“Make Them Die Slowly” on The Deuce

(a/k/a "Cannibal Ferox")

Released:  1983 (in USA)

Director:  Umberto Lenzi

Writer:  Umberto Lenzi

Starring:  Giovanni Radice (as John Morghen), Lorraine De Selle, Danilo Mattei (as Bryan Redford), Zora Kerova, Walter Lucchini (as Walter Lloyd), Fiamma Maglione (as Meg Fleming)

"Oh God, please let her die soon...And let me die soon, too, please!"

Recently, I visited New York City for the first time in about 20 years.  Although I was only there for the weekend, I carved out time to stroll The Deuce on Saturday night.

The makeover of Times Square was well underway the last time that I walked those streets.  So, I wasn’t surprised to find the grindhouses of 42nd Street gone.  Still, the area retains its electric vibe and it was a nice to see outposts of AMC Theaters and Regal Cinemas had opened on the block.

At least, you can still catch a movie in the one-time “Entertainment Capital of the World”.

I was even more delighted to see that the old Liberty Theater is now one of those “Odditoriums” for Ripley’s Believe It or Not!  

How perfect is that?

One summer night, in the early ‘80s, I stood in front of the Liberty for about a half-hour trying to screw up enough courage to cross the threshold…

They were showing a pair of films that I could scarcely believe existed.   The titles were impossibly lurid.  The images on the posters, beyond shocking.   The double-bill?

Trap Them and Kill Them and Make Them Die Slowly.

At this point, your vision should become all wavy, as we flashback to a simpler time.  Before the author was forced to confront the complete depravity of the Italian cannibal genre...

When I was about 15 or 16, I started buying the “Village Voice” from my local newsstand in Cranford, N.J.  That paper opened up a whole new world of moviegoing to me.

Soon, my friends and I began to trek in to the awesome revival houses in Manhattan: 8th Street Playhouse, Bleeker Street Cinemas, the Thalia.  For our efforts, we were introduced to the works of Kubrick, Scorcese, Bergman, and even Russ Meyer.

The trip in from New Jersey could go one of two ways.  If you took the train into Manhattan, you stepped out at Penn Station.  33rd Street.  Madison Square Garden, Macy’s, Empire State Building...  Nice neighborhood. 

If you took the bus in, you stepped out into Port Authority.  42nd Street and 8th Ave.  Literally, the belly of the beast.

As far back as I can remember I wanted to visit 42nd Street.  I’d watch all those cautionary tales about the big city, you know the ones: Taxi Driver, Death Wish, The Exterminator…  And in every one, there’s a scene where the hero walks down 42nd Street.

Oh sure, in the movies, he (always a he) ends up propositioned by a strung-out hooker, threatened by a switchblade-wielding pimp, or mugged by some coked-up street punks.

But BEFORE that happens, usually in some darkly lit alley, the hero is first seen walking down one of the most brightly lit and garishly colorful streets in America. 

It wasn’t the sex or drugs or violence that I wanted to see.  It was those movie theaters!

Seriously.  Go back and re-watch those films.  42nd Street looks like the coolest place on earth!   All of those marquees, barely in focus, behind the narrowing eyes of our pushed-too-far hero, promising “Three Big Hits!” or “Double-Fisted Fury.”

The best my local Cranford Theater could muster was, “Kiddie Matinee.” 

The first time that I stepped onto 42nd Street I could not believe my eyes.  It was even BETTER than it looked in the movies!  There were a dozen theaters on that single block, between 7th and 8th Avenues.

And they showed the craziest flicks!

I used to convince my friends to swing by there, on our way to a more sensible part of town, just so I could check out the posters.

During one of our excursions, we ran into the Original Cocaine Smitty, Jr.  He walked right up and introduced himself, just like that.  He was a drug dealer, of course, but you probably guessed that.

