THE GRIM REAPER

CONTAINS SPOILERS, BECAUSE I JUST DON'T CARE

Hurrah! They've finally taken a break from sending me Jess Franco movies. Unfortunately they've swapped him for Joe D'Amato, aka Aristide Massacessi: a Eurocack director who, bizarrely, isn't as good as Franco.

The Grim Reaper dates from 1980 and also rejoices in the scrabbletastic title of Anthropophagus (among many others). Here a group of badly dubbed young wastrels sail around the Greek islands, and wander around deserted villages at inordinate length before a mumbling cannibal sneaks up behind them and murders them. Ordinarily I'd be fine with this, but unfortunately he takes his own sweet time about it, and more damagingly he mainly operates in the dark so we don't even get the blood and guts on clear display, especially given the perfunctory DVD transfer (4:3, no extras, poor picture quality).

The high point of unforgiveable bad taste occurs when the mumbling cannibal (apparently - it's hard to see) rips an unborn child from its mother's womb and eats it. But even such an appalling act of repugnant depravity doesn't break through the tedium. It's an incredibly slow film and it's hard to care who lives or who dies. Mysteriously it got a sequel, called Absurd, which was promptly banned as a video nasty. This "original" is more of a video dull.

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