Cannibal Diner

I was seeking mindless, escapist entertainment and boy did I find it. Frank W. Montag is listed as the writer and director of this nonsense and he should not be allowed to be near a camera for the rest of his life on earth.

It begins with a few model friends who venture into the woods and set up a tent. They drink some wine and snort some coke before being vanquished by an unseen force.

Next up is Kati(Alexandra Lesch) and she is to meet up with her fellow models in the forest. Somehow, she winds up in an old factory warehouse where she meets up with some individuals with a taste for human flesh.

Alexandra is quite well built but for those expecting a flash of her ample bosom, forget it. She spends the last fifteen minutes or so running and screaming.

One of the villains is in blackface and I was waiting for him to belt out "Mammy" but he only grunted his infrequent lines. I need one hour and fifteen minutes of my life back.

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

Seriously! Just bad! On every level! The best thing about this, is the poster! Subsequently also the DVD cover using that poster image of course (or maybe it was the other way around). There are some beautiful women in this (and one or two of them do show some skin), but this does not elevate the viewing experience.

Actually there is a scene towards the end of the movie, that is almost completely dark, which is almost kind of good. It does create some atmosphere. But too little too late! The effects are OK and maybe the only thing that might make the viewing experience not a complete disaster. It's a shame, because the filmmaker is such a nice guy. And it's good that he tries to do genre cinema in Germany ... but he has some work to do!

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.