Smitty tried to usher us into his “office”, which was the Church’s Fried Chicken on 42nd and 8th.  When we politely declined, he sized us up and declared, “Why the hell did you drag your white asses all the way out from Jersey if you don’t want some blow?” 

It was a scene right out of one of those movies!

That was 30 years ago.  Since then, I’ve met hundreds of people whose names I can no longer remember.  But I’ve never forgotten the Original Cocaine Smitty, Jr.

As we never actually DID anything on 42nd Street, except gawk, my friends soon grew tired of Times Square.   So, I went on my own.

I’d walk the block, and plan an imaginary night of moviegoing.  Should I see the pair of Kung Fu flicks, or maybe the Blaxploitation triple-bill?  Then, I’d come up with some excuse not to go inside.  “I’ve already seen that first movie,” or “The poster for the bottom half of the bill looks really bad.”

Eventually, I’d hop on the subway and do something far from the chicken joint that the Original Cocaine Smitty, Jr. called home.  Far from those other chicken places, as well.  The ones burned into my brain at the tip of John Eastland’s flamethrower.

Then, came that summer night.  I spotted the marquee as soon as I turned the corner.

Trap Them and Kill Them and Make Them Die Slowly.

What.  The.  Fuck?!?!

I knew movies.  I read the “Village Voice”, for god’s sake!  Yet Andrew Sarris and J. Hoberman never mentioned these.  It was like a giant rift in the space/time continuum had opened up before me.

Carefully, I sidestepped the abyss and circled the block, as usual.  I looked over the other posters, but all I could think about was the Liberty.  Eventually, I found myself back in their foyer.

“The Most Violent Film Ever Made” screamed the placard over the entranceway.  “Banned in 31 Countries!”  There was a portable TV near the box office, which showed the trailer on a loop.

I couldn’t process any of this.

At that point, I’d never heard of the cannibal genre.  In fact, I’d only seen one Italian gore film, Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, and I hadn’t yet learned that that film was Italian!

The trailer didn’t help.  It featured scenes of some cheesy New York crime film, intercut with…I don’t know what.  Raw footage of hell?

What the fuck were these films? 

Of course, the answer was right inside.  I just had to buy a ticket… I hemmed and hawed.

One the one hand, this was surely the only time these films would ever screen in public.  By the next morning, anyone who worked at this theater would be in jail and the prints of these features, or whatever they were, would be burned.

On the other hand, if New York was as dangerous as all of those movies made it seem, and if Times Square was a magnet for the worst of the worst, then surely EVERY PERVERT IN THE CITY was inside this theater right now!

What to do?  What to do??

I did what any white-ass boy from New Jersey would do.  I thrust my hands down into my pockets and skulked away. 

I turned my back on Make Them Die Slowly.  But like the original Cocaine Smitty, Jr., I couldn’t forget it.

I reshaped the whole humiliating evening into a humorous story, which I told to anyone who ever brought up Times Square.  “Guess what was playing there?  Go on, guess!”  It never failed to get a chuckle of disbelief.

A few years later, I was living in Los Angeles and working at Trans World Entertainment, a Cannon Films wannabe.  One of of my duties as a “runner” was to swing by the warehouse and pick up promo pieces and screeners for the sales staff. 

One day while helping the warehouse guys search the shelves, I came across a stack of posters for Make Them Die Slowly.   It turns out that one of the heads of TWE also ran a company called Continental Motion Pictures, which held rights to the film in Central America, or some such place.  I asked, but no one on the sales staff had a VHS copy.

A decade went by.  I now lived in Hollywood and loved hanging out at the fleapit cinemas on the Boulevard.  Imagine my shock, when I picked up the “L.A. Weekly” one day in 1997 and saw an ad for a screening of Cannibal Ferox (the more accurate name for Make Them Die Slowly), about a mile from my apartment…

Held the night before!

