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LIFE AMONG THE CANNIBALS
Rating: 
USA. 1996.
Director/Producer – Harry Bromley-Davenport, Screenplay – Daryl Haney, Story – Harry Bromley-Davenport & Daryl Haney, Photography – Marco Cappetta, Riccardo Gale & Hector Rivera, Music – Mark Hart, Mechanical Effects – Greg Meichtri, Production Design – Kate Perotti & Yvette Taylor. Production Company – Dorian, Inc.
Cast:
Kieran Mulroney (Jasper James), Juliet Landau (Rachel Andrews), Daryl Haney (Troy), Wings Hauser (Vince Vincent), Mason Adams (Francis), Bette Ford (Betty), Lionel Mark Smith (Detective Bob), Billy Maddox (Detective Jim)
Plot: Jasper James has come to L.A. to pursue a career as a musician and in the meantime is working as an assistant to former tv star Vince Vincent, who has become an alcoholic after an accident dislodged the plastic surgery on his chin. When Jasper criticizes the meal his girlfriend Rachel makes for him as being slightly overcooked, she turns psychotic. Jasper moves out into a large old house he finds going cheaply. But after moving in, he comes to believe that his strange neighbour Troy may be killing people. He breaks into Troy’s house in search of evidence. But when he finds a videotape of Troy torturing and dismembering a bruiser that Rachel sent to beat him up, he decides to keep quiet. After Rachel humiliates him on a tv show, he makes plans to manipulate Troy into eliminating her.
Life Among the Cannibals is bizarre oddity, a wannabe indie black comedy. It comes from Harry Bromley-Davenport, the English-born director better known for the trashy Xtro (1982) and its two sequels. Clearly Bromley-Davenport is not an indie director waiting to break into the arthouse circuit, he is an exploitation director. And Life Among the Cannibals sits halfway between both extremes. It is sort of a wannabe Coen Brothers film – maybe the Coens channelling The ‘Burbs (1989)? – but made without any of the Coen’s skill and dark, minatory bite. It’s really a Coen Brothers film as though made by a hack like Jim Wynorski or Fred Olen Ray. The film has a pitch of surreal, black comedic bizarreness – the psychotic ex-girlfriend, the alcoholic ex-tv action star with the botched plastic surgery problem, the threatening cops who insist on coming to visit Kieran Mulroney but then prove friendly and join in a poker game, the eccentric aging landlords – but without any real skill it dissolves less into a tone of menacing cruelty than it does raucous farce. There’s certainly the initial weirdness that there is to any good indie black comedy – the feeling that one doesn’t know what is going to happen from one moment to the next – but Bromley-Davenport’s unsubtle tone soon tires. Martin Landau’s daughter Juliet gives a very over-the-top performance. It should be noted that, despite the title, there are no cannibals in the film.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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