The Mountain of the Cannibal God

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The Mountain of the Cannibal God (La montagna del dio cannibale)
Directed by	Sergio Martino
Produced by	Luciano Martino
Written by	Cesare Frugoni Sergio Martino
Starring	Ursula Andress Stacy Keach Claudio Cassinelli Antonio Marsina
Cinematography	Giancarlo Ferrando
Editing by	Augenio Alabiso
Distributed by	New Line Cinema
Release date(s)	1978
Running time	99 min.
Country	Italy
Language	English
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The Mountain of the Cannibal God (Italian title: La montagna del dio cannibale) is an Italian cult movie, English spoken, starred by Ursula Andress and Stacy Keach. The film was banned in the UK until 2001 for its graphic violence and considered a "video nasty".

[edit] Plot

Andress stars as Susan Stevenson who travels to the Philippines to find her missing anthropologist husband. Finding a video her husband had made, it becomes clear that he has gone to Mount Rarami, considered sacred by local tribespeople.

Set in the Jungles of New Guinea, Susan Stevenson (Ursula Andress) is trying to find her missing anthropologist husband Henry. So she and her brother Arthur enlist the services of a Professor Edward Foster (Stacey Keach), who thinks her husband might have headed for a mountain named Ra Ra Me, which is located just off the coast on the island of Roka.

The locals believe that the mountain is cursed, and the authorities won't allow expeditions there. So they surreptitiously head on into the jungle to see if that's where he went. They eventually make it to the island, and after a few few run-ins against some unfriendly anacondas, alligators and tarantulas, they meet another jungle explorer named Manola (played by regular Italian B-movie star Claudio Cassinelli) who's been staying at a nearby mission camp, and agrees to join them in their expedition.

Matters become complicated however, when it then turns out that each of them has their own private reasons for coming to the island, and finding Susan's husband wasn't part of any of them. Susan and Arthur have secretly been looking for uranium deposits, and then Foster reveals that he has only come there because he had been on the island a few years previously and was taken captive by a tribe of primitive cannibals. So has only returned to see if they still exist, and wipe them out.

Upon arriving at the mountain, they are immediately captured by the natives that Foster described and taken to their camp. There they find the primitives worshipping the remains of Susan's husband as they can hear his Geiger counter ticking, and believe it to be his heart still working. Susan is subsequently tied up, stripped naked and smeared with mud (which Andress fans will undoubtedly enjoy) and poor old Manola is tied up and tortured, whilst the others are turned into the dish-of-the-day.

The uncut European print, being a cannibal film, shows scene of gratuitous animal violence. This includes an iguana being split open and gutted, and a monkey being devoured by an anaconda, although these pale in comparison to the likes of Ferox and Holocaust, and director Sergio Martino admits he only tacked these on at the distributors insistence.