Canadian 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 
early '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.
scene 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 
like 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. 
fairly 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.
getting 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. 
was 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 
script (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.
their ties to milestones in Canadian theater and TV, the watershed nature of the movie as a Canadian genre film, the 
path 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)
FILMS WE LIKE (Blu-ray)
SHOUT! FACTORY(DVD)
