A Remake in Search of a Reason
Joe D’Amato’s original Antropophagus (1980) wasn’t exactly high art—it was infamous video nasty fare, remembered mostly for a maniac ripping out and eating a fetus. It was trash, but at least it was memorable trash. Fast forward to 1999, where German splatter merchant Andreas Schnaas decided the world needed Anthropophagous 2000, a remake so unnecessary it makes Gus Van Sant’s Psycho look inspired. Instead of paying homage to exploitation horror, Schnaas delivers a backyard bloodbath with all the finesse of a YouTube prank video.
Cannibal with a Family Problem
The film opens with Nikos Karamanlis stranded at sea with his pregnant wife and daughter. Within minutes, his daughter dies, he “accidentally” stabs his wife, and he eats them both. Family dinners, am I right? Schnaas, playing Nikos himself, isn’t terrifying—he looks like a guy who got lost on his way to a LARP session. Once he makes it back to shore, guilt drives him insane, but instead of exploring psychology, the movie skips straight to: “He’s in a cave now. He kills people. Please clap.”
German Tourists, Italian Corpses
We’re then introduced to a group of vacationing friends whose RV breaks down near Nikos’s abandoned village. This setup should provide suspense—isolated outsiders stumbling into a nightmare. Instead, it’s just a long parade of paper-thin characters introduced solely so they can die horribly. Georg, Rita, Marc, Vincent, Caroll, and a blind sister named Auriet wander around, poke corpses, and deliver lines that sound like they were translated from German to English by a Speak & Spell. You don’t root for them to survive; you root for them to shut up.
Gore Galore (and Galore, and Galore)
Schnaas built his career on low-budget splatter, and Anthropophagous 2000 delivers buckets of it. Heads are smashed, guts are ripped, eyeballs pop like grapes at a kids’ picnic. But there’s a fine line between shocking and boring, and the movie pole-vaults over it. Every kill is dragged out, with Nikos munching viscera like he’s reviewing deli meats. Instead of horror, it becomes a grotesque cooking show: Iron Chef: Cannibal Edition. The infamous fetus-eating scene from the original returns, now with worse special effects, like a biology class diorama run through a woodchipper.
Acting? What Acting?
Oliver Sauer, playing Georg, might be the “hero,” but he has all the charisma of wet drywall. Cornelia De Pablos as Rita looks like she’s doing community theater and regretting every second. Schnaas himself grunts and grimaces as Nikos, chewing not only intestines but also every piece of scenery in sight. The rest of the cast? Random friends, relatives, and neighbors who clearly worked for beer and bratwurst. The performances are so bad you’d think everyone was auditioning for a parody—but no, they’re dead serious.
Dialogue Written in Blood (and Crayon)
The script, penned by Karl-Heinz Geisendorf, is less dialogue and more a series of grunts, screams, and exposition dumps. Lines like “We must leave this place!” and “He is insane, he eats flesh!” are repeated so often you could make a drinking game out of them. Characters narrate their deaths out loud, as if the audience were blindfolded. When Georg discovers Nikos’s journal, he reads it with the passion of a man reciting IKEA assembly instructions.
Atmosphere? Forget It
The original Antropophagus at least had eerie Mediterranean backdrops. This remake looks like it was filmed on abandoned farmland with a handheld camera and a single floodlight. Every “creepy” setting looks like someone’s uncle’s shed. The “cave” where Nikos lives is clearly just a basement with damp towels taped to the walls. Instead of dread, you’re treated to the constant hum of poor sound design and the squish of wet meat effects. It’s less gothic horror and more public access channel presents: Cannibal Man.
The Nikos Workout Routine
The highlight—or lowlight—comes at the climax, when Georg finally shoots Nikos multiple times. Instead of dying, Nikos rips out his own intestines and chews them. Yes, this cannibal is so hardcore he snacks on himself like he’s at an all-you-can-eat buffet. It’s supposed to be shocking. It’s hilarious. He looks like a drunk uncle at Oktoberfest who mistook bratwurst for his small intestine. By the time Georg decapitates him with a shovel, you’re applauding not for catharsis but because the movie is finally over.
The Interpol Epilogue Nobody Needed
Just when you think it’s safe to eject the VHS, the film slaps on a coda. An Interpol agent named Dr. Steven Bauers arrives at Nikos’s cave, finds a journal that magically updates itself, and promptly gets shot in the face by an unseen figure—maybe Georg, maybe not, maybe the catering guy. It’s tacked on like a bad student film twist, raising questions nobody asked. Who cares? By this point, you’re just happy to see the credits roll.
Schnaas Being Schnaas
Andreas Schnaas is infamous in underground horror for his Violent Shit series, which set new lows for plotless gorefests in the 1980s and ’90s. Anthropophagous 2000 proves he learned nothing along the way. His directing is shaky, his acting worse, and his obsession with entrails so unhealthy you want to call a doctor. For splatter fans, his films are endurance tests. For everyone else, they’re cinematic hazing rituals.
Why This Doesn’t Work
The problem isn’t just that Anthropophagous 2000 is cheap. Plenty of low-budget horrors work wonders with atmosphere and ingenuity. The problem is that Schnaas confuses gore for substance, and shock for story. There’s no suspense, no character development, no artistry—just endless meat-pulling and screaming. By the hour mark, you’re numb, not scared. Even the most grotesque set pieces feel like reruns. It’s horror stripped of horror, reduced to a parody of itself.
Final Butcher’s Bill
Anthropophagous 2000 is a bad remake of a bad original, doubling down on everything wrong while forgetting why the first was infamous. It’s loud, sloppy, and monotonous. The kills are gross but not scary, the acting is atrocious, and the story is a stitched-together corpse. Instead of terrifying you, it dares you to keep watching—like a cinematic endurance contest. The only true horror is realizing you spent 90 minutes of your life on this mess.
Verdict: A gore-soaked dumpster fire where the only thing eaten alive is your time. Even the intestines deserve better.
