Trap Them And Kill Them (1983)

Joe D’Amato is at it again with this week’s thriller; (a.k.a. Emmanuelle And The Last Cannibals). Even though relatively well shot for D’Amato, (Aristide Massaccesi) this is really scraping the bottom of the barrel for both Emmanuelle movies and Italian cannibal pictures. The special effects are rudimentary, the sex is (mostly) pedestrian, and the cannibals totally unthreatening, the only thing truly enjoyable is the convoluted soap opera-style plot. On the other hand, if you’re curious about this type of movie you’ve likely got a finely tuned sense of the absurd, in which case you probably ought to pony up 90 minutes of your life to see what a lack of real talent and a hugely bad idea can get you.

We find investigative reporter Emmanuelle snapping photos through the eyes of a rag-doll while undercover in some type of mental hospital. A mysterious savage female patient takes a bite out of a nurse’s breast, which starts Emmanuelle on an hour’s worth of genital rubbing, first on the biter, to calm her down, then on anyone else within grabbing distance.

But the investigation of the biting leads Emmanuelle and her group to an ancient, supposedly extinct cannibal tribe deep in the Amazon jungle. While deep in the bush, the group stumbles upon a bitter hunter, his sexy wife, and a swarthy ‘assistant,’ and soon everyone is getting even deeper into the bush, if you catch my drift. Though all the flesh on display is of grade-A quality, and even though these soft-core scenes benefit from the weird tropical day-for-night shooting that adds a magical atmosphere to movies of this stripe, they are more amusing than arousing.

Such scrumptious vittles on display prove too much of a temptation for the cannibals, however, who eventually capture and tuck into the selections. But first, they engage in the least convincing, and thus least disturbing, ritual tribal gang-rape ever, as one by one the cannibals lay down awkwardly on the victim, clench their buttocks once or twice, and slowly rise to embarrassedly shuffle away. Vital cinema this isn’t.

A few alternately brutal and utterly unrealistic murders shred any last hope of quality you may harbor. The bitter hunter’s waist-height bisection by garroting is achieved through lots of reaction shots and a bloodless, airbrushed freeze-frame that’s laughable. Meanwhile, as Emmanuelle and friend look on with mild, detached curiosity, the hunter’s wife’s viscera is pulled out from a sloppy hole in her pubic region and gobbled with barely concealed confusion and disgust by the cannibal extras. Andreas Schnass would probably accept the effects in this scene, but the fake, off-color rubber props will merely insult everyone else.

Trap Them And Kill Them is a fun rarity for Italian exploitation connoisseurs, but probable evidence for the collapse of Western Civilization to most anybody else.