'Anthropophagous The Beast' (1980) - Joe D'Amato.

No mere review can do any true justice to the manifestly alien horror sensations engendered by Italian genre legend, Joe D'Amato's insane, island-bound terrorscape! D'Amato's darkling visions seemingly belched forth from some charnel hell, and atmospherically captured on grainy 16 mm film. 'Anthropophagous The Beast' remains a prolonged, soul-warping nightmare, drawing you into an unpleasant realm of squalling madness, and gruesomely flesh-gorging torment. This 'Savage Island' is evilly haunted by a horribly debased, blood-stinking, flesh-craving, catacomb-dwelling monstrosity, (George Eastman). Possessed by a relentless lust to kill, The Grim Reaper is morbidly sustained by cannibalizing his victims, consuming skin, hair and torn out entrails, and storing their grisly remains in open, pestilential graves for later abominations!

Following the crude seaside slaughter of two hapless German tourists, we meet a pretty young American girl, Julie (Tisa Farrow)stranded en route to some Greek island idyll. Fatefully hooking up with an island-hopping group of soon-to-be, not-so happy travellers! Siren-like, Julie blithely leads them to a dismally desolated island, looking as though some monstrous blight had driven all the inhabitants away! During their first night, an ill-omened storm heralds an ominous fate for our restless protagonists. Anxiously Tarot-reading, doom-auguring Carol (Zora Kerova) is the only one aware of their increasingly desperate predicament. Descending into the stinking, corpse-clotted lair of their fetus masticating nemesis, whose foul appetites explode disgustingly in an explicit epicurean climax that simply must be spleen to be believed! 

The controversial 'Anthropophagous The Beast' maintains its mythic qualities, wholly appropriate for a nerve-annihilating, skin-flaying Euro-shocker eerily set upon some storied Greek Archipelago. Not unlike fellow iconoclast, Lucio Fulci, Joe D'Amato's disturbing mise en scène is similarly steeped in nihilistic, darkly atmospheric dooms. An unusually bleak and sinister work, D'Amato's memorably morbid splatter masterpiece is unlike any other! The stark, exquisitely eerie photography by maestro, Aristide Massaccesi has a grim efficacy, and muscular monster-maker, George Eastman's diabolically deviant screenplay spawned one of Euro-horror's most baleful bogeymen. The stridently quirky score by, Marcello Giombino provides the malign, off-key counterpart to an uncommonly brutalising descent into the crepuscular, decaying doom of D'Amato's cannibal killing spree!  

'It takes a lot of guts to watch 'Anthropophagous The Beast'...but even more to make it!' - Weirdlingwolf.