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The Cannibal Man
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - 88 Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (13th August 2025). |
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The Film
 Not middle-age but no longer a youth, slaughterhouse worker Marcos (Soft Skin on Black Silk's Vicente Parra) is being pressured to marriage by his much younger girlfriend Paula (The Other Side of the Mirror's Emma Cohen). On their weekly night out, Marcos gets into a fight with a cab driver (Ricco: The Mean Machine's Goyo Lebrero) and accidentally kills him. When guilt-ridden Paula insists that he turn himself into the police, he strangles her and hides her body in his bedroom. When his brother Esteban (Monster Dog's Charly Bravo) refuses to help him anywhere other than to the police station, Marcos murders him too. Trapped in a spiral of murder and fear of discovery, Marcos mind begins to fracture further as the summer heat rises and the smell of corpses – among them Esteban's fiancée (Lola Herrera) and her domineering father (Vengeance of the Zombies's Fernando Sánchez Polack) – attracts stray dogs. He finds solace in the company of wealthy gay neighbor néstor (Arrebato's Eusebio Poncela) until he discovers that the other man's highrise apartment provides a bird's eye view through the skylight of his corpse-strewn shack. Although more popularly known under the export title The Cannibal Man than the Spanish title that translates as "The Week of the Killer", gay filmmaker Eloy de la Iglesia's follow-up to his Hitchockian first thriller The Glass Ceiling is no gorefest and there is no actual cannibalism apart from a sickly suggestion of accidental ingestion. It has more in common with Repulsion but with a less overt surrealistic bent, focusing instead on Marcos' alienation which is as much socioeconomic oppression as it is a reluctance to accept responsibility. Marcos kills Paula as much out of fear as her attack on his manhood when she refuses to accept his worldview that the police would never believe someone like him; ironically, he had just received a promotion that might have improved his economic prospects in the eyes of Paula's parents – although we do learn in the Spanish version that he was hired because his mother employed there and killed in a workplace accident – so the murder could also be construed as another type of escape. Although Néstor may be attracted to Marcos, the film remains ambiguous about where the attraction is shared, with some moments of possible homoeroticism just as easily interpreted as respite and revelry as Marcos is allowed to temporarily forget his increasingly oppressive circumstances at home. Although director Iglesia does not condone Marcos' crimes any more than Néstor, he does seem to share Marcos' cynicism about how Spain's authoritarian regime treats classes differently (even Néstor escapes harassment by police officers checking identification when a restaurateur points out that he lives in one of the high rises). Although the ending was imposed by the censors, it is dramatically resonant. The photography of Raúl Artigot (The Witches Mountain) contrasts urban squalor and desolation in sunburnt browns and oranges with a range of cooler blues evoking escape and the unconscious with Marcos introduced sweltering supine on his sofa near the fan (possibly masturbating) and then seen framed through the blue tiles around his skylight possibly being spied upon by Néstor from his apartment high above, then later sitting alone in the blue-tinted darkness of his shack while the underwater shots of Néstor and Marcos swimming also have a blue tinge to them that may also mark them as half-fantasized. The scoring of Fernando Garcia Morcillo (The Night of the Sorcerers) offers up a loungey counterpoint to Marco's gradual breakdown as he becomes further alienated from the life to which he aspired. Iglesia's next thriller No One Heard the Scream would pair Parra with The Glass Ceiling's Carmen Sevilla. 
Video
Prepared for export by German world sales distributor Atlas International as The Cannibal Man – with dubbing supervised by Robert Oliver and featuring some familiar English dubbers of Italian horror – the film was released stateside under that title as well as "Apartment on the 13th Floor" and later as "He Wants You, Alive!" by American International offshoot Hallmark Releasing. In the UK, the film had a pre-cert VHS release from Intervision and was branded as a Video Nasty on the basis of its title alone – it did not help that the export version moved some slaughterhouse footage up to the beginning and that the assessors may not have watched much beyond that – and it was reissued by Redemption Films in the nineties. Anchor Bay released the export version stateside on DVD in 2000 and – after a double feature reissue with Mountain of the Cannibal God – that disc was reissued by Blue Underground in 2007. The film made its Blu-ray debut in 2014 from German label Subkultur featuring two versions: a mislabeled "Spanish version" that was actually the export version (98:30) with English audio and the shorter German theatrical cut (97:41), the content of which was carried over to a 2022 4K UltraHD mediabook. The disc also included eleven minutes of deleted scenes, some of which had been reintegrated in Spain's 2016 Blu-ray from Divisa which featured an integral cut (107:34) featuring material exclusive to both the Spanish and export versions. This integral cut was ported over stateside by Code Red for their 2018 Ronin Flix-exclusive Blu-ray which dropped the remainder of the deleted trims which consisted of footage not used in either version of the film but intriguing nonetheless (see below). In 2021, Severin Films' put out a Blu-ray stateside featuring separate presentations of the extended Spanish version – a number of Spanish acquisitions by German company Atlas International for world sales were submitted in integral negatives which included all of the export footage as well as sometimes tamer domestic takes or filler footage used to beef up the running time from which Atlas created their export and German domestic versions – and the export cut from a brand new transfer from the original camera negative that is the basis for both versions. These masters have been carried over to 88 Films' Blu-ray edition. The 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen transfers of the international export cut (98:25) – which unlike the Severin edition has not inserted the Atlas International English credits sequence and retains the Spanish one – and a reconstruction of the integral version (107:19) and they look virtually the same as the Severin release. The body of the transfer is a nice improvement over the earlier Spanish HD master which had some filtering and blotchier grain. Grain is sometimes noisy (especially on those bare off-white walls of Marcos' shack) but the newer transfer greatly enhances the film's sweltering atmosphere with an emphasis on decay and sweaty skin as well as some contrasting cool blues of the night scenes (as well as some subtle gels) as mini dark nights of the soul for Marcos. The reintegrated scenes of the long cut look slightly inferior and there is some minute jitter at the transition points (as well as one panning shot later in the film) while the export cut's credits look like they have been upscaled from SD in an otherwise superior presentation to the DVD master. 
