Devil Hunter

Devil Hunter, The (1980)

** (out of 4)

A producer is showing off his beautiful actress (Ursula Buchfellner) when terrorists kidnap her and hold her for ransom in the jungle. The producer hires a specialist (Al Cliver) to go in after her but he must battle cannibals and the monster they worship to try and save the beauty. I had previously seen the German version of this film but this new one released by Severin features nearly twelve-minutes worth a new footage and brings the running time up to 102-minutes. I was worried about this but the added running time actually helps the movie. If you know Franco then you know sleaze is his specialty and that's what we get here. There's a whole lot of sleaze in this thing ranging from non-stop nudity to some bloody violence. Speaking of the nudity, I really don't think there are many frames in this film where a woman isn't naked and if there is then it doesn't last more than thirty-seconds or so. As usual, Franco knows how to film a naked body and his camera doesn't shy away from scanning the woman from head to toe and that includes one of the new scenes where a woman does a tribal dance and the camera goes as close as you can to capture those lower regions. Cliver is best known for his role in Lucio Fulci's Zombie but he makes for a good hero. His acting isn't the greatest out there but he does look the part well. Buchfellner is fairly good in her role as well but I'm sure it was her naked body that caught Franco's eyes. The film has a fairly weak story but it does make for some good sleaze if that's what you're looking for.

Lesser known but full-blooded Jess Franco exploitation that cashes in on the popular early 80's trend of European cannibal movies. A successful actress is kidnapped by a gang of thugs whilst shooting a movie in the South-African jungle. She's kept prisoner and gets sexually abused frequently, but this is only the beginning of her misery as the jungle homes a native tribe with strange and primitive beliefs. Their God is a spooky, flesh-eating madman with his eyeballs hanging out of his sockets. Yikes!! "Devil Hunter" features some beautiful filming locations, good atmospheric music and a whole lot of authentic euro-sleaze. Still, there are many tedious moments and redundant sub plots. The amount of gore is limited but several sequences are truly nauseating, notably the one where the lead-cannibal bites off a poor girl's labia and devour it! Oh my God!! According to the VHS-cover it was her heart, but I doubt her heart was located between the legs. Proceed at your own risk!

I thought this would be a jungle cannibal flick, but it turned out to be something else altogether. It takes about a half hour of boredom to really get going, but once it does it's okay. It's certainly plenty gross in parts, especially the close-ups of the creature's blood-smeared mouth.

The helicopter crashing scene and the scene where the hero is "climbing up a cliff" are particularly hilarious.

When a man who doesn't have Alzheimer's can't remember how many films he's made, he probably is the world's most prolific director after all. That man is Jesus Franco, the king of so-called 'eurotrash'. His 1980 flick Devil Hunter is as rushed, opaque, stupid, lazy and exploitative in the truest sense of the word (the film's title is misleading, for starters) as any other Franco film I've seen. That makes it sound pretty awful, and it is... Yet Franco does have some kind of inimitable sensibility, a generous way with the baldly outrageous, with nudity and sleaze and violence, and even with his stupid cheap editing which tries to pave over the extreme haste with which all his films were made. The mix of all these elements causes you to ride his films out, even while you're mostly waiting for them to end because they're so very tedious.

Devil Hunter is nigh on incomprehensible for the first half an hour. The kidnap by strangers of a white woman who seems to be a model or film star is intercut with a bunch of native action in South America. There's lots of naked writhing, dancing, and endless repeated zoom-ins on an ugly totem pole. You need to get used to the repetitive zoom-ins and the technique of cutting back to the same shot about three times in a row right away, as these are Franco's main methods of extending a film out to feature length.

The monster who looks like the totem pole is actually kind of scary. He has raw bug eyes and his presence is always signalled on the soundtrack by cacophonous groaning, apparently recorded in an echo chamber. Early in the piece he chews on a native lady strapped to a tree, and it's hard to know what really happens here but I think he ate her stomach (or her genitals, sweet Jesus!).

Anyway, the adventure begins properly when a studly guy and his freaked out Vietnam vet pal are sent to the island to recover the white girl from the kidnappers. The flakey guy has an accent which, as dubbed, is half Brooklyn-American, half English-Liverpudlian and all retarded. All of the dialogue and dubbing is ridiculous and laughable, making for another layer of the film which can somehow hold your interest.

Not too much really happens from here on in, and it happens pretty sluggishly, studded with the odd bit of outrage like a rape. The nebulous action is fleshed out (haha!) by acres of 360 degree nudity from the natives and the two female leads, and even from the monster himself. That he walks around with his penis exposed makes wrestling him an unappetising prospect for the tough guy hero, but it's gotta be done at some point, and it's nice to note that the director will show anyone's genitals on camera.

The best feature of Devil Hunter is the location filming. Franco can be extremely cheap with the structural and story aspects of film-making, but he doesn't muck around with sets. You get real islands, jungles, helicopters and mountains, all in widescreen. This is something that is really cool to experience in these days of crappy CGI sets and backdrops ad nauseam.

