Color, 1973, 82 mins. 50 secs.
Directed by Ivan Reitman
Starring Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Ronald Ulrich, Randall Carpenter, Bonnie Neilson, Mira Pawluk
Canadian International Pictures (Blu-ray) (US RA HD), Films We Like (Blu-ray) (Canada RA HD), Shout! Factory (DVD) (US R1 NTSC), Nucleus Films (DVD) (UK RB PAL) / WS (1.78:1) (16:9)


Cannibal Girls is the Dr. No of Cannibal GirlsCanadian horror films. It's definitely not the best of its kind, but without it, popular culture would be a whole lot poorer. Sporting a weird pedigree and an even weirder back story, this oddball exploitation film stumbled onto screens in the Cannibal Girlsearly '70s as a pick-up from American International Pictures, who outfitted it with a William Castle-style gimmick ("The picture with the Warning Bell! When it rings - close your eyes if you're squeamish!") and a memorably lurid one-sheet poster design which thankfully appears on the DVD cover. Of course, now it's more significant as the first significant film directed by Ivan Reitman (who went on to a trio of Bill Murray hits starting with 1979's Meatballs) and an early vehicle for future SCTV comedy pros Andrea Martin and Eugene Levy, with the former dipping her toes into Canadian horror once more the following year with Black Christmas.

After a brief trashy prologue (shot later on a beach in Toronto) in which a man is attacked on the beach while feeling up his girlfriend, we meet our two protagonists, Clifford (Levy) and Gloria (Martin), a couple out for a weekend in the countryside after being an item for only two weeks. Equipped with an untrustworthy car, they wind up in a small town called Farnhamville where big trucks with "MEAT" signs drive around the streets. The local motel owner and town historian regales them with a local story about three beautiful cannibal women who lure men to their culinary doom and have never been apprehended. Fascinated, the pair decide to check out the Cannibal Girlsscene of the crime which has now become a well-appointed restaurant run by the eccentric, Shakespeare-quoting Reverend Alex St. John (Ulrich) and three sexy women (Carpenter, Neilson and Pawluk) who look an awful lot Cannibal Girlslike the maneaters we've seen before. They decide to accept an invitation to stay the night, but Gloria is traumatized when the Reverend and the girls invade their bedroom, tie up Cliff, and seem to prepare for a nasty ritual. Gloria escapes with her life, only to wake up in bed with her boyfriend the next morning. Was it all a nightmare, or is there something more sinister going on? Well, just look at the title.

A perplexing but at times wildly entertaining film, Cannibal Girls boasts no technical prowess at all and, thanks to its dingy cinematography, theatrical splashes of stage blood, and often improvised, florid prattling by the cast, feels at times like something made by Andy Milligan on a trip to the Great White North. For some reason the film has since acquired a reputation as some sort of horror parody, though there's really not much in the film to back that up. Martin and Levy do get a handful of amusing moments such as her attempts to start their car by cooing sweet nothings at the steering wheel or Levy's wry segment involving a cigarette planted on the end of his guitar string, but overall there's actually a lot less humor (intentional or otherwise) here than the aforementioned Black Christmas. Most of the film goes for an eerie vibe with its isolated, wintry setting and splattery cannibal murders every fifteen minutes or so, while the film often wanders around in search of an actual story. (The opening credits promising dialogue "created by the cast" should be a good indicator that this isn't exactly Robert Altman territory on the improv scale.) That said, it does manage to pull out a Cannibal Girlsfairly effective Grand Guignol ending, and cinematographer Robert Saad (who went on to Death Weekend and Cronenberg's Shivers) wrings some solid atmosphere out of the austere locations.

Despite its reasonable box office success (often paired by AIP with another cannibal-themed import, Raw Meat), Cannibal Girls quickly faded into oblivion in the U.S., earning only a tiny handful of token late night TV broadcasts and never Cannibal Girlsgetting a VHS release. Horror fans were left to resort to the 1983 VHS tape issued by Canada's CIC (the same folks who brought you the first uncut version of Bloody Moon), which became a hot catalog collector's item and occasional mom 'n' pop video store staple. However, this edition was the original Canadian version without the warning bell on the soundtrack, leaving the AIP version in limbo for decades.

