THE CANNIBAL MAN (1972)

[The Burgomaster]

Marcos (Vicente Parra) has a job slaughtering animals for a soup company.  He kills a taxi driver by hitting him on the head with a rock during an argument.  One thing leads to another and soon he starts killing family, friends, and neighbors.

Marcos keeps the corpses in a bedroom in his apartment, but they start to stink and attract flies and dogs.  He attempts to hide the smell with cologne and air-freshening sprays but nothing seems to work.  Finally, he begins chopping up the bodies, bringing the pieces to work, and stuffing them in a meat grinder where they become soup ingredients!

This is a typical Spanish "drive-in" movie from the early 1970s.  It was also released under the title APARTMENT ON THE 13TH FLOOR.  The dubbed English dialogue is terrible and the occasional black humor (I wonder how much of it was from the original Spanish dialogue and how much was added during the English translation) isn't very funny.

The movie isn't very gory (don't be fooled by the DVD cover, which shows a close-up of a guy with a bloody meat cleaver stuck in his face . . . this scene is very brief), nor is it scary or suspenseful.  But the DVD is from Blue Underground, so the video and audio quality are very good.  Unfortunately, the only "extra" is the theatrical trailer.

[Rev. Powell]

Thanks Burgo.  I was on the fence about this one and I think I'm going to remove it from my Netflix queue based on your unenthusiastic review.

[Mofo Rising]

Yeah, I rented this quite a few years ago when I was getting anything about cannibals.  Something about the social transgressiveness, to say the least, of cannibalism interested me.  But other than the guy tricking a couple people into eating his murder victims, there is no cannibalism.

In fact, the only thing transgressive about this film was the uncomfortably homoerotic subplot.  What was the point of that?

Ultimately a pointless and disappointing film.