid and detail is crisp, exhibiting only some minor grain from time to time. The mono audio represents the English-dubbed track to decent effect, and there are no other language/subtitle options.