Eaten Alive!: Italian Cannibal and Zombie Movies [Paperback]

What was more suprising is that the text really delivers the goods too. Slater’s own articles and interviews with people like Giovanni Radice/John Morghen (pretty funny) or Catriona McColl (jolly hockeysticks), which make up about 55% of the book, veer between treating the whole scene as strictly cheesy fun, with thankfully not too many silly puns, and adopting a tone of seriousness when the going gets heavy with a film like Gestapo’s Last Orgy. He does his best to be definitive, starting from a fairly obscure 1964 peplum, Roma contra Roma/War of the Zombies, through all the inevitable Lucio Fulci zombie movies, right through to the film which Rupert Everett always seems to airbrush out of his CV (and must be his best by a long shot), Dellamorte Dellamore. If some titles don’t seem to justify their inclusion (Planet of the Vampires? Werewolf Woman?), then Slater demonstrates how they fit into the grand tapestry of spaghetti horror, particularly with his exhaustive notes. There are also some artier entries that, while the films are about cannibalism, really widen the scope of the book: Pasolini’s Pigsty, Love Ritual, Flesh (not the Warhol/Paul Morrissey film), and the odd obscurity like the sleazy sounding nun-erotica film Highest of the Skies that make you want to shell out for DVD imports just out of curiosity.

But the main strength is how Slater lines up so much solid support, and it’s not just the ‘names’: Jim Van Bebber goes gonzo over Third World cannibal films. Kim Newman is as authoritative as ever, though you kind of wonder why he bothered when he hates cannibal movies so much. Film academic Ben Halligan weighs in with compelling analysis of Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, The Perfume of the Lady in Black and Marco Fererri’s art film Flesh. Julian Petley draws lines between the plot of The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue and agricultural disasters like BSE and foot-and-mouth disease(!). Lloyd Kaufman offers a thought-provoking analysis of Cannibal Holocaust as a statement about media manipulation, which will be a real surprise to anyone who’s followed Troma’s output or read his autobiography. But the real find here, for me is a guy called Donato Totaro who I’ve never heard of but is another academic. While he intellectualises the splatter genre, you never feel he’s doing it just to apologise for liking this stuff – whether he’s giving us the HP Lovecraft angle on Fulci’s well-worn Gates of Hell films or drawing lines between Michel Soavi’s Dellamorte Dellamore and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, he convinces with his intellect and that he clearly loves these films.

I didn’t think I needed another book on Italian horror, but Slater and his team have tied up the definitive work on the zombie + cannibal genres. It’s quite a result.

Agreed there are some interesting factoids scattered throughout the book by guest reviewers, some of which are real novelties for the Euro-cult fan. But that's where the novelty stops - the rest is a series of breath taking banal interviews and a series of badly written reviews by the author, Slater. Where the book is entertaining is where the author (more like the editor) has not written or put his peurile childish opinions. The writing reads like Loaded magazine at best - and has none of the panache or the quality which have appeared in other more recent publications and certainly none of the illustrative beauty nor quality of say - books on Deodato, Fulci, Bava which have been released in recent years. Most of the interviewees have turned up else where so we have little or new information.

Little research into "new" interviewees has happened - so best avoided unless you want to broaden only somewhat on old knowledge. Not bad for someone starting out in the field of Eurocult films, but for anyone else, tired, degenerate and off the mark. Some of the films included have such a tenuous link with the genre it makes the reader beg the question as to why the film was included.

A waste of money to be honest, I am disappointed I bought it. Money could have been spent else where rather than reading through rambling tedeum. It reads as badly as Slater's commentaries on various DVDs (City of the Dead, City of the Living Dead and Zombie). Wait until you see it cheap in bargain shops before forking out hard earned cash.