Of course, that screening at the Vine Theater lives on forever, as it was videotaped by Sage Stallone and Bob Murawski and the footage later included as an extra on the DVD.  Cannibal Ferox was one of the first releases from Grindhouse Releasing and you’d better believe that I snatched it up as soon as it hit the shelves.

So, you may ask, how is this film, that burned its name so deeply into memory?  It’s pretty crappy, actually.

In the years that have gone by, I’ve read enough to understand Cannibal Ferox’s place within that strange offshoot of Italian horror, the cannibal genre.  And thanks to the internet and the DVD revolution, I’ve now tracked down most of the related films. 

They are as violent, sleazy, racist, misogynistic and, above all else, morally indefensible as you’ve heard.  That said, I’ll argue that there are some compelling ideas in a few of the cannibal films, including that OTHER notorious entry, Cannibal Holocaust.

Cannibal Ferox?  Not so much.

Still, if you are fan of F’dup Flix, and have a strong stomach, it remains a rite of passage.

Cannibal Ferox was directed by Umberto Lenzi, who made a string of fine Giallo and Poliziotteschi films (Italian slasher and crime films, respectively).  Lenzi also directed an interesting adventure film called Man from Deep River. 

That flick is a rip-off of the American Western, A Man Called Horse, with Thai tribesmen subbing for Native Americans.  Aside from the locale switch, it had one other minor twist.  The main tribe, the one that comes to accept the white warrior, lives in fear of another, even more barbaric tribe.  One that EATS their enemies.

And with that simple, sleazy addition, Lenzi gave birth to the cannibal genre.

By the time of Cannibal Ferox, Lenzi was chowing down on his third helping of flesh (Eaten Alive was his second effort).  You can sense his post-meal stupor throughout the film.  In an interview on Grindhouse’s release, Lenzi states that he never wanted to be the king of the cannibal genre.  In fact, he correctly hands that crown to his friend, Ruggero Deodato.

Ever the journeyman, Lenzi would deliver just what the distributors wanted, even if his heart wasn’t in it.  So, if Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust raised the bar on disturbing imagery, Lenzi would projectile vomit over it.

As noted by everyone, Cannibal Ferox’s story is a pale reflection of Cannibal Holocaust.  The basic set-up remains the same – white people with an interest in anthropology go searching for primitive tribes in the Amazon, treat them poorly, and rue the day. 

Yet, Lenzi strips away all of the earlier film’s complexities: The found footage idea is ditched, the fractured time structure is smoothed back out, and the search & rescue framing device becomes a half-baked police procedural.

Most crucially, all of the troubling ethical sins are scrubbed from the anthropologists and handed to a lone outsider character, a drug addicted lowlife on the run from the NYC mob.

As Mike, Giovanni Radice (billed as John Morghen) bursts out of the jungle and onto the screen in full-on, batshit crazy mode.  Within seconds he’s calling Gloria (Lorraine de Selle), our doctoral student/heroine, “a twat.”  Minutes later, he’s knifing a piglet and snorting coke.  In a ridiculous plot development, Gloria’s friend, an out-of-place party-girl named Pat (Zora Kerova), finds all of this an irresistible turn-on.

Meanwhile in New York…

I kid you not!   The film also features a running subplot about Myrna (Fiamma Maglione), a woman that Mike left behind in New York, who is also under the spell of this psycho.  Questioned by the cops and threatened by the mob, Myrna refuses to believe that Mike is the bad guy that everyone says. 

In another absurd story reach, Myrna eventually heads down to South America to search for him, herself.  Because, you know… Love.

Finally, we come to the reason why this film is so famous.  After an hour of Gloria & Co. stumbling around in the jungle while Mike sadistically tortures every living thing that crosses his path, the floodgates open.  Much like the 3rd act of a rape/revenge flick, the put-upon natives rise up and exact justice…in the most graphic ways imaginable.

If you’re looking for gore, Cannibal Ferox is your huckleberry.  Castration, decapitation, amputation, disembowelment, eye-gouging and, of course, the infamous breast-piercing. 

