Devil Hunter (1981)
Severin DVD (region 1)
d. Jess Franco; pr. Franco Prosperi, Julian Esteban; scr. Julius Valery, Clifford Brown; ph. Juan Soler; m. Jess Franco; ed. Nicole Guettard, Federico Vich; cast. Al Cliver, Robert Foster, Antonio De Cabo, Gisella Hahn (89 mins)
The cannibal cycle – much of which remains banned in many countries – lasted from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s and in its brief outburst of creativity attracted a diverse array of talented exploitation filmmakers, including Spain’s Jess Franco for Devil Hunter. Demented white slavers traffic in stolen female flesh – bound, tortured, raped and eaten by a demented, Godlike monster worshipped by obedient naked dancing girls – in a sadistic Sadean jungle inferno that brings Spanish avant-garde eroticist Jess Franco into collision with the giddy third-world realms of Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust and Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox. That’s Devil Hunter, one of two films Franco made to capitalize on the Italian cannibal cycle and the most explicitly and cynically bleak. It is one of two Franco genre pieces (the other being Bloody Moon) released on DVD by Severin Films fully uncut and uncensored for the first time in America.
Franco takes time with this narrative. His best work always had an improvised quality, a spontaneity that resembled jazz rhythms – indeed his films of the 1960s and early 1970s had trippy, jazz-like psychedelic score to underlie their horror. The score here is more akin to the Italian cycle but at times captures a trippy feel, especially in the captivating early scenes. It is in these scenes that Franco does something genuinely interesting with the cannibal film genre. Scenes of a naked woman running through the jungle, screaming in terror, bound and then eaten in a religious sex ritual are inter-cut with scenes of a modern, liberated woman (also naked) who delights in the freedom that the post-feminist sexual revolution brought women in the West. But the two worlds collide when the liberated woman is kidnapped by white slaver libertines and a rescue party is sent.
The combination of nudity, sex and cannibal horror here recalls Joe D’Amato’s Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals. But where D’Amato insisted on the independence of his intrepid photo-journalist heroine, Franco’s assessment of women’s independence in a proverbial man’s world is far more cynical. Indeed, the humiliation and degradation of the liberated career woman here is seen as an inevitable function of Patriarchal resentment. At least that’s the theme Franco interjects whenever he can, duty-bound as he is to follow the exploits of the heroine as she escapes the slavers and runs through the jungle where she must face the cannibals. Will the rescue team find her in time? Cultural juxtapositions run through this scenario, Franco contrasting the monstrous cannibal religion with the equally monstrous exploitation that affects modern women, who in this film only have the illusion of liberation – in contrast to D’Amato.
Ultimately Franco abandons his thematic concerns for simplistic plot exposition. There’s a lot of nudity, bloody special effects and a sense of the cynical commoditization of women in a consumerist society – quite literally, women are exploited and consumed (eaten). Gender politics in Franco’s film are always ambivalent and indeed the same is found here: a refusal to take a moral position, a trait found in the best exploitation films and a hallmark of the genre, the very factor which makes it so problematic to moralistic censors the world over. Devil Hunter may not be amongst the best of the genre, but it is a noteworthy curio, finally too repetitive and lethargic to sustain in its initial momentum. Still, even minor Franco makes for provocative viewing and Devil Hunter is a sexy, Sadean addition to disreputable cinema bound to delight fans of cannibal erotica.
As a DVD special feature is an interview with Franco in which he talks about his experiences making sexy cannibal films, a genre which he admits was not his original interest and which, for Devil Hunter, he sought to combine with an old-fashioned monster movie. Those interested in Devil Hunter should also be aware of the Severin release of Franco’s Bloody Moon.
Wider Screenings DVD Safe Purchase
(in affiliation with Amazon.com)