Anthropophagous 2000

Not Schnaas' best work ( which is Violent Shit 2) but all in all ok. As always the "actors" are crap, but that's not the essential thing in his movies. The effects are the most important thing in Schnass' production, and they are really great in this one. There's actually not that much gore in it, but the scenes that made it are super and the baby-eating scene is no less than brilliantly sick and twisted... just as we like it!!! I wonder what Schnaas could do with a Pearl Harbor budget!?

Anthropophagous 2000 (1999)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

German director Andreas Schnaas' remake of Joe D'Amato's infamous Anthropophagous is pretty much a direct rip and follows the same storyline of vacationers stuck on an island and being terrorized by a cannibal. I've heard a lot about Schnaas but this was the first film of his I've seen. He's got quite a reputation for gore and the film doesn't disappoint on that level. There are all sorts of insanely violent scenes with tons of gore but the special effects are so incredibly poor that you can't help but laugh at them. It's that laughter that gives this film its charm, ala an Ed Wood movie. Technically speaking everything here is pretty horrid and doesn't hold a candle to the original flick. The famous "abortion" scene is also done here but not nearly as well.

In this retelling of Joe D'Amato's cult classic 'Antropophagus' from the 80's, a marooned lunatic preys upon hapless teenagers.

Joe D'Amato was, in all honesty, not the best director. Carving his name in a niche market of extremely gory and often hardcore pornographic films, his status diminished more and more, until he died of a heart attack in 1999. Mostly, he is remembered for his morally and stylistically repugnant films like the 'Ator' and 'Emanuelle' series, in particular 'Emanuelle in America', but also for his bizarre horror efforts, such as 'Buio Omega' or the aforementioned 'Antropophagus'.

So already you have a sort of love him or hate him situation. Andreas Schnaas evidently despised him, because where 'Antropophagus' was offensive, 'Anthropophagous 2000' is inept and borderline unwatchable.

It all becomes very clear when you sit through a love scene between a long-haired weirdo and his girlfriend who looks like Chong Li from 'Bloodsport'. The, dare I say, dialogue is laughably bad and sometimes totally inaudible. After the scummy sex scene, they are both murdered by our main antagonist, Nikos Karamanlis. The sex is ugly, the gore is over the top and the acting is ludicrous, but you knew that already.

The question is, is it worth it?

No. D'Amato's films were pretty terrible, but like many other video nasties and exploitation films from that time, they have a certain twisted charm, especially some of the soundtracks.

'Anthropophagous 2000' has virtually no redeeming qualities. You will probably laugh a few times, but I doubt that was Schnaas intention. The exposition delivered by the titular cannibal in particular is just unbelievably bad.

Not uncommon for Schnaas. Part of a burgeoning scene scene in the 80's, his previous efforts such as 'Violent Sh*t' or 'Zombie 90' are funnier than this, but technically even worse. Other well known members of this movement were Jörg Buttgereit and Olaf Ittenbach. Both have made vastly superior films to anything Schnaas has ever done.

Now it probably sounds like I'm knocking him pretty hard, but the truth is, you can absolutely watch 'Anthropophagous 2000'. My advice would be to get highly intoxicated first.

"Anthropophagous 2000" is the first Schnaas film I've seen. As a huge Joe D'Amato fan, I couldn't but give it a try. Well, I wasn't totally displeased, but I wasn't overly excited either. When Andreas Schnaas is good, he is very good, but when he's bad, he's rotten.

The film has its strong points: (1) The atmosphere is creepy and suspenseful. (2) The violence is brutal and plentiful. (3) There are enough surprises to keep viewers interested (especially if you are familiar with the original Joe D'Amato classic). (4) Andreas Schnaas is very good as the Grim Reaper (at least he tries his best to make a solid performance).

But there are also weak points. To name the most important ones:

(1) The major letdown is the lack of realistic gore. The gore effects in "Anthropophagous 2000" are of very uneven quality: some are quite impressive, while others are cheesy to the point of offense to the viewer. Was Schnaas distracted by other projects while he was making this, or did he run out of money, or did he simply lose interest?

(2) The sex scenes are laughable. How people are supposed to have sex with their under- and outerwear on (and how we are supposed to believe they're having sex) is beyond me. I'm not asking for Andreas Bethmann- type explicitness, but those scenes just don't work.

These drawbacks aside, "Anthropophagous 2000" is a nice effort. It's brutal, it's gory, and it's definitely worth a look – or maybe two. But it could have been better.

Going to a beach-front getaway, a group of friends hoping to have a fun time together slowly realize their dwindling numbers are the result of a cannibalistic murderer running loose and try to stop his rampage before it's too late.

This here was quite the fun if prototypical German splatter effort. As is par for the course with those kinds of films, this one tends to get the majority of it's positives from the continuous and over-the-top splatter effects for the utterly graphic kills, and even though the low-budget shines through from time-to-time the film gets by more on the cleverness and quantity of the effects. From the marvelous opening, where one victim is repeated hacked up with an axe before being viciously scalped, to a savage double-murder in the woods where one is disemboweled and gutted while the other is removed of his esophageal tract, and the later scene where one is impaled with a wooden pole, there's plenty of rather gruesome and nauseatingly graphic kills here that give this plenty of crudely-styled spectacle that goes quite nicely into the film's rather enjoyable and explosive pace. The here here is so fact and frantic that there's little stopping it from unleashing a multitude of fine gore effects from the next one as these scenes manage to set-up the absolutely amazing finale that one-ups the original in excessive gore combined with the big action that comes along throughout here as this has a fine series of scenes that build up really well. There's some excessively fun action scenes in here that make-up the blistering pace here with several great escape chases through the abandoned town and out into the surrounding woods where they get into close encounters here, even managing several scenes here that outdo the original as the pregnant friend slaughter, the great brawl with the killer as the remaining friends engage in a long showdown and the wraparound here in the caves gives this a great sense of fun. Along with some rather fine Gothic-flavored suspense scenes, these hold this one up over it's few minor flaws. The main problem here is the same prototypical problem the other German splatter efforts feature as the ludicrously low-budget effects here give themselves away on nearly every occasion as the use of plastic mannequin heads for the bodily dismemberment rarely matches up with the performer in terms of facial features while the rough edges and plastered skin look ridiculously fake before the fake blood and intestines get featured. Though it tends to run a bit too close to the original in terms of going shot-for-shot too many times for it's own good, it's all the flaws found here.

Rated Unrated/NC-17: Extreme Graphic Violence, Nudity, Graphic Language, strong sex scenes, mild drug use, extreme violence against children and graphic violence against pregnant women.