Well, this movie certainly turned out to be something much different, and much better, than I expected. That's not to say it was a *good* movie... it definitely doesn't aspire to higher than campiness... but by the usual low standards of a campy movie, it's in many ways excellent.
First of all, it introduced me to the idea of "mukbanging", an internet trend originating in South Korea where people watch videos of other people eating. (I'd say "kids today", but I didn't understand the shit kids did when I was a kid, so age as nothing to do with it.)
Ok. Second of all: obviously, it's a horror movie with "Cannibal" as the first word in the title, which places certain genre expectations squarely on it. And, it does live up to those expectations... after a fashion.
There's a lot of unflinching gore here, for sure, but not quite as much as the title might lead you to expect, and, the movie isn't *about* the gore. Instead, and is about people and their relationships, not about horror. It has an actual plot, it's a horror movie but not an exploitation flick, which has got to be something of a first among low-budget horror movies with "Cannibal" right in the title.
Make no mistake: it's very campy. A fair number of parts of it are outright terrible. And it does sink to relying on some overly familiar tropes. Buuuuuut... it has.... something... that I'm fond of.
A lot of it is well done. There's some actual character depth and development. It has, like I said, a plot. The casting is not really as godawful as it seems in the first scenes. The characters have to show occasional emotion, a little, and the actors aren't awful.
And, honestly, I thought it was going to be abysmal. Just "actually really good, for a bad movie" is a real treat when your expectations have been set by that title.
I would say, as far as camp movies go—and I'm serious, I mean only on that scale—this may have too many flaws to be an "A", but much of it is a pretty solid "B+". I pretty much enjoyed it, even though certain parts of it were definitely pretty cringe. And again, from the title, I never imagined I might have something anywhere near that good to say about it.
It's kind of a fakeout there.
And, besides, we all kinda always thought those stereotypical cinematic manic pixie dream girls were probably occasionally killing and eating people when the cameras weren't rolling, right? So it's rewarding to find out you were right. I wish they'd been able to cast Zooey Deschanel in this like they probably wanted to. That would have been pretty classic.
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