September 30, 2015

As horror fans, we’re always on the quest to find something new, something unique, something different. We want to test our limits and see if there’s anything out there that’s even too much for us. Can we still be scared or grossed out after we’ve seen everything? At some point, you stumble upon the Italian sub-genre of “cannibal” films. And there’s one thing that anyone that endures the cult classic CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST can agree. Once you see it, you will never forget it.

The same can be said about CANNIBAL FEROX and several other films from this odd pocket of Italian cinema. Thankfully, Grindhouse Releasing has fully saved and restored these films in all their gory glory. We got to chat with Oscar winning editor Bob Murawski, who co-owns the Grindhouse Releasing label and get the full scoop on how he managed to put together such terrific versions of these notorious cult classics out on Blu-Ray!

Blumhouse.com: When’s the first time that you discovered these “cannibal” films? Because for me, I have a very distinct memory of seeing CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST in Chicago after a convention as a midnight screening and it forever changed me. Was that the first film of that sub-genre you discovered too?

Bob Murawski: Originally, the first one I heard of was CANNIBAL FEROX. I used to subscribe to this magazine, a Xerox fanzine called The Gore Gazette. It was this insane fanzine written by this guy named Rick Sullivan in New York and he basically covered all the Times Square/42nd Street “grindhouse” scene. The first issue I got, he had been at one of the film markets and he was talking about the films he’d seen for sale and one of them was CANNIBAL FEROX. There was the infamous picture of the girl with the hooks through her breasts, and of course, it was a Xerox magazine so it was grainy and washed out and in black and white and that just made it look all the more disturbing. A couple of issues later, he reviewed the movie. It had been picked up by Terry Levine at Aquarius Releasing and it’d been named MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY. He gave it a great review, which had to be around 1981. He ultimately named it Gore Gazette movie of the year. I didn’t see the actual movie until years later. I was in Michigan at the time and a lot of those movies never made it to the mid-West. But I know it was a huge hit on 42nd street. I finally got to see it on video. One of the video stores by me got the Thriller video release in the big box. It was uncut and lived up to all the hype.

BH: What about CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST?

BM: CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST I started hearing about in a similar way. I started reading about it in Chas. Balun’s magazine DEEP RED. He wrote about it and said it was “the last cannibal movie you ever need to see.” He went into detail about how horrific the movie was and how it really tested the boundaries of what you could do, and how this stuff we were into, it made us question even being into these kind of movies. I didn’t see it for a few years, but finally Chas put it out as a bootleg video through his magazine. It was videos you just couldn’t get any other way, so it was a 4th generation version. I ended up finding it downtown in Little Tokyo at a video store down there in a pretty pristine quality VHS. But it was censored and had blobs covering up any of the nudity. In those days in Japan, they could show any other sort of horrific atrocities and as much gore as you can imagine, but pubic hair they couldn’t show. The movie in that version was very disturbing. Years later, my partner (in Grindhouse Releasing) Sage (Stallone) and I were in Rome because he had bought the rights to CANNIBAL FEROX and THE BEYOND, and we were also offered CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST at that time. He hadn’t seen it so we got a VHS from the distributor and I talked it up, and it lived up to the hype I made, so we ended up getting an option to put it out through Grindhouse.

BH: When you guys put CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST out through Grindhouse Releasing, was that the first official release of the movie in the U.S.?

BM: Yeah, that was the first time it had ever been released on video in the US. CANNIBAL FEROX had come out as MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY on the Thriller video label and actually was uncut. People think it was a cut version, but I don’t think it was ever cut. But of course, we wanted to put out a good high quality version of that as well. It was one of our first titles. That and THE BEYOND. We wanted to go back to the original elements and putout something with great quality. CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST had been released theatrically by Larry Joachim who was a NY based distributor at the time. We made a number of prints but as soon as he submitted it for a rating, he got an X rating. He tried to repeal it and get child psychologists to testify to the MPAA. It’s funny, he always told me about it and I always thought he was making it up, but I went and researched it at the Academy and found old articles in Variety magazine detailing how he was trying to repeal the rating by working with child psychologists saying that even though the movie was disturbing, it wouldn’t screw up kids. But really, if any movie deserves an X rating, it’s that movie! (Laughs) But it played quite a bit on 42nd street and on the East Coast, but it never made it out of there. People always saw it as a bootleg and it was never released on video. Our release was definitely the first non-bootleg way of seeing it in the US and that was our DVD we put out in the late 90’s/early 2000’s.

BH: These films have been out on DVD before from Grindhouse Releasing, but now these Blu-Ray release look fantastic. I can’t believe how good they look!

BM: I was a little frustrated by CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST because again whenever you’re working with these Italian labs you’re at their mercy. Because they control the film elements, a lot of times the producers, are the co-owners of the facilities, you’re stuck doing these transfers in Italy, at bad labs that don’t have very good quality. For CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, they transferred it from the original negative, but I was pretty unhappy with the transfer that they did. So the version that we put out is a hybrid of our original HD master that we did years ago for the DVD. And this new transfer that they had, because there was some stuff not as good as our original transfer, so it was a real patchwork putting it together. And CANNIBAL FEROX was a similar situation. I went through 3 different transfers from the Italians before I got anything I considered to be remotely acceptable. The first transfer they did was totally out of focus. They didn’t see it, and they wouldn’t acknowledge it or refund my money, so finally they did another transfer and offered to give me a certain percentage of credit towards it and I said fine. I was at their mercy. We did a second transfer and it was even worse than the first one! Finally we ended up just scanning it frame by frame on a scanner as opposed to a film transfer. Even though it costs 5 times as much money, I knew that there would be no other way to get something halfway decent. Everybody always wonders why these take so long, but that’s the reason. It’s a constant struggle to make these things technically acceptable. That’s just part of what goes along with releasing these old Italian movies.

