Cannibal Diner

A bunch of nubile German chicks head off to an abandoned diner before discovering that it's really home to a den of cannibals. One by one they are picked off in tame cutaway ways until the one that's left runs around a lot while whimpering. You ever see a film with a pretty cool cover which makes you think it might at least have some nice gore and be a passable entertaining time filler? Only then you put it on and it's absolutely dire and generic and totally devoid of any tension, suspense or fun? Yeah. Cannibal Diner is one of those films. Basically, it's a generic badly directed mess and most unforgivably of all, it's really boring. The director is apparently under the bizarre delusion that jumpy flashy cut off editing and long scenes of a chick stumbling around to intense urgent music equates to tension. It doesn't.

I don't want to sound too harsh here because I never expected much to begin with, and sucker as I am for all things cannibal related in horror, my standards tend to be fairly low in this regard. All I ask for is some nice gore and some perky nudity. Now while there is admittedly some perky nudity here, it's still an utterly abysmal film, that failed to even meet my low requirements, and I gotta say, I'm actually amazed that films like this even get financed. I firmly believe that for all its flaws, indie or low budget horror is actually the lifeblood of the genre, in terms of quality, but just like big budgeted and decidedly bland remakes, indie horror unfortunately throws some turkeys our way also and Cannibal Diner is a film to be avoided, as it's one of those films where your finger is itching to press the fast forward button 30 minutes in and even at 66 minutes (6 minutes are end credits) it still outstays its welcome. 2/10 a really bad and boring horror film and far too tame.

Avoid.

There are worse movies out there than Cannibal Diner and there are a few things that keep it from being worse than it actually was. Cannibal Diner does start off promisingly with some atmosphere and tension, the music has an urgent and haunting vibe to it and the gore is thankfully not too cheap and not used too excessively. The camera work/editing and directing though were often frantic and abrupt and when they do slow down they manage to take slow to extremes. The movie is too darkly lit in places and while the settings have a nice Gothic look you couldn't properly enjoy it because of the state of the lighting and the way it was shot and edited. Cannibal Diner felt very underwritten with the dialogue sounding so awkward it was not easy to take seriously or understand what point was trying to be made. The story apart from the opening has no atmosphere, thrills or tension and just felt very pedestrian and overly-silly, with scenes that went on for far too long and didn't serve anything to the story. The antagonists, not looking terrible but also not mind-blowing either(true of most of the effects here actually), have little personality and no real menace, which made the conflict and threat really unconvincing. There's no better news about the acting, the actors look good and sexy but their acting is another matter, too often being stilted and repetitive. The chemistry is not convincing either with them sometimes being in their own world and not much else. All in all, could have been much worse but a lame movie in most but not all respects. 3/10 Bethany Cox

Shameful on the Cannibal movies category it's shameful compared to Cannibal Holocaust, Cannibal Ferox, and Jungle Holocaust. Even Eli Roth's Green Inferno dominates over this thing. This was dreadful.

This is for the people that are into movies like Dead Snow, Wrong Turn, The Collector, Creep the list goes on that are nearly the same as this. There's no plot, there's no attempt at a story. Our main character has the brain of a toothpick. The beginning of this movie kills the rest of it, simply cuz she does not know how to take a pair of car keys, and not go somewhere where a sign says not to. Out of everywhere to get help, she goes into the factory, which looks like it came out of a nuclear waist-land.

She is the only character with depth. All 5 other women do not even exist in the movie. They are there for 5 seconds and that's it. Also, the main character says the F word every time, and then it's silence. That's all of her voicings.

The title CANNIBAL DINER and the poster led me to imagine that this was going to be a movie about an establishment that serves up human flesh for the eating. Though admittedly quite distasteful, the topic has had some surprisingly good treatments, such as DELICATESSEN (1991), EATING RAOUL (1982) and especially THE GREEN BUTCHERS (2003). Even cheesier treatments like MOTEL HELL (1980) and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2(1986), which are not really good movies, have managed to do something with this idea. Alas, the title is positively deceptive and, in a way, so is the poster: there are cannibals, but there is no diner (could it be that the German film-makers meant "dinner"??).

This film turns out to be yet another take on the well-worn theme of hot chicks being hunted, this time by chemically contaminated cannibal mutants(?) who are just actors in black face-paint.

Though I would not call this film amateurish, it comes close. Even worse, it lacks even one ounce of originality, as most scenes are borrowed from other movies. There are many scenes of the girls walking around which end up just providing ample opportunities to check how much longer the movie is going to be. In more than one of those walking scenes, I was stunned by the incongruence between the lack of tension in the scene and the excitement conveyed by the stock music, even more so because the director apparently also wrote some of the music, and as such would have been expected to have a better feel for how the music and the visuals go together.

This movie's worst sin is that it is unrelentingly, mercilessly boring. I do not think I have ever checked as much and impatiently anticipated when a film is going to be over, even though it clocks in at only 75 minutes.

I sometimes read in negative movie reviews expressions of regret or anger about how the reviewer's time was wasted, but this kind of thought almost never occurs to me. I appreciate that putting together a movie is a major undertaking, and even if it is bad, it still represents a sustained effort by a group of people to make a vision a reality. This deserves to be applauded and appreciated just on its own. And usually I do, and therefore I almost never regard my time as wasted, even if the film was profoundly bad.

But here, the pointless ending after having endured excessively indulgent yet stultifyingly boring walking/chasing scenes did actually bring up feelings of annoyance at having wasted my time with this. In the future, I will strictly avoid all works by this director.

While driving to meet her friends for a spot of camping in the countryside, Kati (Alexandra Lesch) finds herself lost. When she gets out of her car to ask for directions, her vehicle is stolen, and she finds herself wandering into a restricted industrial area that is home to a clan of cannibals.

The poster for this low budget German 'Wrong Turn' inspired horror shows its star, buxom beauty Alexandra Lesch, laying naked on her back, her naughty bits obscured by the cannibals' hands, suggesting a film brimming with gratuitous nudity. Sadly, barring a brief shower scene during the opening credits, Lesch fails to get nekkid, her ample charms remaining (mostly*) hidden under that regulation horror item of clothing, the tight white vest.

But a lack of nudity isn't the only way the film comes up short: for a German horror with the word 'cannibal' in the title, there is also a frustrating lack of gore, with only a couple of body part props and an unimpressive 'metal pole in the eye' during the whole sorry affair. For the most part, the film consists of Lesch running around a ramshackle factory, trying to avoid the flesh-eaters. As nice as it is to see such a well endowed girl bounce her way through a movie, it does get more than a little tedious when there is virtually no plot to speak of and a complete lack of originality. Chuck in a dreadfully boring final act shot almost entirely in night vision and what we have is an extremely disappointing waste of time.

2.5 out of 10, rounded up to 3 for IMDb.

*Lesch does strip to her undies towards the end of the film, but filmed in night vision (poorly lit with a green tint), it's hardly worth the wait.