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Adam and Eve Meet the Cannibals
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| Year: |
1983
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Director: |
Enzo Doria, Luigi Rosso
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| Stars: |
Mark Gregory, Andrea Goldman, Ãngel Alcázar, Costantino Rossi, Pierangelo Pizzato, Vito Fornari, Liliana Gerace, Andrea Aureli, Marco Antonio Andolfi, Maurizio Margutti, Leda Simonetti, Massimo Spattini
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| Genre: |
Trash, Fantasy, Adventure |
| Rating: |
  4 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
God Almighty created the Earth, turning it from a wasteland of molten rock into a verdant paradise, and to populate it he made animals, then the first man, Adam (Mark Gregory), who emerged from a fleshy cocoon to enjoy the Garden of Eden, though he would do so alone. He was feeling the lack of a companion, as the deity was not much of a pal he could chat with, so when on the beach one day he crafted a woman out of sand to lie beside. However, God noted his loneliness and made it rain, washing the sand away to reveal an actual person who Adam named Eve (Andrea Goldman), and immediately fell in love with. But life for her was getting a little monotonous, simply wandering around regarding landscapes and sunsets, so she began to wonder about a certain tree...
As you could tell from that title, this was no ordinary Biblical story, in fact the tale of the original couple on the planet was merely the starting point for a selection of adventures best described as, well, rip-offs. The craze for Bible movies was pretty much over by the early eighties, but these Italian exploitation moviemakers were not going to let that minor detail hold them back as they opted to take a selection of other movies and basically adapt them into the Genesis yarn. The first, most obvious inspiration for their take was the then-recent Brooke Shields hit The Blue Lagoon, therefore this featured 1990: The Bronx Warriors star Gregory as our Adam, and the "never made another movie" Goldman as Eve, the trembling young lovers.
Rather than the more portentous parents of mankind, and as it was an Italian flick Eve got all the blame for getting herself and her partner banished from Eden, according to this because she watched a couple of lions mating and wanted to do the same to poor, innocent Adam. Therefore she listens to the snake (which whispers like Kaa in The Jungle Book) and takes his advice, chomping on the apple and offering it to Adam, then heading off to the bushes for a shag - it really was that tasteful. As a result, a volcano is set off, and the boulder from Raiders of the Lost Ark bears down on them, leading them to fall into a cavern and out into the rest of the world, which is unusually well-populated for a supposedly nascent planet.
Populated by, yes, cavemen, as One Million Years B.C. was not only an inspiration, but they nicked the pterodactyl footage from that movie too, and as Quest for Fire and Clan of the Cave Bear were contemporaries of this, we were asked to believe that Adam and Eve were essentially Stone Age individuals, finding their way towards hunting, gathering, and so on to survive. But what of the cannibals mentioned in the title? Some of those cavemen did feast on human flesh, but it was not exactly the equivalent of Cannibal Holocaust, as the directors appeared to want to make an adventure film rather than a horror, though that said the animals did take a beating, but obviously fake ones such as the large, hairy bird they feast on (and make thongs out of), or the hilarious "bear" which is one action sequence.
You may observe this was getting further and further away from the holy text the longer it went along, and you would not be wrong, except that they did lead up to the birth of the first baby, a momentous event totally undercut by the way that Adam and Eve kept bumping into all sorts of people who must have been around before they had even been created. What was God up to? We never found out, as he appeared to have wandered off and lost interest the moment Eve messed things up; she even went as far as having an affair with another caveman (Ãngel Alcázar) who she encountered when she and her partner parted ways - he's the bloke who rescues her from that bear. You couldn't call this blasphemous, it was too stupid for that, but the way that Eve was shamed for destroying paradise, which to be fair was part of the source, was rather hard to take from a modern perspective, and Adam was purely a himbo whose resourcefulness, or lack of it, made it hard to believe either of them would have survived this ridiculous odyssey. Music by Guido and Maurizio De Angelis.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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