Cannibal Ferox - Plot

Plot

The film begins in New York City, U.S. with a man getting heroin from his dealer Mike. The man finds two mobsters who are also looking for Mike, who owes them $100,000. They shoot him and leave him for dead.

Meanwhile, in Paraguay, two siblings, Rudy and Gloria, with their friend Pat, prepare for a journey into the rain forest. The three have ventured there to help prove Gloria's theory that cannibalism may not have existed all along, being a myth. The trio encounter Mike, the drug dealer mentioned in the beginning, and his partner Joe. Joe is badly wounded; Mike explains the two were attacked by cannibals. During the night, Gloria goes missing, and Rudy finds a native village while looking for her.

Due to Joe's injuries, the troupe decides to stay in the nearly deserted native village. Mike seduces the naive Pat. In a cocaine-fuelled rage, he encourages Pat to kill a native girl, but she is unable to do it, so he kills her. In his dying moments, Joe reveals that he and Mike were responsible for the cannibals' aggression. The two came to the region to exploit the natives for emeralds and cocaine, taking advantage of their trust in white men. One day, while high on cocaine, Mike brutally tortured and killed their native guide in full view of his tribe. The badly charred body that the troupe thought to be the Portuguese guide (who never existed) is actually this native. Mike kidnapped a native girl to lead them out of the jungle, but the two were followed and attacked, explaining Joe's injuries.

In light of Mike's murder of the young girl, the natives finally snap and begin to hunt the troupe. Joe eventually dies of his wounds, and his body is found and cannibalised by the natives in full view of Rudy and Gloria, who are hiding from the natives. Mike and Pat had abandoned the rest of the troupe, but they are all rounded up by the natives eventually. They are forced into a cage (that Mike originally used to lock up natives) and forced to watch Mike have his penis cut off and eaten. The wound is then cauterized to ensure he does not bleed to death. When the natives take the troupe to another village, Rudy manages to escape, hiding in a pool of water from the natives. However, he is caught in a booby trap in the jungle and the bleeding wound of his attracts the attention of piranhas, who force him out of the pool screaming. The natives shoot him with a poisoned dart, and he dies almost instantly.

Pat, Gloria, and Mike are taken to a new village where their suffering continues. The women are put in a hole in the ground as Mike is placed in a separate cage. The native man that Pat saved from Mike at the beginning appears, and lowers a rope into the hole so the women can escape. However, at this point Mike digs out of his cage, chases the man away, and cuts the rope, preventing the women from escaping. He then flees into the jungle. He is almost spotted by a plane being flown by a search party looking for the missing troupe (one of which is Mike's girlfriend from New York), but shouting in an attempt to be noticed by the plane causes the natives to finally locate him. They drag him to a fallen tree and cut off his right hand with a machete before taking him back to the village. When the search party lands, they are told by the natives that the explorers were in a canoe, which capsized. They were then eaten by crocodiles.

Pat is bound, stripped, and has hooks put through her breasts. She slowly bleeds to death as Gloria is forced to watch. Mike's head is placed in a crude apparatus, and the top of his head is cut off; the natives then proceed to eat his brains. Gloria is left for the night; during this time the same sympathetic native who Mike chased off earlier returns and frees her. He guides her through the jungle but is eventually killed by one of his own people's booby traps. A desperate Gloria eventually meets up with a pair of trappers, who take her to safety. Instead of telling the true story, she backs up the natives' lie about the others being eaten by crocodiles.

The film ends with a shocked and jaded Gloria part of society once again. She has published a book called Cannibalism: End of a Myth which completely covers up the story of what happened. This was most likely done because of her realisation that the natives were only vicious because of the extensive cruelty they had endured under the white man they once revered.