Therefore it was a great relief in 2010 that Shout! Factory's much-needed DVD release presented the film with both soundtracks fully intact. The disc defaults to the standard Canadian version, but you can also watch it with the AIP track which commences with a voiceover explaining to the audience how the whole process works. Basically a noise sounding like a bicycle horn goes off right before blood appears, and then a doorbell chime indicates the nastiness is over. This tactic seems fine (if awfully comedic) at first but becomes increasingly useless as the film progresses, often sounding off only a couple of frames before the gore hits and sometimes bypassing shocking moments entirely. In any case, it's nice to have this nifty bit of cinematic ballyhoo (basically a twist on Chamber of Horrors' "horror horn") back in circulation where it belongs. The actual transfer is obviously much improved over the dated, cropped CIC edition and does as well as you could expect at the time for a cheap, early '70s Canadian title that had extra footage shot for padding and shock value months and months after it Cannibal Girlswas originally completed (including the prologue). Along with the wonderfully trashy American theatrical trailer and two radio spots, the disc includes a pair of great extras explaining exactly how the film came about. Reitman and producer/editor/co-writer Daniel Goldberg (who went on to much bigger, full-fledged comedies like The Hangover) appear in one featurette, "Cannibal Guys" (26m48s), and candidly talk about how the film came about, including its lack of Cannibal Girlsscript (using only a 14-page treatment), their ignorance of things like shot coverage, and their covert methods used to push the film at places like the Cannes Film Festival. Best of all are the tales about dealing with AIP's Sam Arkoff, who evaluated it as "so terrible it might actually make some money." Eugene Levy (now looking much more familiar without the film's wild afro and porn star mustache) appears in a separate 19m42s video interview (titled "Meat Eugene!," of course) in which he stands in the butcher section of a food market and talks with critic Richard Crouse about his own naive approach to his leading role, including how his own smoking habit contributed to his cleverest on-screen gag. The disc sleeve comes with a reversible option with alternate poster art on the opposite side. The same essential package was also released the same year on DVD in the U.K. from Nucleus Films, and a few months later it bowed on Blu-ray in Canada from Films We Like featuring an obviously superior HD presentation, both soundtrack options, and the two interview featurettes and theatrical trailer. It also adds a 1968 Reitman short film, Orientation (21m58s), taking an increasingly surreal and comedic look at a nerdy college freshman's integration into campus life and possible romance.

In 2025, Canadian International Pictures gave the film its long-belated U.S. Blu-ray debut in an expanded presentation featuring a new, improved color grade and "extensive" dirt and damage repair on the existing 2K scan. The difference isn't radical, but noticeably the blacks have been adjusted a bit to look less gray in the darker and scenes and It looks pleasing throughout. Again you get the original Canadian soundtrack or the revised AIP option as DTS-HD MA 2.0 mono options with English SDH subtitles. A new commentary with the obvious ideal team of Canuxploitation experts Paul Corupe and film Jason Pichonsky hits all the notes you'd expect including pointing out the Toronto locations, covering the backgrounds of the cast and Cannibal Girlstheir ties to milestones in Canadian theater and TV, the watershed nature of the movie as a Canadian genre film, the Cannibal Girlspath to distribution, and tons more. A fourth audio option is a podcast episode of "2 Guys and a Chainsaw" with hosts Craig Higgins and Todd Kuhns, who have a friendly conversation about the film's importance, the cast, and their own experiences with it and other related productions, plus an additional new epilogue on Canadian horror so it fills up the running time. "Cannibal Guys," "Meat Eugene!," and the trailer are here of course, while Orientation is included in a longer, uncut (25m27s) presentation that also looks way, way better here than before. It also gets a new commentary by Hamilton Babylon author Stephen Broomer covering all things early Reitman and the nascent stages of frat comedy here. Chris Alexander turns up here for two new video pieces, "Reitman the Fright Man" (20m20s) covering his interaction with the filmmaker about his genre days with Cinépix and related titles (this one, Rabid, Shivers, Dead Weekend, and Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia), and "The Horror Horn" (5m20s) briefly explaining the AIP gimmick. The new "More Meat!" (20m32s) is a fun batch of additional outtakes from the Eugene Levy interview including a Frankenstein musical interlude, while other morsels include the French-language opening credits (Des filles cannibales!), 90 seconds of TV spots, 85 seconds of radio spots, a 25-image AIP pressbook, and a 23-image archival gallery. The package comes with an illustrated booklet featuring a 1973 interview with Reitman and Goldberg by Joe Medjuck (mainly on the insanely arduous, piecemeal project of finishing the film and getting it through post-production) and an updated version of artist Rick Trembles' Motion Picture Purgatory comic about the film.

CANADIAN INTERNATIONAL PICTURES (Blu-ray)
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FILMS WE LIKE (Blu-ray)

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SHOUT! FACTORY(DVD)

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Updated review on March 22, 2025