Cannibal Man 2000 Horror Movie Review

A hot-tempered blue-collar butcher kills just one man, a bullying taxi driver whom surely no one will miss, and by the end of the week winds up with a veritable stockyard of corpses in his tiny home during a Spanish summer heat wave. It all starts when Marco’s girlfriend insists he go to the police, and he strangles her to keep her quiet. Soon everyone he cares for is dropping by the increasingly crowded house looking for one victim or another, and Marco, as out of control as a rabid dog, keeps on killing, one cover-up leading to another. The stinking pile of bodies soon has all the neighborhood dogs smacking their lips, until he starts dropping his fetid victims into the slaughterhouse grinder, piece by piece. Though it sounds more like a farce than a humid thriller, it’s neither a black comedy nor a gory bloodfest (despite the misleading title, there is no cannibal in this picture). Marco turns from macho hothead to doleful wretch as he numbly executes each successive victim as if it’s a tortured chore demanded by mocking gods. Writer-director Eloy de la Iglesia doesn’t shirk on the dirty deeds—one unlucky fellow gets a cleaver full on the face—but this is less a spectacle than a woebegone portrait of the spiritual disintegration of an angry antihero.  —Sean Axmaker