Yep.  It’s here.  It’s gross.  Hooray?

If you’re looking for something more to chew on, you’re out of luck.  Well, there is one nice moment, where the girls comfort each other, while in a literal black pit of despair, by singing “Red River Valley”.  Of course, it’s absurd – does Lenzi believe that Americans still sing this folk song from the 1800s?  Yet, it’s also a rare tender moment in an otherwise brutal film.

So, yeah...

Unless you’ve been waiting 20 years to see this film, don’t see the film. 

But, pick up the Grindhouse Releasing Blu-ray, anyway!  I’m serious.  I don’t like the film, and I still jumped at the chance to upgrade.

The 3-disc set is so cram-packed with interviews, documentaries and just plain LOVE for all things grindhouse-y, that you can skip the movie and still feel like you walked those mean streets of Times Square, back in the day.   Just like me… 

And the Original Cocaine Smitty, Jr.

Come to think of it, this movie would have been a whole lot better if Radice’s character had half the charm of the Original Cocaine Smitty, Jr.

I mean, why drag your white asses all the way down to the Amazon, if you don’t want some blow?

Footnotes:

1. The screengrabs on this page are from the DVD, not the Blu-ray!, from Grindhouse Releasing, because, yes, my computer is that old.  Besides, the photos are heavily compressed and do not represent the actual PQ, anyway.  The DVD now appears to be out of print, but you can buy the Blu-ray here.

2. I never did see Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, the more accurate title of Trap Them and Kill Them.  I lost interest once I read that it was directed by Joe D'Amato.

3. The name of the Original Cocaine Smitty, Jr. was not changed to protect the innocent.  If anyone else ever met him, please post about it below!  I am sorely disappointed that Google has never heard of him.  Hopefully, this post now changes that.

"The Exterminator" Comes Home on Cable TV

Released: 1980

Director: James Glickenhaus

Writer: James Glickenhaus

Starring: Robert Ginty, Christopher George, Samantha Eggar, Steve James

“Go get your toy."

My first exposure to a true grindhouse film was The Exterminator.  It was mean, grim, and shocking.  And I saw it in my pajamas.

It’s hard to imagine now, but back in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, the only way to watch an uncut movie in your own home was through something called cable TV.

And we didn’t have it.

It’s not like my family decided to cut the cord; cable wasn’t available in my hometown.   Literally.   I lived only 15 miles outside of Manhattan and yet the cable – the one from whence cable TV gets its name – had not been strung as far as Cranford, NJ.

My god, how old am I?

True, the first videocassette players were just hitting the market in the ‘70s, but they were outrageously expensive.   Like, car down payment pricey.

There was also a service in the NYC area called Wometco Home Theater, which, kinda brilliantly, sent a scrambled signal over the public airwaves, by sub-licensing a UHF channel at night.   Wometco showed a single movie per day, in an early and a late showing, and the descrambler box cost more per month than we now pay for Netflix.  And that’s in 40 years ago dollars.

So, to put a finer point on it, there was no way FOR ME to watch a movie unedited at home.

Sometimes, when I was really bored, I’d watch the scrambled Wometco signal on channel 68 and try to guess what movie they were showing that night.  And hope to see boobies…

This is what happens when you have only three networks to choose from.

As I entered my senior year in high school, something miraculous happened.  Cable finally reached our suburb. 

From the moment that 75-ohm coaxial video cable was screwed into the back of our Sylvania console television, I watched whatever movie was on, whenever I had the chance. 

Due to the vagaries of cable programming, this often meant seeing the same movie again and again.  Not because it was spectacularly entertaining, but because it was... Always.  Fucking.  On.   (…All The Marbles, I’m looking at you!)

However, there are two movies that I watched over and over again on purpose: Cutter's Way and The Exterminator.

Cutter's Way is an amazingly well acted and heartbreaking drama.  The Exterminator is a stone cold slice of sleaze.

