Romano Scandariato Movies

A team of scientists and explorers follow a trail of pilfered corpses to the Pacific-island domain of a hand-wringing mad doctor (Donald O'Brien) who performs bizarre, tortuous experiments on living and dead specimens in his jungle laboratory. After a drastic reduction in the size of the team thanks to the Doc and his zombie hordes, the survivors try for a desperate getaway -- but not before the cannibals capture, strip and body-paint the team's requisite buxom blonde (Alexandra Della Colli). A suitable "B"-side to Lucio Fulci's own island-themed gore epic Zombie, Francesco Martino's Dr. Butcher, M.D. (an abbreviation for "Medical Deviate" according to the lurid promotional materials) is actually a composite of two separate films. The pre-credits prologue is cobbled together from bits of an unreleased film entitled Tales That Tear Your Heart Out which were tacked on to Martino's cut, originally titled Queen of the Cannibals, by American distributor Aquarius Films. The end result is completely senseless, but fun for gore-hounds, who are treated to impromptu surgical tortures, zombie gut-munching and death-by-outboard-motor. ~ Cavett Binion, Rovi

Euro-sleaze merchant Joe D'Amato probably thought he was bringing something new to the exploitation field by fusing elements of the long-running softcore Emmanuelle series with the cannibal subgenre foisted on the viewing public by such directors as D'Amato and Umberto Lenzi, among others. The end product is merely excruciating tedium punctuated by occasional kinky sex in the first half of the film and cheap, gag-inducing special effects in the second. The threadbare plot involves the investigations of a glamorous journalist (Laura Gemser, then-current star of the Emmanuelle series, though not actually playing that character here) into the cannibal proclivities of a certain Amazon tribe. After viewing documentary footage of cannibals torturing, executing and devouring their enemies, she apparently still wants to learn about such behavior firsthand and journeys down the Amazon with a research team to find the tribe in question. Naturally, the entire group falls into the cannibals' clutches, leading to endless messy scenes of people being carved up, impaled, disemboweled, split in half and (of course) eaten. Too gory for softcore fans and too dull for gorehounds, this is basically a film with no target audience whatsoever. ~ Cavett Binion, Rovi