Audio
Both versions offer a choice of English or Spanish DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono tracks and optional English subtitles. Although the English track features some familiar voices from English dubs of Italian horror – in some cases Spanish films were dubbed in Italy while in others the English dubbers would bus across the border for some recording jobs – the Spanish track is recommended even though none of the actors dub themselves just for more somber and mature delivery. For instance, sexpot restauranteur Rosa (Five Dollars for Ringo's Vicky Lagos) sounds like a brainless flirt as dubbed in English by Carolyn de Fonseca – dubber of such Italian horror characters as Olga in Suspiria and the Oedipal mother in Burial Ground – but in Spanish her observations about Marcos and his relationship with Paula sound more pointed. On the integral cut, scenes not included in the Spanish version revert to English on the Spanish track while scenes not in the English version revert to Spanish on the English track with optional English subtitles. 
Extras
The international cut is accompanied by two new commentary tracks. The first is an audio commentary by film historian David Flint whose discussion covers the film in the context of Spanish horror, its Video Nasty history, and the film's sexual politics and the paranoia of living in a fascist state. While speculating on how the film got lumped in with the other "cannibal" films scrutinized by the BBFC, Flint reveals that the pre-cert distributor Intervision was one of the early video companies that started out with a catalog of high profile studio titles until those studios started their own home video lines whereupon Intervision started importing a more diverse range of films. In discussing the other genre credits of the film's cast and crew, Flint seems to be unaware of the availability of Iglesia's Murder in a Blue World on U.S. Blu-ray or that of Arrebato – the U.S. Blu-ray of which has been ported over to U.K. – but that might be an indicator that this track was recorded at an earlier date for a possibly delayed or canceled release. The disc also includes an audio commentary by film historians Nathaniel Thompson and Troy Howarth who draw comparison between Iglesia's trilogy of early thrillers and the apartment trilogy of Polanski, discuss how Iglesia got the gay subtext of the film through Spanish censorship at a time when other countries were treating the idea of sexual fluidity more boldly. They also discuss the black comic elements of the film and make an argument that the censorship-compromised ending still works in the sense of "you can't fight the system." They also give context to Spain's attitude towards horror, pointing out the absurdity that Paul Naschy's supernatural monsters could not be situated in Spain but a sexually-repressed serial killer could, as well as the contributions to both filmmakers of screenwriter Antonio Fos (The Vampires' Night Orgy).  "Digesting Cannibal Man" (16:56) is an interview with academic Dr. Bárbara Barreiro León who discusses discusses Iglesia's career and depicting homosexuality in Spain at a time when it was criminalized between men – while they could not even conceive of women together – and contrasts Igelesia and Pedro Almodóvar as gay filmmakers, with Iglesia depicting the margins of Spain and the scourge of heroin among youth in his Quinqui films and Almodóvar's more campy depiction of sexual exploration and recreational drug use. In "An Unlikely Video Nasty" (11:46), academic Dr. Johnny Walker discusses the history of Intervision and how the Video Nasty debacle actually lead to video distributors playing up the "nasty" nature of some of their titles including the reissue artwork of The Cannibal Man and the sixties Texas-lensed alien creature feature Night Fright as "E.T.n. (The Extra-Terrestrial Nastie)". In "A Bloody History: Viewing Horror Under Dictatorships" (12:02), academic Dr. Alejandra Rodriguez-Remedi discusses Iglesia as a banned filmmaker in Chile under Pinochet and not getting to see his works until arriving in the U.K. where she found the Video Nasty phenomenon absurd in a democratic country. The disc also includes the deleted scenes (1:35) that were not reintegrated back into the expanded version including some snippets of unused ending, an alternate take of the sex scene between Marcos and Rosa, and most interestingly a montage featuring a kiss between Marcos and Néstor that may be imagined or real but dropped because Iglesia felt it might suggest that the latter condones the crimes of the former (in the actual ending, Néstor just says he supports Marcos whether he turns himself in or run away), along with a Red-Band trailer (3:03), a Green-Band trailer (2:58), and a newly-created re-issue trailer (2:41). 
Overall
An art house psychological thriller slapped internationally with a crass, exploitative title, The Cannibal Man might have disappointed gore hounds during the video days when by title alone it became a Video Nasty, but hopefully more seasoned Euro-horror fans will find it a compelling character study.
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