The fact that The Exterminator existed, and was picked up by HBO to play in living rooms across the country, blew my little mind.  I became kind of obsessed with it.

Despite my fondness for it, The Exterminator is a difficult film to defend.

Its themes are recycled from other, better films.  Many of the characters, including our titular protagonist, are unsympathetic.  And much of the film is ugly in both look and content.

In fact, the film’s main strength is that it just GOES FOR IT.  It owns what it is and doesn’t give a fuck how that plays to your notions of a good time at the movies.

It is the quintessential F'dup Flick.

Okay, you remember when I said I couldn’t defend this flick?  (Seriously?!  It was only a few paragraphs ago.  Sigh.)  Anyway, here’s where I defend this flick.

Maybe “justify” is a better word.  “Rationalize”?   How about “explain”?  Anyway, hear me out…

First, the good…

Despite an underwritten role, Robert Ginty’s performance as John Eastman is very compelling. He plays the character as a broken man from the first frames of the film, tossed around by mortar shells and events beyond his control.  In calmer moments, he seems always on the verge of an insight to which he can’t quite give voice.

His interactions with friends and loved ones reek of play-acting for the sake of others – “You okay?” “Yeah.  Sure.” – and much of his dialog is banally direct: “Let’s take a walk, Maria…Michael was mugged.”  “Sit down, Maria…Michael is dead.”

Paul Kersey, in Death Wish, is a hero.  Eastman is an anti-hero and Ginty does a great job making us question if we even like him, let alone want to be like him.

Visually, director James Glickenhaus struts his low budget action skills early, with the (obviously not shot in) Vietnam opener, filled with moody darkness, hypnotic slow-mo, and endlessly curling fireballs.

Despite the occasional visual flourish, Glickenhaus never loses sight of the dark tone he wants for this film.

An early example occurs during the war sequence.  After an intense firefight, fellow soldiers Eastman and Michael Jefferson are captured and tortured.   Eventually, they are able to turn the tables on their Viet Cong captors, but not before Eastman cracks and gives useful intel to the VC leader.

Only a few minutes in and already the audience is faced with an understandable yet challenging development.  Can Eastman really be a hero when he has just compromised US Army operations?

Glickenhaus quickly pushes our unease with our protagonist even further.

Michael is able to get a gun away from his captors and kills all of the enemy soldiers, except for the VC leader, who is only wounded.  Then, he cuts Eastman free to finish the job.

There’s no question how this scene will end; Eastman must kill the VC leader…for many reasons: he is the enemy, he knows too much, and because…well, he is an asshole.

But rather than play the sequence for all its “git some, git some” glory, Glickenhaus locks the camera down and simply observes the two men in one, long take.  As Eastman slowly preps his gun in the background, the bleeding VC leader desperately crawls away in the foreground.

The shot goes on and on.  The longer it does, the more pathetic the VC leader’s doomed escape attempt becomes.  You want this nasty business to be over with quickly but instead we watch this man flail and suffer…and be human.

Finally, the men look at each other and Eastman shoots the VC leader.  No anger, no righteousness, no punny catchphrase.  Nothing.

Drained of any emotional charge or catharsis, the moment leaves one feeling vaguely unsettled.   Hooray?

Later in the film, Eastman perfectly describes this pervasive sense of unease.  

The war over, Eastman and Michael find themselves home in NYC, where they run afoul of some punks.  Predictably, the gang cripple Michael, and Eastman must hunt them down and kill them.

After he’s had his vengeance, Eastman describes how it felt to his paralyzed friend: “It was like we were back in 'nam.  It didn’t matter if it was right or wrong, I just did it.”

Like it or not, that is the tone for the entire film.  It is beyond right and wrong.  It is amoral.  Fatalistic.  Nihilistic…

So, obviously there is some level of thought and, dare I say, artistry at work here.  But if we are honest, the reason why the film lingers in the memory isn’t because of its craft.  It is because of a long and repugnant subplot set in Times Square.

