  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) |
We like to think of it as "the other white meat." The cannibal tribes of New Guinea referred to it as "long pig" -- one sweet little euphemism for what is generally considered unspeakable.
It's human flesh, the ultimate gastronomic transgression, and over the years it's mostly been played for laughs, sometimes unintentionally.
Witness pop culture's ultimate cannibal -- Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter -- who is as much comic figure as villain, and a dispenser of useful epicurean advice to boot (without him, how would we know that fava beans and a nice Chianti set off a plate of liver quite nicely?)
This week sees the release of Hannibal Rising, the prequel to the prequel to Silence Of The Lambs, with somebody named Gaspard Ulliel as the teenage Hannibal coming to grips with his tastebuds.
And with that, here's a roundup of our top nine movies, plays and other manifestations of the lunch-that-dare-not-speak-its-name. We were going to do a top 10, but somebody ate the last one.
Soylent Green: "Ya gotta tell 'em! Soylent Green is pipple!!!!! Yes, it's the other movie besides Planet Of The Apes where Charlton Heston spazzes out at the end after discovering the horrifying truth ("You maniacs!"). Next time the government gives you cheap eats and tells you it's plankton, just say "No thanks, I had a late lunch." Otherwise, you just might end up eating Edward G. Robinson. And those old guys are kind of chewy.
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover: Here's something with Helen Mirren in her prime, as a bored restaurant owner's wife who has an affair with a patron. Peter Greenaway's delicious and dire 1989 anti-romance/revenge fable is not for the faint of heart or stomach. And there's a twist ending involving today's theme, which we won't divulge except to say that the secret to a properly prepared long-pig is obviously aspic.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (and every movie it ever inspired): Sure, his face was leather. But poor old Leatherface was just a misunderstood breadwinner, trying to put food on his family's table. Of course his family was a bunch of cannibalistic psychopaths, but you get my drift. Tobe Hooper's revolting 1974 drive-in staple created such a powerful image, it inspired a generation of sick horror, from Wes Craven's equally classic The Hills Have Eyes to Jeepers Creepers to Wrong Turn to, um, '03's remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and last year's remake of The Hills Have Eyes.
Night Of The Living Dead (and every movie it ever inspired): There were plenty of zombie movies going back to the '30s and '40s, but mostly they just shuffled along looking for people slow enough to strangle at Bela Lugosi's bidding. It was George Romero who rewrote the canon, whereby the first thing a zombie wants to do when he crawls out of his grave is ... no, not go to Disneyland. He wants to eat people. Not a healthy salad, not even a Quarter Pounder With Cheese. People. Slow people ("Look, it's a zombie! We better walk faster."), but people nonetheless. And that's the way it's stayed, even in zombie movies not made by George Romero. Although some have catered to more selective tastes -- like Dan O'Bannon's Return Of The Living Dead, in which the zombies went around hollering, "Brains!" Talk about a no-brainer.
Alive! On Friday, Oct. 13, 1972, a plane en route to Chile carrying a Uruguayan rugby team crashed in the Andes. Sixteen of the 45 passengers ended up making it to civilization after having turned to cannibalism to survive. (The survivors have a website www.viven.com.uy/571/eng/). Their harrowing ordeal inspired a quickie '70s B-movie called Survive! and a 1993 Hollywood treatment called Alive! starring Ethan Hawke and Vincent Spano.
Ravenous: Cannibalism in the Old West? As they used to say before chowing down back then, "Donner, party of 87!" Classified by the Internet Movie Database as a "comedy/horror/thriller/Western," Antonia Bird's 1999 creep fest stars Guy Pearce as John Boyd, the luckless captain of a nowhere U.S. Army fort who rescues a stranger named Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle) who's near death. Once revived, Colqhoun tells a tale of a group of settlers whose leader has turned to cannibalism. Intrigued, Boyd leads his men on a cannibal hunting expedition (over the objections of the Natives in his command, who think Colqhoun himself might be a flesh-eating Wendigo).
Sweeney Todd: Okay, you couldn't get tickets to The Sound Of Music, so you decide to take grandma to another beloved family musical, one that won nine Tony Awards on its debut in 1979. And it turns out to be about a foul-tempered London barber who slashes his enemies' throats and offers them up to a Mrs. Lovett to grind up into meat pies. Sample lyric from the song A Little Priest: "Well, then, if you're British and loyal/you might enjoy Royal Marine!/Anyway, it's clean/Though of course, it tastes of wherever it's been." A production of Sweeney Todd is headed to the Princess Of Wales theatre late this year.
Titus Andronicus: Lord knows, I get a pretty steady beating from people who consider almost anything I write about the plot of a movie or play to be a "spoiler." But I figure, if something's been around for more than 400 years like Titus (Shakespeare's goriest play), there has to be a statute of limitations on revealing an ending. So here goes. Titus kills Chiron and Demetrius, has them cooked into a pie and fed to their unsuspecting mother Tamora. Then everybody left alive kills everybody else, except Lucius who becomes Emperor. Also, Soylent Green is pipple!!!!
Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: Yep, Johnny Depp, as Capt. Jack Sparrow, looked pretty funny trussed up on a stick like a souvlaki (the natives here refer to him as "long pork"). And, yes, the Carib tribe in this movie was reputed to be cannibalistic, although some maintain that accusations of cannibalism was standard operating procedure by Europeans to rationalize killing Natives or selling them into slavery.
Whatever, the image of cannibal natives survived as comic material (remember wacky Mel Lastman's trip to Kenya? "I'm sort of scared about going there," he said. "I just see myself in a pot of boiling water with all these natives dancing around me.")
Our fave story on that score belongs to Jay Ward, the late creator of Rocky & Bullwinkle, who had an episode flagged by NBC's Standards and Practices department for depicting moose-and-squirrel parachuting from a plane into a cannibal cauldron in the jungle. "Cannibalism?" Ward said, "to eat a moose and squirrel?"
