Watch In the Land of the Cannibals For Free

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

A small commando squad ventures into the heart of the Amazon to retrieve Sara Armstrong (Cindy Jelic Matic). The hottie daughter of a senator, she was kidnapped by a cannibal tribe. The soldiers are led by a guide named Romero (Claudio Morales), a man who knows the score when it comes to the local tribes and their customs.Ad copy refers to this as a cross between "Cannibal Holocaust" and "Predator", which pretty much sums up the whole silly affair. In fact, director Bruno Mattei ("Hell of the Living Dead", "Rats: Night of Terror") and his co-writer, Giovanni Paolucci, spend so much time shamelessly aping "Predator", and "Aliens" as well, that you just have to shake your head and laugh at their nerve.On location shooting in the Philippines is effectively atmospheric (and supplemented by some stock footage), and there's a pleasingly high body count. The gore devised by Giuseppe Ferranti is actually quite good. The characters are all patently ridiculous, and receive appropriately cheese ball performances. Ydalia Suarez is the most amusing as Vasquez, an oh so obvious nod to the gung ho marine played by Jenette Goldstein in "Aliens"."In the Land of the Cannibals" is plenty stupid, but it's not pretending to be anything other than a routine ripoff film and continuation of that cannibal genre popularized by the Italians in the 1970s and 1980s. While this viewer would readily admit that it's hardly "good" stuff, it's actually pretty entertaining, provided one isn't annoyed by the lack of imagination in the script.Six out of 10.

Bruno Mattei is one of my favorite directors. Not because he's great, but because he is always entertainingly terrible. Who can forget such amazing films as "Women's Prison Massacre" or "Zombie 3". He was unique."Land of Death" is often touted as Predator meets Cannibal Holocaust, but really it's not. Yeah, he steals scenes from Predator (in fact, he steals the same scene THREE TIMES in typical Bruno ham-handed manner), but really it's only because he has soldiers in the jungle, so why not? The plot does not otherwise mirror Predator. There is not even a giant boss-fight in the end, though with supernal brilliance, he actually foreshadows such a boss-fight in the dialogue and scenes. Then doesn't deliver. Et tu, Bruno? Two acts of on-camera animal violence, and it is probable that the murdered piglet is a prop - seems kind of prop-like during the death scene. I'm pretty sure they killed that snake though - jerks.The aspect that bugged me the most was how quickly Bruno's "crack soldiers" lusted for insane vengeance on the not-really-cannibals, after one (1) of their guys was killed. Particularly because we see the soldiers kill dozens to hundreds of the indians in retaliation, including burning down their village. Yet I think we are supposed to root for the soldiers.My favorite guy was Kruger, the "Irishman". In fairness he did have a mock-Irish accent.Really my problem with Land of Death is that it wasn't batshit stupid enough to stand with Bruno Mattei's greatest moments. On the other hand, because it was a disappointing Bruno Mattei film, that kind of makes it the perfect Bruno Mattei film.If you are a Mattei fan, check it out. If you are not yet a Mattei fan, go watch The Other Hell, The Tomb, Island of the Living Dead, Women's Prison Massacre, SS Girls, or Hell of the Living Dead first. Those will amaze you with Bruno's chutzpah.

Ripping off big budget American films was a common practice for Italian filmmakers in the seventies and eighties with the likes of The Exorcist, Dirty Harry and Jaws being 'reinvented' several times by a host of names, which often included Bruno Mattei. By 2003, cheap exploitation cinema had become less popular in Italy; but Bruno Mattei was still making movies and apparently he didn't see any reason to stop this often practiced tradition of ripping off American movies, and saw fit to reinvent John McTiernan's Predator and splice it together with another popular American export, the cannibal movie, and what we have as the result is this film. Land of Death takes place, as you would expect, in the Amazon jungle and as was the case with Predator; we focus on a group of soldiers that have to go into the jungle on a rescue mission. They have to rescue a general's daughter who has been kidnapped by a cannibal tribe who, fascinated by her blonde hair, believe her to be some sort of goddess.Most of the Italian rip-offs released during the seventies and eighties were a bit more subtle than this film. The order of the day was usually to rip a film off thematically and basically spin a new story around the idea used in the successful American film. But Mattei apparently couldn't be bothered to go through the time consuming process of thinking up an idea and writing a script; so what we get instead is just a re-run of Predator. And I mean that literally; whole lines of dialogue are taken, scenes are stolen almost frame for frame, the characters are the same etc. In fact if it wasn't for the fact that there is no alien, this could be a frame for frame remake of Predator (although it's more along the same lines as the fan made version of Indiana Jones quality-wise than Gus Van Sant's Psycho!). Basically, if you've seen Predator, you will know exactly what to expect here and to be honest there's not much point watching unless you're only there to see just how badly McTiernan's film has been stolen from. Mattei does at least give us some gore...but to be honest, this is shameful stuff.

Land of Death (2003) ** (out of 4) One of several films Italian director Bruno Mattai made during his comeback a few years before dying. Mattai's films are always bad so the real question is if they are bad enough to be entertaining and this one here is. It's also worth watching Mattai to see what and who he rips off and this time out he does a scene for scene remake of Cannibal Holocaust even though, of course, that film is never credited. In the film some American soldiers go missing in the jungle so another group goes in to look for them and they too run into cannibals. I was really curious to see what Mattai would do with this politically incorrect genre and he delivers exactly what those earlier controversial films did. You have rape, torture, flesh eating and yes, real animals dying. These scenes are always disgusting but Mattai has them here after all the years of protest towards Cannibal Holocaust and others like it. This film here contains the bad dubbing and bad acting but everything is bad enough to where the film remains interesting if you've seen the other movie. There really isn't a single original idea here as everything comes from Cannibal Holocaust but it's interesting to see such a rip off.