By the midway point of the story, Eastman has killed every bad guy we’ve met, as well as a guard dog, in increasingly brutal ways.  Now what?  There are still 45 minutes to go.

And here’s where the film makes a radical left turn.  Instead of the previous line-up of comfortably clichéd gangbangers and Mafioso types, Eastman’s next prey are frighteningly realistic sexual sadists.   Not just bad guys, but men so evil that you didn’t even know there were names for the things they do.

In a 20-minute tutorial on hell, Glickenhaus teaches us the names. 

The really bad stuff happens at “chicken places.”  The men who run them are called “chicken hawks.” And the “chicken” are young boys who have been sold into sexual slavery.

Glickenhaus even reserves a special, satirical name for one of the loathsome perverts who frequents the chicken place: “The State Senator from New Jersey”.  (Being from NJ, I smirk at that line every time.)

The whole enterprise runs like a misery machine, destroying people while stacking Benjamins, and Eastman’s reaction to it is equally mechanical. 

In a long and wordless sequence, before the inevitable siege and rescue, we watch as Eastman calmly makes his own hollow-tip bullets: place the bullet in a vise, drill a hole into the lead, place a drop of poisonous mercury into the hole, balance a couple of rods of solder over the tip, and heat with a blow torch. 

In other words, a tutorial bookend.  For every action, an equal and opposite reaction.

Here, I must give a special shout out to Christopher Brenner the actor who plays the “chicken boy” (so named in the end credits) rescued by Eastman.   Although onscreen for only a minute, Brenner’s non-verbal performance is so vulnerable, so beyond terrified, that you start to wonder if the filmmakers actually did kidnap and force him to appear in the film.

If IMDb is correct, Brenner never made another movie after this.  Chris, if you are still out there, I want you to know that you either gave a stunning performance…or I am so very sorry.

As you can see, this whole sequence is a steaming hot plate of WTF?   So, why watch a movie like this at all, let alone multiple times?

Here’s what you need to understand.  When I was growing up, northern New Jersey lived in the shadow of Manhattan.  On a clear day, I could see the World Trade Center towers from my street.  Our TV stations came out of New York, our newspapers came out of New York, our culture came out of New York.

Yet, we almost never went INTO New York.

New York was great, but New York was dangerous.  Every news report said so, every TV movie said so.  Even if you dared venture into New York, for a baseball game or the Ice Capades, you never, ever went to Times Square.  Except, maybe, on New Year’s Eve...

NO!  Not even on New Year’s Eve!

Everything that was wrong with New York – with the world – could be found in Times Square. 

Whatever that meant…

And then I saw The Exterminator.  And I understood.

In a way, films like this are like the works of the Marquis de Sade.  They go so far beyond titillation, into revulsion, that your reaction to it becomes the message.  

“Look at what people do to each other.  It is fucked up, no?  Ah well… Goodnight, now.  Sleep tight.”

But as you lie there in your jammies, in the comfort of your suburban home, trying to make sense of what you just saw, the questions start coming:

Is that stuff about chicken places for real?
How does one deal with evil like that?
Is a vigilante a good guy or just as messed up as the bad guys?
Who made this fucked up film?

I find questions like this fascinating.  Perhaps you prefer Friends.

By their very nature, grindhouse films are confrontational.  You watch them to have your notions of reality and morality challenged.   And by challenged, I mean dragged out into the street and thrashed to within an inch of their lives.

It used to be that you actually had to go to Times Square to see a depiction of 42nd Street as harrowing as this.   Who knew that once cable TV came to my home, it would bring Times Square along with it?

Footnotes:

1. The pictures on this page are screengrabs from the DVD in the Synapse Films Unrated Director's Cut Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, which can be purchased here.  The photos are heavily compressed and do not represent the actual PQ of this release.