The Grim Reaper (1981)
Directed by Joe D’Amato
This has been on my watchlist on amazon prime for over a year. I saw it was short, so I quickly watched it the other night. Gotta love amazon prime, they put the wrong dates on shit all the time, apparently, they think it is from 2011! I never heard of this honestly, didn’t know what to expect. I turned it on and realized it was Italian, so I figured I was in for a gory movie with really awkward and graphic sexual scenes. For this movie? I got neither of those things! Deep inhale…. here we go!
The Grim Reaper is about a group of tourists that go to an island, where apparently few people live? Their boat ends up becoming untied or something and drifts out to sea. One guy wants to go swimming for it, another tells him he’ll never make it, because it is too far out. The boat is literally 100 yards away, pretty sure he could make it, just sayin’. Like most Italian gore movies, the plot is simple and confusing at the same time, things don’t get explained until later if at all. Whilst watching this I started to do some research on my phone. I soon realized this movie is also named Antropophagus, which I’ve actually heard of, and I have seen the poster numerous times. What I realized around half way through the film, is this is the hacked up, semi censored version of Antropophagus! HOORAY! So here I am watching a shlocky gore movie, with no gore!
The acting is on par with other Italian movies. All the dialogue is dubbed over, because they used numerous actors speaking different languages then dubbed them over with the language of the country it is shipped to. So, it is clunky and awkward for sure. Aside from the crap acting you get some pretty bad camera work and production quality. Some scenes are so dark you can’t see what is going on. One of my favorite old horror movie elements! Humongous is the first movie that comes to mind that is steeped in that garbage. While this movie isn’t as dark and disorienting as Humongous, it is still annoying. Some shots are really grainy and you get that odd glare during night scenes that you get when boosting the contrast in post-production. The characters all dress the same, the guys wear button down shirts with collars and sweaters over top. The women wear button down shirts with sweater vests over top. The pregnant girl that gets captured by the killer is the only one in a dress, if I remember right.
The special effects? I can’t really say anything since I watched the bastardized version of this movie, and most of the gore is cut out. What was there was minimal but somewhat affective. It makes me mad that I didn’t just watch the full version, but after this now I don’t really want to haha. The kills are cut away from and meh. The killer bites out a throat, buries a clever in one guy’s head and just hacks a guy up. There isn’t much to talk about, again I saw the edited version, kill me now.
I know I’ve kind of skipped around in this movie but man it really lost me halfway through and you have to wait and wait and wait for something to fucking happen. I was literally saying aloud “DO SOMETHING!” the whole time. The film gets to its “climax” and I say that in quotes because not much happens. A guy goes into catacombs or something and finds the pregnant girl, he gets killed, the killer grabs the girl and we get a flash back. The killer remembers being stranded at sea or something with his wife and son. The son apparently died and the wife refuses to let him go. I think the father wants to eat the son, I don’t know at this point I was pissed. She refuses to do so and he stabs her to death, yeah then he screams. It is no surprise that I can’t recommend this to anyone, watch the full version and skip over this shit. It gets a D- from me. I can’t give it an F because I got all the way through it and it didn’t piss me off as much as some movies.
