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"A pretty sick sense of humor" is announced at the onset, Marino Girolami assuredly has it, along with a dapper sense of understatement. (The morgue attendant munching on a freshly carved heart is dubbed "a psychopathic deviant," the natives feasting on an unlucky clod's innards are rather "resistant to culture.") Act One takes in the cannibals of New York City, Ruggero Deodato might be just around the corner filming his own angle of the Empire State Building. "But doctor, do you really think we're that much different from savages?" Act Two parachutes anthropologists (Ian McCulloch, Alexandra Delli Colli) into a tropical island, the ambitious newshound (Sherry Buchanan) tags along in search of a Pulitzer and gets her cerebellum scooped out for her trouble. A blunt distillate of the Moreau mythos, cp. Lewis' The Mad Doctor of Market Street. Plenty of zesty work with scalpels, machetes, clamps and spiked traps, even outward motors get to tear into squishy textures. The leaping fiend who becomes a crashing mannequin, the indio who reaches into his victim's eye sockets for hors d'oeuvres, all part of Girolami's patient gagwork. The scientist's (Donald O'Brien) declaration of purpose ("I improve Nature!") clinches the thing as a joke on missionaries, the zombies are quilts of sewn-up flesh shuffling to the greasy synthesizer score. Chekhov's Rule is applied to "a ceremonial dagger for human sacrifice," Under Capricorn's shrunken noggin on the bedspread receives extra syrup and maggots. The streamlined American version (Doctor Butcher M.D.) is its own jocular critique. With Peter O'Neal, Alejandro Dakar, and Walter Patriarca.
--- Fernando F. Croce |