Love Goddess of the Cannibals - Italian Exploitation Flick
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Love Goddess of the Cannibals (aka Caribbean Papaya and Papaya: Love Goddess of the Cannibals) is heavy on the sex, light on the horror, and seriously lacking in logic.
Written by James “Crypticpsych” Lasome
November 24, 2010
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Caribbean Papaya Movie Trailer
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Release: November 16, 1978 (Italy)
Directed by: Joe D’Amato
Written by: Roberto Gandus and Renzo Maietto
Starring:
Melissa Chimenti as Papaya
Sirpa Lane as Sara
Maurice Poli as Vincent
We begin Love Goddess of the Cannibals with a topless islander (the beautiful Chimenti) frolicking on the beach and in the waves. After a short while, she enters a nearby hut where a man is waiting for her. She proceeds to have passionate sex with him for a short period before moving her head downward between his legs. Shortly thereafter, a happy ending quickly becomes a very unhappy and painful one, and we’ll leave it at that. As she leaves, two apparent accomplices burn the hut and dispose of the body.
Cut to elsewhere in town where a cockfight begins. A reporter named Sara (the lovely Lane) avidly watches while her friend, a geologist named Vincent (Poli) arrives. The two leave and head back to their hotel where they shower together and have sex (sensing a pattern?). Shortly thereafter, Sara discovers the body of the man from the beginning of the film in the corner of their room. While Vincent alerts the police, the same woman from the beginning appears, now pretending to work at the hotel.�Afterwards, we’re informed that the geologist is working on a new power plant out in Las Ventas, for which they’re forcibly displacing the indigenous
people, and that this particular murder was one of multiple times someone involved in the project has been killed.
Together, she and Vincent head out to sightsee and, conveniently enough, run into the same woman who now reveals that her name is Papaya. She has them bring her home to Las Ventas. While there, she lures them deep into the village to the mystic and hypnotic “Round Stone Festival”. During it, the duo come under the villagers’ spell. Now they must figure out how to escape from the village and what the inhabitants really want with them.
I must admit I was surprised by how watchable Love Goddess of the Cannibals is. Considering it was directed by the late Joe D’Amato, notorious director of such films as Porno Holocaust and Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, to say I was not expecting much would be an understatement. However, D’Amato does provide a well-acted, well-shot film. The setting is beautiful as the film is shot on location in the Dominican Republic (though this also does lead to a game of “spot the fly” on the actors). The score’s also very nice, blending tribal-esque music with a distinctive 70’s disco funk.
That being said, this is BARELY a horror movie. The scariest thing in the movie, the ritual, is outstandingly shot and includes such visuals as 
eviscerations of real dead pigs with close-ups of innards, rampant wild nude dancing, human sacrifice, and the chief of the ritual biting into a “human heart” (basically the only “cannibalism” in Love Goddess of the Cannibals as Papaya spits out her … “snack” from the beginning). Beyond that, the movie basically becomes a quest to get one, two, or all three of our leads to strip down and get down to business, so to speak, continuing to an ending that seems to come out of nowhere and makes very little sense. I didn’t actually time it, but it certainly felt like more of this movie was nudity or sex than not.
Another problem this film has is that the actors, while giving good performances, suffer from a script that turns them into fairly one-dimensional and unbelievably stupid characters. Vincent is the archetypal “egotistical white man” who thinks the natives are in the way of his progress and that he’s enlightening them. Papaya doesn’t really have a tremendous amount to her character other than “hot islander who goes against egotistical white man”.
Sara is the only exception, as she evolves from a woman who enjoys a good cockfight and is unendingly curious about the islanders’ ritual into the only person who sees the danger she and Vincent are in. That said, Sara
and Vincent are both still unforgivably stupid. The sheer amount of time and effort they expend to get to the ritual, not to mention that they stay�through it as it gets more bizarre and drink strange substances whose origins they have no concept of, had me yelling at the screen in frustration. It might be acceptable in a slasher film, but THIS IS NO SLASHER FILM.
Overall, Love Goddess of the Cannibals is a watchable movie that has virtually no horror to speak of. Outside of a brilliant tribal ritual sequence, most of the movie is just a means to get decently-acted yet stupid characters to the next bit of nudity or sex scene (which, while the women are pretty, gets monotonous and boring very easily). If you want sex and sleaze, this might be passable. If you want horror or a cannibal movie, I suggest you find one with a little more meat on its bones.
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