Amazon.com video review:
A hot-tempered blue-collar butcher kills just one man, a
bullying taxi driver whom surely no one will miss, and by the end of the
week winds up with a veritable stockyard of corpses in his tiny home during
a Spanish summer heat wave. It all starts when Marco's girlfriend insists
he go to the police, and he strangles her to keep her quiet. Soon everyone
he cares for is dropping by the increasingly crowded house looking for one
victim or another, and Marco, as out of control as a rabid dog, keeps on
killing, one cover-up leading to another. The stinking pile of bodies soon
has all the neighborhood dogs smacking their lips, until he starts dropping
his fetid victims into the slaughterhouse grinder, piece by piece. Though
it sounds more like a farce than a humid thriller, it's neither a black
comedy nor
a gory bloodfest (despite the misleading title, there is no cannibal in
this picture). Marco turns from macho hothead to doleful wretch as he
numbly executes each successive victim as if it's a tortured chore demanded by
mocking gods. Writer-director Eloy de la Iglesia doesn't shirk on the dirty
deeds--one unlucky fellow gets a cleaver full on the face--but this is less
a spectacle than a woebegone portrait of the spiritual disintegration of an
angry antihero. --Sean Axmaker
