Eaten Alive By The Cannibals

Doomed To Die (Eaten Alive By The Cannibals, Manga Vivi) Directed By Umberto Lenzi. Starring Robert Kerman (1980).

                Janet Agren (City Of The Living Dead, Hands Of Steel) has the sharpest cheekbones in the business as she walks around in vintage 80’s Time Square.All cannibal films are required to have prime footage of sleazy Times Square marquees (Zappa’s Baby Snakes?!) and genuine lurking sordid characters in the background.You can almost taste the rubbery steak from Tads or smell the filthy peepshows and gross hot tubs (like the ones at Plato’s Retreat)! Then right from that point they draw us further into the subterranean jungles to contrast from our world: the concrete jungle to the third world, the real Amazon. Robert Kerman and Janet Agren’s constant bickering relationship is almost like "African Queen". They are there to bring down a Jim Jones type cult leader, Jonas Melvyn played by Ivan Rassimov who is more menacing in this one then he was with blonde hair playing the victim in Man From Deep River. He is hypnotizing women, painting them gold and using cobra venom soaked dildos on their poor genitals! It's all part of his plans for world religious domination. Mimi Lay has made a career out of playing cannibal bait and later on starred as a hooker in Element Of Crime by Lars Von Trier.Good thing she’s plays a minor role, otherwise they’d have a bitch of a time trying to match her death scenes from Jungle Holocaust and Man From Deep River!

Eaten Alive By The Cannibals is like a mixtape of the best cannibal attacks stolen from other films (Man From Deep River,Mountain  Of The Cannibal God and Jungle Holocaust). Lenzi has no shame whatsoever but to be fair, he did direct Man From Deep River, so he has the right to rip himself off! Had I not seen this first before the stolen films, I would have been very pissed off!

Like every cannibal film you get a lot of half naked Foreign dudes in white paint wearing bargain basement crepe hair frightwigs devouring whatever cheap gizzards and steak-um meat they can find. There’s recycled animal slaughter too, like the famous cartoon leaves over the monkey tied to the javelin travesty from Mountain Of The Cannibal God. Check out the great interview with Sergio Martino where he denies forcing a snake to eat a live monkey (found on Mountain not The Eaten Alive DVD)!

                Robert Kerman hates this genre but still shows up at conventions (denouncing Deodato, saying the man has no soul!) but he acted in this right after Cannibal Holocaust. I think he is prouder of his porn career then his Cannibal career! He comes off like a fake David Hess and is pretty likeable. Many of the actors get to pretend like they are shooting or looking at something while footage from another film is spliced in. I found it very entertaining and like most exploitation horror fans I could re-watch this movie stolen or original, it’s pretty much the same storyline, bad dubbing and jungle setting you find in every other Jungle adventure cannibal film so there you go!  

Ivan Rassimov as The Cult Leader

Richard Kuklinski hit by a cannibal dart

Let's Get Physical!

Yummy Steak-Ums!

WATCH HERE