BH: You wouldn’t be able to tell from the final product!

BM: It took a lot of work! For both of the movies, once I got the elements, I took them over to Fotokem and they did a huge amount of work over there with color correction and cleaning stuff up. It was a massive amount of work to make it work. I didn’t want to leave any stones unturned. We kept working and working to make it as best as it could be. I’m pretty happy with them.

BH: I grew up as a die-hard horror fan, but for some reason the Italian cannibal films were the one sub-genre I didn’t really know. But on the CANNIBAL FEROX release, you’ve got this fantastic documentary titled EATEN ALIVE! THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ITALIAN CANNIBAL FILM. And it’s really a terrific 101 course on the whole sub-genre.

BM: Yeah, well, the cannibal films were always the black sheep of the Italian movies. But the doc is great. Calum Waddell in Scotland shot all these interviews and put it together and did a great job. His partner Naomi Holwill interviewed all the key players. All the directors, all the actors. They found some of the actors that had never been interviewed before. It’s just great to have everything in one place in one document. I was initially skeptical when they first proposed it because I didn’t know if there was enough that remained to be said about these movies! But there was, once they interviewed everybody and put it all together, there was a lot of stuff that had not been said and needed to be said. People had a lot of interesting insights, so I thought it was great.

BH: I rather like the Lenzi and Deodato “friendly” rivalry. The back and forth between those guys. (Laughs)

BM: That whole thing is great! And the stuff with Lenzi and his star Giavanni Lombardo Radice is great too. That was something we quickly discovered when we first got the movie. Sage and I went to Rome in 1997 and they just would not be in the same room together. We had to record the commentary tracks separately and edit them together. But actually, it turned out to be great, because both of them were very honest and had they been together, they might not have been. So we were able to get the real honest story from both of them, and they both had such conflicting point of views of what happened in terms of circumstances. They’re memories were different! I think Lenzi was white washing a lot of things. And Giavanni was very matter-a-fact about how horrific a lot of the stuff was, which I thought made it very dramatic. That’s what’s cool about these movies. There’s something to offend everybody! (Laughs) Which is what I love about them! So many movies now, you watch and immediately forget them, even as you’re watching them. But these movies are unforgettable.

BH: One of the things that stands out for me about these movies is the soundtracks. And with these Blu-Ray releases, you did an amazing thing by including CD versions of the soundtracks with each package. How important is it for you to include the soundtracks?

BM: It was very important! We started doing it on our original Laserdisc release of CANNIBAL FEROX, which was our first release. I really wanted to have some of the music on there. I originally wanted to have a gatefold Laserdisc with the Laserdisc on one side and a 10 inch full length record on the other side, which I thought would’ve been cool. But we ended up not being able to find the music. So we did a 45, which was still cool. The theme was on one side, and a tribute thing that the guys who mastered it put together which consisted of a lot of the dialogue from the movie. I come to these movies a lot of times as a fan of the music! I’m a huge soundtrack collector, so for a lot of these movies, my first encounter has been through the soundtracks. They all have such great, unique music. Even though we didn’t succeed on the original Laserdisc release, by the time we did the Blu-Ray, the original master tapes had finally surfaced for CANNIBAL FEROX. So we were able to include that, done from the original master tapes, which were incredible. The quality was great and it was just amazing. Again, CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST was another one where the soundtrack was just so spectacular. That soundtrack was held in such high regard because it’s Riz Ortolani, an Academy Award nominated composer, but not really that well known in the US to a lot of people. And I just wanted to be able to feature the music in a way that wasn’t necessarily featured in the movies. Even going one step back, one of the things I’ve always wanted to do in the movies themselves is basically we’d take the original mono tracks and find the separate music and FX elements, and take out the mono music and do the music in stereo. We did remixes for THE BEYOND, which has another incredible score by Fabio Frizzi. When we put that out, we basically replaced all the music with stereo music, so we could feature that clear recording of the music. We did the same thing with CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST when we did the DVD. I put the stereo tracks into the release to play as an option if you wanted to. To me, the music to these films has always been a huge part of these releases, so I was thrilled to be able to include a CD of the full soundtracks with these movies, starting with THE BIG GUNDOWN. That had this incredible, iconic Ennio Morricone score. That was the first one we did as a Blu-Ray/DVD combo with the soundtrack CD. With the CANNIBAL releases, it was really cool to be able to have the CD’s in their own sleeve, so we could do more artwork and just really make them special.

BH: CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST and CANNIBAL FEROX tend to be considered the definitive or most notorious of these Italian films. Are there any particular titles from that period that you personally like or would recommend?

BM: I like a lot of them! EMANUELLE AND THE LAST CANNIBALS I think is good. Any of the Lenzi ones are great. MAN FROM DEEP RIVER is great. EATEN ALIVE I love. The other one from Deodato THE LAST CANNIBAL WORLD (aka JUNGLE HOLOCAUST, THE LAST SURVIVOR) is great. I just think it’s a rich sub-genre that’s worth exploring. The movies are disturbing, but they’re entertaining. If you can get past some of the stuff like the animal violence, which as a vegetarian I find problematic as well, there’s a lot of great ones and they’re worth exploring.

Visit the official Grindhouse Releasing website. You can find Blu-Ray versions of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST and CANNIBAL FEROX (along with the other Grindhouse Releasing titles)