Raw Deal

Lamentably, most films in which people get eaten do not deal with larger themes and do not feature characters that would forego eating human flesh if they had any other choice. In most films, ruthless creatures chow down on human beings for one simple reason: there's nobody in the immediate vicinity who is big enough and bad enough to stop them. It is impossible to believe that the mammoth great white shark in the original Jaws only gobbles up coeds and little kids because there's nothing else in the whole Atlantic Ocean to eat. No, he eats coeds and helpless little kids because he's an ornery son of a bitch who likes to get in people's faces, and while he's in them, to eat them. While a certain revenge motif comes into play in Jaws 3-D and Jaws the Revenge, we are still basically talking about sharks that eat people just to annoy everybody. There's no reason they couldn't eat marlin or bluefish or red snapper or medical waste like all the other sharks. But then again, they're not like all the other sharks, are they?

Another subset of people-eating movies are films in which people get eaten by creatures that get put up to it by other humans. The most obvious example is Willard, which deals with a dysfunctional youngster who breeds his own army of rats and then turns them loose on his neighbors. There is no reason to believe that the rats would have ever ruined the big party that Ernest Borgnine was holding had the decision been left up to them; rats don't like parties. They were pressured into doing it by the dysfunctional youth. Not quite so innocent is the man-eating plant in Little Shop of Horrors that manipulates Rick Moranis into supplying fresh bodies, but then again, it's silly to be too hard on any creature that effectively removes Steve Martin from our midst.

Humans are also to blame for the tragedies that befall their fellows in Piranha, Leviathan, The Killer Shrews, Empire of the Ants, Alligator and Orca, all of which deal with man-eating monsters created by humans, usually scientists. In Alligator, a parody of Jaws scripted by John Sayles, a baby alligator flushed down the toilet grows to humongous proportions thanks to hormone-filled carcasses dumped into the sewage system by an unscrupulous drug company. The result? A bunch of people played by actors you never heard of get eaten.

The same thing happens in Empire of the Ants and The Killer Shrews. In Orca, a killer whale minding its own business is transmogrified into a killer-diller whale by Richard Harris, an unscrupulous fisherman who wantonly kills its mate. The result? Keenan Wynn gets eaten, and young Bo Derek gets partially eaten. Charlotte Rampling, playing an anorexic marine biologist who befriends Harris, apparently escapes a similar fate because there's not enough meat on her to interest any self-respecting killer whale.

In Leviathan, a monster spawned by an unscrupulous defunct country that used to be called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics grows up to humongous proportions thanks to some chemicals planted in the vodka. The result? Richard Crenna gets eaten.

In Piranha, a parody of Jaws scripted by John Sayles, a school of killer fish grow to humongous proportions thanks to some chemicals spilled into the water by an unscrupulous country called the United States of America. The result? Keenan Wynn gets eaten again.

And in Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell, a German shepherd grows to humongous proportions thanks to an unscrupulous group of Satanists who don't dump any chemicals in the water system, but who look like they would if given half a chance. The result? Well, Richard Crenna almost gets eaten.

Coincidence, you say?

In discussing films in which consumers become the consumed, it is imperative that we distinguish between films in which the people who get eaten deserve to get eaten and films in which they do not. Based on our exhaustive sample of 33 motion pictures in which people are consumed, we found 93 cases in which the movie told the audience enough about the person being eaten to allow for a determination about whether the individual deserved his cruel fate.

In the overwhelming majority of cases (72), the people being consumed--swimmers, surfers, lovers, vacationers, sewer workers, Uruguayan rugby players--did not deserve to be eaten and were unfortunate victims of circumstances. Of the 21 other victims, 18 indisputably deserved to be eaten, and three were tossups. For example, the wife-beating Ku Klux Klansman in Fried Green Tomatoes certainly got exactly what he deserved, as did the balding asshole in Night of the Living Dead who wanted everyone to remain hidden in the basement (where it's safe), as did Vincent Spano and Keenan Wynn, for reasons too obvious to discuss, in Alive, Orca and Piranha.

Less open-and-shut cases are the roving pederast in Suddenly, Last Summer, who didn't deserve to be eaten, but who should certainly have chosen a better neighborhood in which to pick up small boys; the dogmatic British colonel in The Last of the Mohicans, who didn't deserve to have his heart eaten, but certainly deserved to be shot off his horse; and Lorraine Gary's youngest son in Jaws the Revenge, who deserved to have his arm torn off for having her as a mother, but who probably didn't deserve to have his entire body ripped to shreds just because he had Roy Scheider for a father.

Within the admittedly disequilibratory genre of people-eating movies, it is nonetheless possible to distinguish between films that are merely tasteless (PG), and films that are really gross (PG-13). For example, it is important to make a distinction between films in which people get eaten after a modicum of preparation (dressing, garnishing, seasoning, cooking) and films where people get eaten raw. Whatever their other failings, Eating Raoul and Fried Green Tomatoes handle the subject of cannibalism delicately, so that even if you freeze-frame the film on your VCR you still can't really tell that the food being eaten comes from a human being; in both cases, it looks like something you might order at any roadside Greek diner.

In Quest for Fire, on the other hand, the cave men munch on what are clearly human limbs that have charred over an open flame. In Alive, the stranded rugby players simply tear off little portions of beef and then stuff it right into their mouths. This is really disgusting, and I can't believe in the long run that it's going to help Ethan Hawke's career to have done it. Gnawing on morsels of flesh torn off the backs of corpses played by obscure Hispanic and Anglo actors or Vincent Spano is the sort of thing you're supposed to do at the end of your career. Just ask Rory Calhoun.

As noted above, it is also important to distinguish between these very dissimilar cinematic properties:

1) Films in which animals have a legitimate right to eat their human prey because they are themselves hungry and will die without some immediate means of sustenance

2) Films in which animals eat human beings because they've gone completely bonkers and can't be held responsible for their actions

3) Films in which the animal has some sort of a personal vendetta against the person he plans to eat

4) Films in which animals eat people just to show off.

In the first category are such films as Piranha and Alligator, where the man-eaters, through no fault of their own, have grown to become super mutants and simply must eat or die. In these films, the audience feels a certain grudging sympathy toward the monsters, because the monsters didn't ask to be transformed into monsters and therefore can't really be blamed for their gastronomic transgressions. Thus, even after the school of razor-toothed butchers has ripped a bunch of little kids and a cute camp counselor to pieces in Piranha, one does not feel any special antipathy toward the murderous fish. They were only doing their job.

The same is true in Stephen King's Cujo, which is set in Maine, where people don't get out often enough, and even when they do, they're still in Maine. In Cujo, a previously cuddly Saint Bernard with no prior history of substituting raw human flesh for Alpo, is suddenly driven straight out of his mind by a rabid bat that impudently bites his snout.

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