Despite having little to no connection with actual cannibalism, that didn’t stop unscrupulous investors from marketing The Cannibal Man as an absolute gut-muncher, because the original title of La Semana del Asesino (The Week of the Killer) didn’t have the exploitative innards they thought the film needed.
In truth — or retrospect — the film didn’t really need it, because Eloy de la Iglesia’s haunting story of a man who slowly feels the threads of sanity become more frayed with each passing day is a truly terrifying tale that should have given the Spanish director far more attention outside of cult film circles.
Spending his day working at a slaughterhouse, Marco (Vicente Parra) kills a taxicab driver one evening in self-defense, which inexplicably awakens something inside him that leads to him murdering everyone from his brother and girlfriend to others who might come around his den of squalor, situated outside a lavish apartment building.
Over the course of the week, as the house begins to smell of death and guilt — always a reactive combination — Marco takes the body parts to work, basically to turn them into liquid mush. I don’t think it gets turned into food and, to be fair, when the prospect of eating the human meat is presented to him, he becomes exceedingly nauseous. Maybe a better title would have been Almost a Cannibal, which sounds like a great romantic comedy.
Director de la Iglesia throws in numerous jabs at the then-oppressive Spanish government — most notably in dutifully homosexual swimming scenes, mildly erotic for the time. When viewed through those rebellious eyes, The Cannibal Man is indeed a film of absolute protest that, through a semi-graphic lens, makes it far more important than most give it credit for. —Louis Fowler