Umberto Lenzi
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Filmography
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Connections, in both directions
I remember visiting the old Deuce — where I sat behind a guy who wasn’t just smoking pot, he was using a bong, great clouds rising to the peeling ceiling — to see Make Them Die Slowly, which I’d later learn was the American grindhouse title for Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox.
More than a decade later, this 2013 offering (which will crawl on to UK DVD this month after a fleeting theatrical platform) finds him regurgitating Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust and Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox, with added female genital mutilation.
He’s the brand of filmmaker who feels the need to combine the “parody” of something like a Date Movie film spoof with the likes of Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust or Umberto Lenzi’s 1981 Cannibal Ferox, crafting something that has neither the ostensible self-awareness nor the controversy of either.
Midsommar’s stylistic antecedents are many and varied: Get Out, The Wicker Man, Cannibal Ferox (among others by Umberto Lenzi), anything by Michael Haneke (dumbed down quite a bit, of course), the cinema of Herschell Gordon Lewis, and, yes, National Lampoon’s European Vacation -- picture Chevy Chase’s Clark Griswold, in place of Dani or Christian, reacting to the unintentionally funny pronouncements of those silly villagers, then try to get that out of your mind.
Censor ’s video-store scene, with Enid procuring her dark cinematic drug of choice, shot me back like lightning to the grungy country store of my teenhood where my cousin and I, under the watchful eye of a Blood Beach poster, got our own too-young hands on Faces of Death and Cannibal Ferox , i.e. the horror dares of dumb boundary-pushing youth.