Ultimately, issues of recommendation where this film is concerned seem moot. If you're trying to see all the Video Nasties, you will have to watch this at some point, and you'll be made as restless as I was. If you like Franco, you'll watch this anyway. If you fall into neither of the above categories, the odds are you'll never come across this film. Copies of it aren't just lying around, and I could hardly recommend the seeking out of it. It's Franco. Lazy, crazy Franco.

Loathing , grim and unsettling Jesus Franco picture with plenty of nudism, blood , gore and guts. Dealing with a cruel indigenous cannibalistic tribe that worships a Devil God , it is filled with some genuine fright , horror and doom . A Vietnam veteran named Peter Weston (Al Cliver) accompanied by another unsettling veteran (Robert Foster or Antonio Mayans) head to an island inhabited by cannibals to save a kidnapped cover-girl (gorgeous Ursula Buchfellner or Ursula Fellner) not only from her kidnappers (Gisela Hahn, Werner Pochat...) , but also from the cannibals' lurking Devil god (Bertrand Altmann with bug-eyes that were created with ping-pong balls which had tiny holes poked to let to see) . Hunted, raped, and tormented out of her mind... Where the natives are pleased to Meat you! Kidnapped by cannibals! Raised to eat her human flesh! . She grew up to be her sacrifice !. Now a Vietnam veteran is looking for her !.

A ruthless , barbaric , authentically disgusting flick packing inexplicable disturbing occurrences , nudism , shocks , thrills , suspense , chills , hair-rising events with horrible mangling and being really gory . It follows in the wake of the cannibalist films from Umbert Lenzi , and, especially , the really a brutal fake documentary : ¨Ruggiero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust¨ that resulted to be the mother of all cannibal films , the most savage , the most controversial movie ever made and the most horrific tale in modern history . It belongs to Eighties' terrible period in which Franco wrote or directed various Cannibal film , such as ¨Sexo Canníbal¨, ¨Terror cannibal¨ and ¨Mondo cannibale¨ . Adding other extremely gory films as ¨The Sadist of Notre Dame¨, ¨Oasis of the Living Dead¨, ¨Zombie Lake¨, ¨Bloody Moon¨, ¨Faceless¨ . El caníbal (1980) is a below average yarn with too much chilling scenes , filled with sleaziness and non-sense of style . It is filled with killings , naked girls , sexual violence , disfigured people, grisly murders by means of slashing , ripping to death , killings in cold blood executed by ominous cannibal , loathsome and loads of blood and gore . A mysoginist movie with plenty of nudism , sadistic frames , graphic cannibalism , explicit scenes of violence and made in extremely eerie style , no for squeamish . This Terror/Cannibal Movie displays lousy special effects with cutting , chopping , hacking , beheading , stomach ripped out and other cannibalistic frames .Stars a second-class cast with B-Italian actor Al Cliver and the beautiful ex-playboy girl Ursula Fellner. And involving some familiar faces from Jesús Franco's movies , such as : Muriel Montossé or Victoria Adams as Girl on Yacht , Lynn Mess as Cannibal Priestess , Werner Pochath and of course Antonio Mayans .

Mediocre cinematography by Juan Soler filmed on location in Benidorm, Alicante, Comunidad Valenciana, Archena, Murcia, Spain , Sintra, Lisbon, Monserrate Chapel, Palácio de Monserrate, Sintra, Serra de Sintra, Portugal , where Franco shot several films ; however , being faded by the odd colouring of the old VHS, I would like to see this get remastered on blu-ray . It contains anticlimatic musical score composed by Jesus Franco himself . A disconcerting horror movie with no much interest and badly made by Jesús Franco. He often used a lot of pseudonyms , among the aliases he used, apart from the names Jess Franco or Franco Manera, were Jess Frank, Robert Zimmerman, Frank Hollman, Clifford Brown, David Khune , Toni Falt, James P. Johnson, Charlie Christian, David Tough , among others. In many of the more than 180 films he's directed he has also worked as composer, writer, cinematographer and editor. Jesús's influence has been notable all over Europe . Jess was a Stajanovist, restless writer, producer, director who played and realized over 200 pictures. His career spans over 50 years with a few successes and lots of flops, making all . From his huge body of work we can deduce that Jesús Franco is one of the most restless directors of Spanish cinema and often releasing several titles at the same time. Many of his films have had problems in getting released, and others have been made directly for video. More than once his staunchest supporters have found his "new" films to contain much footage from one or more of his older films. Jesús Franco is a survivor in a time when most of his colleagues tried to please the government administration. He broke up with all that and got the independence he was seeking and getting , at times great eye for composition. He was a hard-working filmmaker, directing a lot of ridiculous movies. However, making some acceptable films , such as : ¨We are 18 years old¨, ¨The awful Dr Orloff¨, ¨The Bloody Judge¨ , ¨Count Dracula¨, ¨99 women¨, ¨Parxismus, ¨The Blood of Fumanchu¨, ¨Faceless¨ and a few others. He always went upstream in an ephemeral industry that fed opportunists and curbed the activity of many professionals. But time doesn't pass in vain, and Jesus' production diminished since the 90s , but he went on working until his death. This shocking and gory terror/adventure movie with lots of blood and guts has an inferior rating : 3.5/10 . Only for Jess Frank completists.